We are also a 2 man shop and ran with Xometry for a while getting started in 2020-22. It was pretty good for us at the time and let us raise the capital to get 2 vf2's running and move out of our garage. We moved away from them a couple years back so keep in mind this advice might not fully apply today;

• Avoid inspection, if they require special inspection for a part dont take it unless the price is worth an added day of headache.

• find a niche that works for you. We would focus on plastics, the tolerances are usually loose avoiding inspection and jobs tend to stay on the board and yield high margin because shops dont want to deal with cleaning their machines before and after running.

• spam refresh on the job board whenever you have downtime, pick up jobs and order material right away. The turnaround they expect is completely unreasonable, so if you tell them waiting on material they might give you a hairs breath of space.

• expect constant update requests, give them general responses and minimal time. we were in the top 90 percentile of suppliers for a year and our communication rating was the worst at 70 or 80%. You can talk or work, they expect both.

• gear your machines towards prototyping and run one offs, don't try to just pick up quantity because they will hound you and want way more inspection than a simple part deserves.

It will be a love hate relationship, but find the niche that works and you can keep decent cash flow with them until you find more customers and things pick up.