3D Print Content Is King With Lucas Matheson Of Pinshape

 

The future of the continued growth of 3D Printing lies at the hand of creating 3D Print Content. In this episode, Tom and Tracy Hazzard speak with Lucas Matheson of Pinshape about how his company is working to grow 3D Print Content and the content creator community. Pinshape is a leading consumer marketplace for 3D printable products that connects people with 3D designers. Helping protect the market and designers in this process, especially with regards to Intellectual Property, Lucas explains to us how Creative Commons and Digital Rights Management applies to 3D Print Content as well as other issues like modifications, derivatives, and fan art. 3D Print Content is King. Learn how you can help protect it and secure a future for 3D Printing in this conversation.

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3D Print Content Is King With Lucas Matheson Of Pinshape

When 3D Print Content is paramount to the faster evolution of the 3D Printing market. We talk with Lucas Matheson about how Pinshape is working to grow 3D Print Content and the content creator community through digital rights management and other more advanced concepts like streaming 3D Print Content. The future of 3D Printing is in content growth, so 3D Print Content is King and you should always protect the King!

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In this episode, we’re going to have an interview with the CEO and Cofounder of Pinshape, Lucas Matheson. They are one of many sites that we’ve been researching and learning about that is a marketplace for people to post, share and sell their 3D design files.

Some of you may know that we’ve been hesitant to join a design file resource. There are many reasons why. Some of them have to do with intellectual property. Some of it has to do with ease of use in shopping, and another side of it is whether or not there’s an audience yet for our designs and our types of designs. Are we putting them up there, but then no one’s going to buy it?

Is there a market for those?

We have a lot of questions about it. In this episode, we wanted to talk to Lucas Matheson about some of those issues that are holding back other designers.

Also, why should designers like us feel that they’re the right place to market their designs?

Why don’t we go to Lucas?

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Lucas, thanks so much for joining us. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about you and your background and about Pinshape?

Thanks so much. I appreciate being here. Pinshape is a marketplace for 3D printable models. We started the company and wanted to build an alternative to Thingiverse and provide some other types of features and community features that we thought were important for this market and industry to grow. Since then, we’ve been able to attract some high-quality designers from around the world and we’re slowly building a thriving and passionate community around 3D printable products.

That’s great and what about you?

My background is mostly in finance. I went the business route. I spent most of my career in M&A and due diligence, helping companies buy and sell other companies. I went to grad school and met my Cofounder, Nick. We started researching 3D printing and we realized that there was an incredible opportunity ahead of us. We are both passionate about the content side of the marketplace or the industry, so we built out our MVP, our Minimum Viable Product for Pinshape. We slowly built up from there.

We can’t agree with you more about the content being king here in the 3D printing world. That’s why our show is called What the FFF?! We believe it’s the key to future growth in 3D printing.

The number one question people ask me is, what are people printing? That’s an exciting question to think about now and over the next years. Ultimately, if there are not great products for people to print at home and professionally, if there’s not great content, this industry is going to take a long time to evolve. Companies are going to be cautious around making investments into the hardware space and in the material science side to justify investments, if they’re not seeing any traction on the consumer side and the professional side as well in terms of people printing out products. It’s where they see a tremendous amount of value.

What are you going to do? What are we going to do as an industry to attract more designers and product developers to make better content?

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to attract the best designers in the world. Part of our strategy is to first run design contests on our platform. On Pinshape, we run a design contest every month. We usually have around $4,000 to $5,000 in prizes. We usually have a free 3D printer or a scanner or another device or some other software as service packages. We run these contests to incentivize designers but also engage them in exciting opportunities. A good example is the World 3D Printing Expo in China. Three of our designers won first, second and third prize in that contest. There was over $20,000 in prizes for the contest. We’re proud as a company to be able to bring in the top three designers for a huge 3D printing design contest in China.

