Bambu Sad Labs & what is a 5000 Units? 5KU Pod 4

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:10]Hi and welcome to a solo blog from 5000 units. I'm Keith with 5000 units and Bobby is off this week and I'm going to do a quick update before I take off for a week or so off.

[00:00:27]So, the big update in my world this week is definitely the bamboo slicer issues, right? So, let's kind of dive right into that. The headline this week is a perfect illustration of the problem with modern hardware, and that is that Bamboo Labs is threatening to sue an independent developer.

[00:00:48]So, if you missed this, a developer forked Orca Slicer, and he essentially found a way to enable direct network printing features that Bamboo keeps restricting on their own software. So, he opens it up and he What does Bamboo do? They hit him with a cease and desist order. If you want all the details on that, I think you'll get a much better version of what's going on from Lewis Rossman. Look him up if you're not familiar. Bamboo has always been a walled garden and they've never lied about that. I personally run a little fleet of bamboo printers and the hardware is really good and the software is also really good. As I do that, I go into it with my eyes open that this is a closed ecosystem.

[00:01:31]And my frustration of buying into a closed ecosystem is definitely there.

[00:01:37]When a company's going to dictate exactly how you can use the machine that's sitting on your desk and then legally threaten the guy who's trying to give me more control of those machines, really makes you realize that you just don't own the hardware, which is a bummer. But it's not going to stop me from buying Bamboo Labs stuff at this point. I think the lawsuit probably won't go anywhere.

[00:01:59]But Lewis Rossman's whole he just did something pretty ballsy from what I've seen. I haven't I'm not a longtime viewer of his channel. Just the last couple months I've been catching up on it and seeing what he's into and watching more and more of his videos.

[00:02:16]But he apparently talked to this person, this developer, and was originally he was offering like $10,000 to help support the defense if the if the case went anywhere and uh he then I think he contacted the guy and uh sounds like they had some kind of chat and the the developer doesn't doesn't want to get involved in any of this. you know, he's got better stuff to do apparently. And so, Lewis Rossman posted the files himself and essentially dared Bamboo Labs to sue him or take him to court. Um, which I thought was pretty pretty awesome. So, uh, we'll see how that goes. Um, the problem with this is that it's a very short road to a payw wall. Um, and I've just tried to stay optimistic about it, which might be silly, I know, but I like the printers and so far it's served me well. And in the grand scheme of things, I don't have the money to move to uh large scale industrial printers. They're just super expensive. uh the entry cost to getting into one of them for what I do uh it would just never be justified. I could buy so many bamboo uh H2C's or uh H2Ds and uh for that much and do so much more work and it would be fine. Um but the bamboos have so many plus sides uh that it's just hard to match. if you have had to buy parts and service your bamboo, it's generally great. Um, and they just keep getting better at that. Uh, so having to run a fleet of them, being able to, uh, pop a cover off and see what's broken and then there's a QR code right on the side of the part. I scan the QR code with my phone and hit buy and I've got a part in the mail a couple days later.

[00:04:24]Um, and I don't even need to know what it's called necessarily. I do. Uh, but that kind of service inside the machines for somebody who's going to take the machines apart, service them, and keep them running, it's really, really invaluable. Um, so I'm not defending Bamboo Labs in any way. It's probably terrible, but I'm still going to keep using them. But at this point, I'm too far in. Um, so what do we do? We walk around and we keep buying Ben & Jerry's and we begrudgingly buy stuff from Amazon um, and all these massive private equity companies and we feel like we have no other choice. We're just funding Lex Luthther as I've said before.

[00:05:18]But this is why building 5,000 units is important to me. I want to build a company where you don't have to begrudgingly buy stuff. I want to build a company where when you buy a 5,000 units product, you can feel good about it. It's going to do something good in the world, you're going to get a good product and you can trust that the 5,000 units company isn't going to screw you over.

