Editor’s Note: This story is the third in a series of three stories that explain a new startup in Iowa. To read part one on Claimable, click here and part two on Tumbleweed, click here.
Brandon Hart, the CEO and owner of HartSmart Products, a 3D printing company, is in a rebuilding phase, one of finding his identity in an ever-changing industry.
HartSmart products started in Hart’s basement in his then-Windsor Heights home when he was printing items for customers, all while working a corporate job for Verizon. He left Verizon for another company but kept printing until he finally ventured out on his own, full time, as more companies were seeking his help in printing out prototypes to see if their ideas worked in the real world.
He emerged from his basement first to locate in Maple Studios, a startup studio designed to support early-stage industrial technology companies and founders during their startup to growth stages. He stayed there for a few months until he moved into his first shop, a small 1,375-square-foot space off of Swanson Boulevard in Clive. Four years ago, he moved into his current 9,000-square-foot location in Urbandale, which is staffed with three full-time employees, including Hart, and is equipped with a plethora of 3D printers — the last time he counted, it was at 17.
These days, he’s finding his way all over again.
“There’s a lot of rapid development that is happening,” he said. “The expectations customers have are changing constantly, so we have to stay up to date. We have to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible to have the products that people [want] because of one YouTube video; now all of a sudden [they] have to have. It’s an interesting time to be in this particular industry.
“Given the big changes that have happened in our industry recently, we’re trying to figure out who we need to be going forward to stay relevant, stay in business.”
The big changes he’s referring to is the “massive hype” for a long time that surrounded 3D printers. Industry leaders believed that everybody was going to have a printer in their home, “right next to their microwave,” Hart said.
“There will no longer be a need for all of these big factories to exist, because all this on-site, local manufacturing is going to start happening, because the 3D printing can make everything,” he said. “None of this was true.”
About two years ago, reality set in and people realized it’s “not all it’s cracked up to be and then, essentially, the bubble bursts,” he said, referring to the Gartner Hype Cycle, which provides a perspective on how a technology or application will evolve over time.
“And it’s been a downhill slide ever since then, and at a certain point, you hit what’s known as the trough of disillusionment,” he said.
But then, as the cycle shows, there is recovery in sight.
“[Then] it starts to kind of pick back up again, because people start to realize, ‘OK, so maybe it wasn’t what we thought it was, but there’s still a lot of good use for 3D printing,’” he said. “Then you start to come back up out of that trough a little bit, never to the full height of the maximum hype, but you will start to come back up again, and then start to level off. From that point on, this kind of maturity, the industry has matured, where people understand the technology, they understand what it is and what it’s not, what its usefulness is, and what it’s not useful for. I think we’re coming out of the trough of disillusionment at this point.”
Hart has learned a lot of lessons along the way.
For example, the company used to “really dive in and work with inventors to try to help productize their ideas,” he said. “And that is a nightmare, so we pulled away from that. Now we mostly focus on printing the things that the inventors are working with somebody else to prototype.”
Another item responsible for the company’s growth was the sale of the large format machines themselves, Hart said. His company used to work with a company called Modix, which made inexpensive “DIY kit 3D printers.”
“It literally has thousands of parts, and they just show up in a variety of boxes, and you are responsible for putting it all together and making it all work,” he said. “But because of that, you can get a very large format machine for a ridiculously low amount of money, so we were pretty instrumental in their growth, and being able to offer their product.”
There were problems with the product, he said.
“We would spend probably 75%, sometimes more, of our day, every day, just supporting customers who bought box machines from us,” he said. “Low barrier to entry to get a machine, but actually putting it together properly and making it work, not easy. … It was a good thing to no longer be working with them. We got a lot of hours in our day back.”
Moving forward, the company will not only be prototyping, but also printing end-use parts, which could include specific adapters and brackets for their products to mount to, or interface with existing equipment, he said.
“[It] gives you as a manufacturer not only the ability to rapidly iterate on its design, but it also allows you to instantly change anytime you want to, because you’re just making every individual part,” he said. “You’re not investing $50,000, $100,000 into a mold, and you have to keep pumping out those parts so if something changes in your particular industry overnight, you can change overnight as well where you can offer mass customization of everything.”
Hart also recycles plastic, a project that reflects his passion for sustainability.
“[I] really hate throwing plastic in the trash,” he said.
He said he has a couple of different places he sends used plastics, including Iowa State University, which takes PLA (polylactic acid) scrap and turns it into sheets and students cut it into different products, he said.
Hart’s goal is to not compete with other 3D printing businesses, he said. Rather, he would like them to come to his business for the materials, machines and parts.
Also, “We have a full 3D printer farm, and we do contract 3D printing, so if they get a big order and they can’t fulfill it, they can use some of our capacity to help them with that,” he said. “We can consult with those companies and tell them how to set up a printer farm efficiently and effectively. We can provide a routine maintenance plan for where we go out and we service all of their machines on a regular basis.”
He has settled on an analogy for describing his work. He likes to think back to the Gold Rush days.
“There’s this understanding that the people who made the most money were not the gold miners, but the people who sold the pick axes to the gold miners,” he said.
Read more from Startup Stories:
Note: This story was updated at 9:58 p.m. Aug. 28, 2025 to reflect that pick axes were sold to gold miners.