There are other opportunities, as well. ELLE Time & Jewelry ran a contest on our platform where they used our community. We have thousands of designers in our community to design products for ELLE. They’re a subsidiary of the magazine. What ELLE is doing, which is interesting, they’re using the winning designs to mass-manufacture them and sell them through traditional channels. It’s in a good example of a company, of a brand that’s using their IP. They’re innovating within a community like Pinshape. They’re sourcing designs and they’re using those designs to satisfy their traditional business needs. We find that type of opportunity interesting where we can connect brands and companies with opportunities for designers around the world to innovate and create new products.

It’s interesting from our perspective. We’ve designed mass-market products for years. When we started 3D printing, we had the same problem. It was difficult to get into 3D printing so I can imagine a company ELLE is going in and looking at that and saying, “This is so much to take on. Our existing development staff doesn’t know 3D printing. Where can we expand our capabilities and jumpstart the learning curve and get us going?”

One of the things that ELLE did with that contest, which was interesting, is part of the prize pack was an interview with ELLE to work there part-time as a jewelry designer. That’s one of the challenges that they realize they have internally. They needed some expertise in the world of 3D printing to make sure that they’re prototyping products properly. We’ll see a lot of industries and companies focusing on how to improve that learning curve and that’s going to be a big priority in 2015. A lot of companies are investing in attracting the right types of people. They’re understanding how they can create better products, get a better feedback loop, get products in the customer’s hands earlier on in the process. Ultimately, designed products that are more in line with their customers and specific segments of the market that they’re approaching.

It helps to balance out. When you’re designing for the mass market, you have to be cognizant of what’s going to sell. When you’re designing for 3D printing, you only have to sell in a unit of one. You have to have a good balance of both and it’s nice to be able to bring in a process in which you can evaluate outside of your own corporation.

Traditionally, 3D prototyping has been good for companies to get feedback internally. The next step for a lot of companies that design products, in general, are going to be strengthening the feedback loop between designing a number of different products that they’re able to test more quickly. Also, make better and more informed decisions before going to production and mass manufacturing products. That will be a trend that we’ll see over the next few years. A number of different companies will not only design ten products instead of one over a shorter term and get better feedback on them and eventually double down or triple down on the ones that are successful.

For us, when we step back and look at the design and 3D printing, the thing that always rises to the surface is around the idea of customization and personalization. This industry is moving towards providing an ecosystem where it’s the next generation of customers who are going to be customizing and personalizing products. That’s where designers, companies and brands are going to start thinking about how their customers can engage with their products and own unique physical products. That’s what’s exciting for us about 3D printing. We’re still ways away from that, but we’re moving slowly more towards an economy driven by customers that are able to modify and personalize products.

We like the idea of that too. How is copyright, holding back some of the designers or your intellectual property rights in general? How is that going to change when everything becomes personal and mass-customized in a way?

Intellectual property is something that we’ve been looking at for a long time. In part because my sister-in-law is an intellectual property lawyer and we’ve been able to engage her in these conversations early on in our business. When you step back and look at what’s going to happen and what we think is going to happen with IP in this space is first, designers are cautious about people downloading and sharing their models. In reality, we don’t see a lot of pirated content on the internet for 3D models yet. The reality is as scanning technology evolves and as we all move towards a time where we’re downloading a scanning app on our iPhone and being able to scan everything in our house and uploading it to the web. We’re going to start seeing a lot of products being uploaded to the internet and copied, duplicated and shared.

 

When it comes to the modification of files, that’s where a lot of companies are starting to look into and figuring out how they can protect the modification, customization and personalization of their products. That’s also where a lot of the technology is being developed. I know of several companies that are working on the technology to be able to allow companies to offer products in a marketplace like Pinshape. It allows their customers to modify and personalize those products while maintaining intellectual property. The question always comes down to if you take a 3D model, how far do you have to modify that model before the original IP owner loses that intellectual property? For that, we need a clear understanding of the difference between fan art, derivative works and infringement.