[00:05:40]We're hoping to announce our first project, which is currently in development before the end of summer. I don't want to announce it too early. We're going through development right now. We need to make sure manufacturering is going to happen. Everything's manufacturability, but I want to talk a minute about the 5,000 units ethos and really what the company's for.

[00:06:07]So, I spent some time contemplating business and companies and the way the world works, the business world.

[00:06:19]And I just wanted to explore if that was the way it had to be. Do we have to run businesses and corporations the way that we do? Do we have to soop up every every bit of value that we can get out of every single thing and ring it up and keep it for ourselves?

[00:06:45]And I I wanted to kind of run the thought experiment of what if we didn't what if what if we built a company where it's still going to be a company. We're still gonna live in a capitalistic world and we're still going to try to do the smart thing and you know fund our company and pay ourselves okay and and everything. But what if we just like what if we didn't get greedy and what if we just planned ahead uh of the steps that we have to take build a business model that would be a win for everybody and also be a force for good.

[00:07:28]So I spent some time building this business model and after I got done I took it to some people I respect, business people and some other people who I just thought were smart and ran the model by them how it worked and uh I got good feedback from everyone and around the same time uh I got exposed to a couple other things a couple other companies that didn't exist so that an owner could buy another helicopter or their fifth Escalade or take a private jet to Florida for Christmas every year.

[00:08:15]Just a company that could exist so that everyone who touches it comes out a winter.

[00:08:24]So what does that look like? What is it?

[00:08:26]It's crazy, right? I don't think it is.

[00:08:29]The first thing was a set of rules to guide us and set rails around what does good mean? What does it mean to be good?

[00:08:38]So, we did that. I did that. And then the next step was to understand how the business model would be funded by itself. And the way it's going to work is less complicated than you would expect. Our first couple projects are my own passion projects. Some things that are going to be designed mostly by myself and put out into the world as something that I want the world to have.

[00:09:05]Right? These are things that if they were already out there in the way that they are, I would go buy them. But they're not. So, I'm going to put them there. I'm going to give you an opportunity to buy it. But the guidelines for how this thing is made and how it's going to interact with the world are very non-traditional.

[00:09:28]And it starts in a couple places. First, the basic business model is that we're going to work on a pre-sale model, a pre-order. The first job will probably go through Kickstarter. So hopefully we can get some steam up and bring in some Kickstarters for the first project, which we're not going to announce yet.

[00:09:47]So I'm sorry to be vague about it, but I don't want somebody else to do it yet.

[00:09:51]It's still going to be a thing that's going to be out there. So we got to be smart about the whole thing, and I need to make sure we can actually develop and I don't want to come on here promising that we're going to sell you something that we we're not going to. So we're going to do a pre-sale model.

[00:10:05]We are going to have the entire production run at a set number, 5,000 units. And there's two reasons for that.

[00:10:15]And of course, there's going to be a little bit of the FOMO out there, right?

[00:10:19]Like there's only going to be 5,000 of them that we're going to make, that's going to be it. So, if you get a 5,000 unit, one of the units, good for you. I mean, that 5,000 is a lot, though. I don't know how big our audience is going to be, but so there's a little bit of FOMO in the in the recipe. Again, this is a capitalistic country, and we're we're here still to be a business. We just don't need to be a greedy business, and we don't need to be an evil business.

[00:10:43]We're just going to do good. having the production run already all figured out, priced out, and ready to go so that once the Kickstarter is done, we can literally pull the lever and begin all the orders for the bombs and production and assembly and packaging. It's going to make it so that compared to a lot of Kickstarters and things like that, we should be able to roll things out quickly.

[00:11:11]The second part of the products that 5,000 units is going to design and make are that the products themselves are going to be designed in a way that will make them good to own. And I don't mean that like they're not going to be good to own like your dog, right? They're not going to keep your company. They are going to be something that once you buy it, it's an asset to you now. It's It's going to be something you can depend on, something you can fix. When you own one of these, I want you to feel the way about it that my great-grandfather felt about a tractor, right? That this wasn't just a thing that he bought and he sunk money into. This thing was always there for him and he could always fix it if it broke. He could always get parts and he could always refer to these old manuals on how to fix it. He had all of that.

