One business a day

Every day, one business
taken apart with real numbers.

No inspiration, no success stories. Verifiable figures, real margins, and an explicit verdict — including when the verdict is don't.

2reports published 62web searches run 39sources cited
Today's report · 21 August 2026
Hard Manufacturing

3D printing on demand: €6.75 a unit, and ten sales a day before you pay yourself

A €18 marketplace sale leaves €6.75 once labour and failed prints are counted. That means ten sales a day for €2,000 a month — in a niche where prices fell 68% in two years.

€6.75 Net margin on an €18 marketplace sale, after fees, filament, packaging, failures and 20 min of labour
-68% Price collapse on articulated dragons: £14 in 2023, £4.50 now — the entry niche everyone picks
€20-27 Estimated net margin per B2B job at €40-50, where the constraint becomes sales, not printing
~65% Share of print shops that never break even (stated by an industry blog, not audited)

Consumer printing is a race to the bottom — 68% price collapse in two years, and an unaudited industry estimate puts break-even failure at ~65% of shops. Only direct B2B work at roughly €18-27 a job survives, and that is a sales business, not a printing one.

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Selective Local

Self-service laundromats: break-even needs 10 washes a day, a wage needs 20

Two Italian shops with filed accounts made €1,585 profit and a €2,329 loss after seven years. The franchise brochures promise $830,783 a year. Only one set of numbers was audited.

Starting capital 40,000–150,000 € Gross margin 70-80% per cycle

How a report is made

Five separate steps. A radar reads the news for dated events and a commissioning pass rejects most of them. Research queries the web and labels every figure verified, stated or estimated. A precedents pass names the companies that already ran the business and what became of each — the failures hunted as hard as the successes. Then the report is written, and a fact-checker tries to demolish it, starting with the companies. The method in full.