Pinshape was invited on Capitol Hill in Washington to talk to members of Congress and staffers. It was about moving some legislation forward and starting to get people in the House to start thinking about how we can provide some guidance to the industry on what are the rules around fan art and derivative works. What is the difference between those two things? Also, helping to communicate that back to the designer so there’s a little more clarity in the market around how companies like Pinshape should handle content when it’s uploaded to our platform. Also, how designers should be thinking about designing products that could potentially be infringing on other’s property.

I understand that you guys have selected Creative Commons as your starting place for licensing or copyright notification for your designers.

We have Creative Commons. We also have another license that we’ve added in that we wrote ourselves that is essentially a no share, no derivative, no commerce license. It allows individuals and companies to download a model to use it for their personal or corporate use at home or at work but restricts their ability to share, sell or modify those designs. That license isn’t integrated into our platform. When designers upload models to our platform they can select that license and it’s clear and simple. We tried to keep it as crystal clear as possible on our platform.

Is there anything about Pinshape or your website that has a mechanism to prevent people who are downloading those files from sharing them despite the agreement regarding that license?

We announced a partnership with a company called 3DPrinterOS. What we can do on our platform is designers can upload a model to Pinshape. They can select a streamable option. Essentially what that does is it restricts the ability of our community to download the source file of that model. What customers can do is they can select that model, if it’s free or paid, they can then stream that model directly from the cloud to their home or office 3D printer. Essentially, we can select the printer, select some printing options. We can slice that model in the cloud specifically for a specific 3D printer and stream it directly from the cloud to an office or home 3D printer. You can think of it like Netflix for 3D printing.

Is the designer responsible for figuring out what works on the 3D printer or is that something that’s handled by the 3DPrinterOS system?

We can slice for various types of printers and different types of filaments. Essentially, it’s a slicing tool on our platform in the cloud. After it’s sliced, we can encrypt the G-code. We send it through a small application that a customer would download. That customer is then encrypted and sent directly to the printer. From a user experience perspective, we worked hard to make that user experience as simple and easy as we possibly could. Not all 3D printers are supported from the platform, but a large majority of the major 3D printers are supported. They’re constantly adding new 3D printers to the platform.

Your consumer makes the choices of what filament and maybe what resolution in terms of layer thickness and some of those things on your site through this 3DprinterOS app or engine, and they then get to stream the printable file?

That’s exactly right. Users can customize settings that they want to. There are easy options and a more advanced option for users that want to dig down a little bit into layer thickness and support and so on. Those options are available and the process is pretty seamless. We are proud of our team. We worked hard for a number of weeks, integrating this technology in our platform and providing an experience that makes it as easy as possible.

That’s available now?

Yes. The reason we did that is because we’ve had a lot of designers that are cautious about their work. They spend a lot of time on their designs and they’re not interested in having people download the source code. We’re also looking to attract assets and digital models from companies and brands looking to participate in this community, and start putting some products into marketplaces and making some of their digital IP available for printing at home. Not all of these companies are going to want individuals to have access to the source code. We think it’s a good opportunity for companies to start participating in a 3D printing community and putting assets in a marketplace where people can get them printed at home.

What about the enterprise? How are you going to handle a pay per print model or something like that, when you’re talking about big companies that might want to continually use a file?

We essentially built through the 3DPrinterOS platform to essentially be a pay per print. If a model was $3 and it was streamable, you’d pay the $3 and you’d stream that product to your 3D printer. We’d have a callback through our API that would tell us that the print was successful and that transaction would be complete. As a designer, you can establish the context around how your product is distributed on Pinshape.

Can you offer different price models for volumes?

We thought a lot about that and we haven’t integrated that yet but it’s definitely something that is on our many to-do lists, in terms of integrating features. It’s something that for now, we want to get the streaming service up and running. We want to make it as easy and user friendly as we possibly can. As we learn more about how our users are enjoying the feature or having some challenges, we’ll optimize it as we move forward.

That’s great because that’s holding back the implementation in an enterprise solution. Whether it’s a UPS Store, a Signarama or any of those large companies who might have clients that come through their shop and they’re printing for them, but they want to try it out from somewhere. You need to have some good files. You need to have some things that appeal to those types of clients and consumers that are going to come through that store.