[00:12:10]There was no part of that tractor that he couldn't fix.

[00:12:16]And anything we sell to you, we want it to be like that.

[00:12:21]And that means that when we start the design process, every step of the way, we need to make sure that we're not doing something that's going to stop you from fixing this thing or potentially stop you from maybe even reproducing parts of it.

[00:12:42]The design process so far, we're trying to make everything 3D printer friendly.

[00:12:49]So any plastic or metal parts that can be done in a printer, we're trying to design the parts themselves so that they will just be able to be printed in a, you know, you're going to need a larger FDM printer. You're not going to be able to do this on a little guy unless you break it up. But even then, you could break it up and do it if you really wanted to. Lots of slicers have nice little puzzle pieces or dovetails so that you could reprint out larger things and stick them together if you're uh so inclined.

[00:13:13]But the H2D is kind of going to be the size we're looking at. I might bump it up just a little bit because I really like the envelope of the H2S now that I have a couple of them. And that gives us just a little bit more room for the size of it's exactly like the size of the project that we're working on. And so we're starting there. The second thing is the components. If you've been in a lot of different parts of mechanical the mechanical industry, right, like mining or large scale heating and cooling, boilers, all of this large temperature controlling, moving parts, not real automation in the modern day sense, but the big heavy that had to move around by itself. There was motors and controllers and PIDs and all of this stuff has existed for decades in off-the-shelf form.

[00:14:08]Bearings are a good example. Fans, all of this stuff. And there's just no reason half the time at least for all the stuff to be proprietary. So, if you're going to make something like this, like the project that we're working on, we're going to use as many off-the-shelf components. So, if the fan goes out in it, you can go on eBay, AliExpress, Granger, McMaster, and you can buy bearings for it, and you could buy a pump for it, or you can buy a fan for it. That's it. That's the way it should be. There's no reason to make that proprietary so that when it breaks, you can't get another one. Maybe you rig something up if you're a little creative, but more than likely you're going to go buy a new one.

[00:14:53]So, that was where we started. Those are the first two design considerations that we're taking as we make our way through the first project. I want this thing to be able to be fixed forever. I want it to be so granularly repable that you could essentially smash the whole thing and just by looking at it and going over it, you could create a whole new one.

[00:15:16]After the pre-sale of the 5,000 units, the current plan is to release the CAD for everything and the specs so that people who do not buy one of the 5,000 units could potentially make their own of whatever project we do. So, we're not going to keep trying to milk this thing forever. I'm not going to promise that we won't run another 5,000 units if there's a ton of demand. We all got families to take care of. I'm gonna make another 5,000 of them and we'll sell them and we'll do pre-sales again. So, if the demand's there, maybe we'll do it again. But it's 5,000 units is usually where the math works out, where things become comfy, right? Where we can make it, we can get paid and we can do the next move.

[00:16:03]Where it gets a little tricky will be PCBs, stuff like that. ESP32 boards is what where I'm working right now. And in today's day and age, there's no getting away from that. things that are going to have to be programmed. Things need controllers. We want to have Bluetooth on something.

[00:16:21]So, there's going to be some PCB boards involved. And at first blush, you're like, well, damn, that's proprietary, right? You're going to use your own board to do your own thing, which yeah, we are right now. I'm working on a project PCB way. Our first samples are due this month. I'm super excited.

[00:16:39]But the idea will be that post pre-order, we will release the PCB board plans and we'll release the code and we won't we're not going to encode anything. We're not going to encrypt anything. I'm even going to go as far as to make sure we have USB ports and SD card slots built into the hardware if we can do it. And that way if you're the kind of guy who wants to go around and get in there and change that stuff and get all Mr. Maker on it, you can. Why not?

[00:17:17]Again, that's a win for that person, a win for us. It's a win for everybody.

[00:17:22]And that's going to be the e for the whole company. And as far as a company, maybe we'll do some stuff on the back end, the design of it. If it's all got a 3D printer design, maybe we'll sell kits boron style where you could buy the kit later and build your own. And part of purchasing one when you get in on the 5,000 units is going to be that part of what you're doing is yes, you're buying it for yourself and you're getting yourself something good and you're supporting a company who is trying to do some good and you're also providing a service to everyone who doesn't buy one that wants one. All right. So selling them in limited quantities is part of the business model. And I want to be able to do these big projects. I want to make them. I want to make a difference.

[00:18:07]And then I want to do it again. I want to find another thing, another person, another project, and put another 5,000 units item out there into the world.

[00:18:17]Uh I don't want to be stuck on these things forever trying to milk them, trying to compete with knockoffs from out of the country, all that business.

[00:18:25]people stealing the design and trying to sell it. I don't want to be in that latigious lifestyle, right? I want to make something awesome. I want to sell it to 5,000 people and then I want to do something else.

[00:18:38]So, when you buy one of the 5,000, you're also helping to fund the fact that uh I'm not going to milk that project forever. 5,000 units doesn't want to keep having to deal with the same project forever and ever and ever.

[00:18:51]other people can make their own and you've helped give them that. That's just going to be how part of the company.

[00:19:03]So, right now our website is up and the dad hats, the 5,000 unit dad hats are up there and we're going to try, aside from paying the bills for the site and the traffic and everything, everything we sell on our website will help fund giving new 3D printers to kids and makers and hopefully some classrooms.

[00:19:25]We're going to look for some STEM teachers or some science teachers. We're shooting for grade school, middle school. I'm not limiting it to anybody.

[00:19:31]We sell the merch. We get some t-shirts, we get some hats, and we take that money, we pay our IT bills, and then whatever is left, we are moving into buying printers. We've given away four printers so far, and the company's only existed for three months. So, every month I'm going to give away a 3D printer. And if you would like to nominate somebody, uh, a kid we're shooting for grade school, middle school, a teacher that you think would love to have one in their classroom, feel free to send me an email at printers at 5000units.com with just a short paragraph on who this is and why you'd like them to have a 3D printer. We're going to pick someone at the end of the month. We'll get a hold of them. your contact info or their contact info will work out great if you can share that and we'll go from there.

[00:20:22]Again, it's all about doing good. Buy a hat and help support giving somebody who wants a a 3D printer 3D printer. We did also just put on the site the 5,000 units banners. I'm going to get one to hang behind me here. They are $400 and if you buy a banner, I will buy a 3D printer for a classroom or a kid just like that. We'll make it happen. I think it's important that we get 3D printers in the hands of kids now because I feel like I think that as we empower children to understand that they can make something that they can fix things and they can create we also are empowering their attitude to realize that they don't need to just throw things away.

[00:21:05]They don't need a subscription to do something and I think it will just be an improvement on their whole life.

[00:21:12]So anyway, 5000units.com. Buy some merch. Support our my IT guy and some kids. Printers at 5000units.com. If you want to nominate a student or a teacher or a classroom or whatever use case, I'm not putting any limits on there. And we'll get a hold of them. Maybe we'll send them a printer. Hopefully, we'll have another podcast here around the end of the month. Me and Bobby will get together. Right now, we got about eight viewers. So, thank you for coming and watching the podcast. We are on Spotify.

[00:21:43]We're on YouTube. We're putting shorts on Tik Tok and Instagram and wherever else shorts go these days. The studio is coming together. Our lighting is getting better. We got some new cameras and we're going to keep going. Stay tuned for an announcement sometime this summer when we announce our first product. In the meantime, remember that you can fix things and you don't have to give your money to companies you hate. You can give them to companies that are good. So, keep an eye out for them. Maybe shop at goods store.

[00:22:13]Maybe try to shop with people who are more local and try to make your money go further. If you can't, you can't. We all are there. So, have a good night.