We think that managing some of that IP risk for companies and brands will pay off in the sense that we’ll be able to find companies that are interested in participating in the 3D printing ecosystem. This is a great and safe way for them to do that.

That was holding us back for a long time too with some of our designs and why we hadn’t signed on with any file-sharing company. We’ve been holding out, so we’re not all that unique. Many designers are holding out.

We’re looking to attract those designers. That’s what we’re learning. There are many talented designers both from the product side, the industrial side, the animation side, the movie side and the gaming space. We’re seeing a lot more artists starting to experiment with 3D printing models and learn how to decimate models and make sure they’re printable and go through all that process of cleaning them up. We’re trying to help those designers with that process. What we’ve learned is a lot of designers have their own way of doing things, their unique style of getting models ready to 3D print.

Ultimately, there’s going to be a massive influx of 3D designers from around the world that start participating in this ecosystem and start thinking about themselves as product engineers. The line between an engineer and an artist with 3D printing is starting to fade away a little bit. We find most artists are generally excited about the idea that they could potentially start building products and not having to worry about the manufacturing process at all.

You mentioned about the Shanghai CES. Tell us a little bit about that.

CES is the Consumer Electronics Show and has traditionally been in Vegas. For 2015, they opened up an exhibition in Shanghai. I was invited to Shanghai to speak on a panel discussion around 3D printing. I was on a panel discussion with the head of 3D printing from Autodesk in Hong Kong and the CEO of XYZ 3D Printing. It was a great experience to be able to chat about the consumer space and provide some context around where we think the industry is going and some of the bottlenecks in the industry that we see.

 

From the production side, from the XYZ 3D Printing side, what are the next challenges with hardware and what’s it going to take for in terms of price for the average consumer to go out and buy a 3D printer. There’s some good context from the software side through the content IP space. We talked about materials quite a bit in how we’re going to see some exciting materials and filaments come online that’s going to help change the application of extrusion 3D printing. We’re going to start to see some different applications because of some of the materials that we’ll be seeing coming out and being made available.

You talked a little bit about scanning before.

Scanning is interesting. It’s something that most people in the 3D printing space don’t talk a lot about but it’s one of those industries that I see exploding. We’re seeing a lot of companies investing and building new scanners that are going to be affordable, precise and accurate. When you look at scanning technology, you could spend $15,000, $10,000 or $800 on a relatively good scanner. We’re seeing a lot of companies that are building apps for iPhones that are getting better in terms of quality and resolution.

We’re moving more towards an economy where millions of people have access to scanning technology. Once that happens, products from around homes and offices will be scanned and uploaded online. For us, it’s the next major wave of digital media that we’ll see coming online. We saw our history of music, TV, photos and videos. The next major wave of digital media, we’ll see literally tens of millions of models start being uploaded to the web. It’ll be interesting to see where those models end up and how people access them. Also, how the intellectual property is managed when you don’t need to copy the source code directly from the company, but you can create it in your own house.

I see a wave of lawsuits on the horizon. It could be an intellectual property management nightmare.

There are a bunch of companies that are looking to mitigate that risk and scan files in different repositories online like Pinshape to make sure that those files being uploaded to platforms don’t infringe on other people’s property. There are others that believe that it’s a little bit of a waste of time and that DRM in this industry is not going to work. What’s interesting is a lot of this industry was founded originally on the idea of open source. It’s sharing models, contributing back to a community and having access to files. We share a lot of those beliefs and believe strongly that our community is sharing interesting content. The question is going to be around incentivizing companies to participate in the space and helping them to protect that IP so new investments and products can be made.

In the end, if it doesn’t start making money, the industry is not going to grow. That’s what we keep saying. If in the mix of things, the designer, inventor or intellectual property owner can’t make money in the process, there isn’t going to be enough good content to be sharing.

When I was in university, Napster was peaking. When you look at Napster, a lot of people ask why is it so successful. From my perspective, it was successful because it was incredibly convenient. You could go into Napster and in two clicks, you could have a product, digital asset, program or whatever you wanted. You could have it within a couple of minutes and no other speed service provided near the convenience that Napster provided. We started seeing companies like iTunes evolve. They started making the process of buying digital media convenient. We started seeing Netflix with a subscription model and making accessing movies convenient. We started seeing iStock photos where it’s convenient and they’re providing a good experience to pay.

These models are successful because they’ve been able to provide a convenient experience for customers and customers are willing to pay for that. They’ve proven that over the years. The 3D printing industry will leverage on that. Essentially that’s what we’re doing on Pinshape. We’re building an experience that is as simple and easy as possible. We’re trying to eliminate a lot of the frustrations that others are facing in this industry, to be able to download products and get them printed as easily and as simply as they possibly can.

I can’t agree more because I keep thinking about the scanning nightmare that happens. Scanning, even at its best is difficult to replicate. I don’t think a lot of people understand this. You can’t just go from scanner to 3D printers. It doesn’t work. You have to fix the model. You have to do all this work. When we realized that we put 200 hours into a lot of our designs, even if you were to scan it, it probably takes you at least half that to fix it. It’d be cheaper and easier if you have a better system to buy and download the file.

That’s exactly what we believe in. It’s around convenience and user experience. If we can provide a great experience for our users on our platform, they’ll come back. They will download more models and enjoy the process of exploration. That’s also what’s what we love about this industry. Unlike a lot of other digital media, with 3D printing, you never know what you’re going to see every day. There are many new products coming to the market and I don’t think people have a specific genre that they’re specifically interested in like music. In 3D printing, there are such a wide variety of products that can be 3D printed. For us, it’s helping people. As millions and millions of products are uploaded online, part of our experience is helping people find contents that are relevant and interesting for them.

We talked about it and you alluded to it earlier. What’s printed today is not necessarily what’s going to be printed tomorrow because the people who own 3D printers today are different from what’s coming online in the next year or more.

We’re building a lot of our feature sets to leverage the next generation of customers. For us, the next generation of customers is somebody with disposable income who’s interested in technology and feels like they’re a maker. I grew up in a home where my father was in the carpentry room every weekend building stuff and making things. That was who he was. He was a maker and I believe a lot of us have an inherent interest in making things.

Given our lifestyle, a lot of us don’t participate in activities and hobbies where we’re creating things and making things with our hands or with our physical products that we can touch. 3D printing is going to be an interesting opportunity for a lot of people to start creating things and creating products. As that process gets easier from the software side all the way to the actual printing side, we’ll see more people start investing in this space. They’ll treat it more as an experience of being able to make things that they want to make.

Especially in the craft realm of things. The crafters who are maybe as common as in Etsy shop or maybe think of it as common as it is in homes to have a sewing machine. Not every home has a sewing machine, especially these days. People who are into crafts like that, if they have the ability to go online, find a file, do a little bit of customization that you’re working on. They have some creative ability, but they can’t mess up the file or take it too far away from what it’s intended to do. You’re going to get a lot more people into it. You get to choose wonderful new materials that are coming out. There is a lot of creativity but it’s on the less technical side of things. Now you have creativity happening in that DIY. We call it MIY, Make It Yours.

People ask me all the time, “Do you think everyone will have a 3D printer in their house one day?” That’s probably one of the top three questions people ask me. My sense is that the answer is no. I see two distinct groups of people. One, are people who want to buy products. Those are consumers. They will be consumers today and they’ll be consumers tomorrow. Those consumers want to buy products that are affordable, that provide a lot of value in their life, and that they enjoy using. The fact that these products will be 3D printing will be irrelevant for these customers. It’s like now when we go to buy a product. We don’t stop and think, “I wonder how they made this bowl or I wonder how they made this tool.” We only know that the tool does a job that we want it to do and we know the value of that product provides us.

The other group of people are makers or Do-It-Yourself. However, you want to describe it. These are the people who are there for the experience of making things and creating things. That population is drastically underestimated in terms of its size. It will grow significantly over the next decades as this technology evolves. It becomes easier and easier for the average person to customize and personalized products. Also, to think about how they want to innovate in their own life, how they want to solve their own problems, and how they want to create interesting things that are relevant to them.

You don’t think that it’s going to be in every home but I hope it is because we have young children. One of them has started to learn 3D printing and she just started to learn to read as well. It’s quite a feat to try and teach that. We think it’s great because we started to realize how much she’s learning early geometry and how to use the computer technically. It’s her first time using a mouse. All of these things are great skills to be teaching and to be able to put it into a physical creative output. It’s a lot more rewarding at that age to be teaching those kinds of things early and young. It’s a great idea to be having a 3D printer in every home from that standpoint because these kids are so willing to experiment. They don’t care if it goes wrong or not as much as we care as adults.

I’m excited about that as well. I have two children myself and I’m excited. They’re young but I’m excited for when we can get a 3D printer that they can use in the house that’s fun and interesting, and let them explore their creativity and make stuff.

I love the ideas that they come up with too. We ought to start tapping into that and be thinking about that when we’re deciding what files to load up on Pinshape.

It’s why I started this company. I was driving by a school one day. I saw a bunch of kids standing in a school and they were all dressed differently. I remember thinking about that for a long time and it confused me because when I was in high school, we all dressed the exact same and that’s how we’re identified. I found it interesting that these groups of kids were different and they were all playing together. I realized then that generation, our next generation is going to be individualized and unique. They’re going to want products that are unique, customized for themselves, and they’re not going to be afraid of that like I was when I was in high school about exploring with what I wanted. It was more of a groupthink mentality back when I was in school. I see this trend with young kids where they are eager to explore what they like, what they don’t like. They’re not afraid of that. I love that. That’s where I see this customization and personalization with the next generation of consumers.

We couldn’t agree more. Our generation, your generation and all of us are also eager because we are faced with the mass market. The product choices have been narrowing and narrowing because of volume, Target, Walmart and those kinds of volume that you require. You can’t take any risks. On the digital side, on our iPhones and on our creative experience online all the time, we have the chance to personalize. It’s frustrating people and that frustration is leading us to desire unique products. When we find that we can get it in any color we want, we go for it.

That’s exactly right. It’s exciting.

 

Thank you again and let us know if we can do anything for you.

I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you guys.

Thank you for taking the time.

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That was refreshing. I feel like we got a lot more information or at least I got a lot more information than I expected to give me some confidence that Pinshape might be a good place to put up our designs.

We talked about how we’ve got a lot of criteria. It’s why we haven’t joined them. Some of that is addressed here. If a site is growing for business as well as personal use, that’s appealing to us because that’s what we do best. What do you think about the comments that he was making about ELLE Jewelry and some of these companies coming in? On one hand, it’s refreshing. You’re going to get some interesting design work but on the other hand, I’ve also seen a lot of immature designers. It’s one thing to understand 3D printing and it’s another thing to understand the market of a company and marketing products. I wonder whether or not it’s going to work for every type of company. For ELLE Jewelry, it makes total sense because jewelry is such an art and the artist each has an individual signature. You don’t want to corporatize that. You want to keep that individuality. It works there.

There are going to be companies that have more success than others doing this but certainly, getting some high profile companies like ELLE involved is going to help the overall exposure of 3D printing and excitement about it. That’s going to help the industry overall. How much will they be successful? The thing about 3D printing is, anybody can design and print. You don’t have to have a lot of experience.

You and I have a big perspective on those that win contests are usually young and inexperienced. It’s hard to tell whether or not they’re going to be successful later because they are the ones that have the time.

Only time will tell who’s going to be successful on these platforms and who sticks around. People are going to have a limit as to how much time they can spend creating and uploading designs if they’re not making money, if they’re not being successful at it.

That is a bold call back, so you need a day job to keep doing it. At the same time, that is something that maybe needs to happen. Maybe somebody needs to come in and sponsor designers to go on. “We need an income stream. If you want us to be filling that pipeline with great designs that we know are saleable, maybe you need to sponsor us. Maybe you need to keep paying us to do this.” That’s where somebody’s missing the mark. Whether it’s a big store, big chain or whatever it is, or even a little mom and pop shop who want to offer 3D printing services, creating their line is critical.

That’s the enterprise solution you were talking about in the interview, which they’re not ready to address yet. I do see the potential going forward for large companies that have franchises and individual shops all over the United States who have a need for a common set of products that they can stream per print to each store location for their customers.

Maybe customized them or maybe not, but it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day though, it has to fit their profile of customer. Who’s the client that’s coming in there? If it doesn’t fit that and you’re not a good designer like that, you’re just good at 3D modeling, that’s a bigger problem there. The application of that is the difficult part. In our experience, it takes a long time to learn how to 3D print even when you’ve been a successful product designer already. You can’t just take your product designer and say, “Go ahead and 3D print.” You got to give them some time.

There’s a difference between 3D printing something you’ve designed and designing something for 3D printing specifically. There’s a big distinction. If you don’t understand that, only experience is going to teach you that.

If you’re planning to do that, you’ve got to give yourself a year.

That’s a fair statement of putting significant time into it.

Take your designers or a subset of your designers and devote them on to 3D printing and give them a year to be pulled together in a successful line because it’s going to take that long.

In this industry, everybody’s trying to get attention because there’s not a significant revenue stream from much of any of it yet. It has a lot of potential and it will be ultimately successful. A lot of the designs that are getting attention are flashier and may be less practical. There’s going to be a sweet spot that’s more of a balance between the practical things people need and want every day, and great design. There’s going to be a sweet spot there. To that end, in terms of where you’re going to find the sweet spot and making money in 3D printing, it’s as much about business strategy as it is blending the needs of the user and the designer. It’s a business. We are trying to find some people that are interested to grow or adapt to their business using 3D printing.

You can be a freelancer or a designer who wants to open up a Pinshape shop or any Etsy shop. You could already be an Etsy shop owner or you could be a shop owner in a small town. You could be a part of a chain. It doesn’t matter how small or big you are in terms of your business scope as long as your plan is focused on making money with 3D printing.

There is a little contest we’re running. You can go to our website and either send a voicemail through the Ask Us buttons or go to our homepage. There’s a form you can fill out and make a pitch for what you want to do in business with 3D printing. You have a chance to win $10,000 of our time in business consulting to help you succeed.

It’s over a course of six months. You’ll want to be reading our blog because we’ll be using case studies from what we’re learning about the questions that are being asked, and the mentorship issues that come up with the winner. We’ll be using that on our show to help everyone.

That’s going to be of interest to a lot of people who are trying to figure out how are they going to fit in this 3D printing world. How are they going to maybe start a business or make money in it?

That doesn’t change anything we still have our Ask Us Anything feature, which is the other show that we run all week long to answer your questions. You can go to our website HazzDesign.com, hit the Ask Us Anything tab. You can go to Facebook or everywhere on the internet we are @HazzDesign.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thanks for reading.

Important Links:

• Pinshape
• Thingiverse
• Nick Schwinghamer – LinkedIn
• ELLE Time & Jewelry
• Creative Commons
• 3DPrinterOS
• XYZ 3D Printing
• Napster
• HazzDesign.com
• @HazzDesign – Facebook

About Lucas Matheson

Lucas loves making, and exploring beautiful things. He’s spent his career working for exceptional companies, and learning from exceptional people. Along with Pinshape co-founders, Nick Schwinghamer and Andre Yanes, Lucas wants to make 3D printing simple and fun with an aim to build an engaging community of innovative makers and designers of all experience levels, who are helping to shape the future of 3D printing.

Pinshape is a 500 Startups-backed company, with offices in Vancouver, Canada and San Francisco, California.

 

• Here’s How »

• 3DStartpoint.com
• 3D Startpoint Facebook
• 3D Startpoint LinkedIn
• Hazz Design Twitter
• 3D Startpoint YouTube