Did Onshape Miss a Golden Opportunity to Make a Community?

Did Onshape miss the opportunity to become the next GrabCAD?

You can be forgiven for not knowing about GrabCAD. The once wildly popular model sharing site (over 5 million users at its height) was sold to Stratasys, a 3D printing machine maker, and appears to have drifted into obscurity.

Founded in 2009 by Hardi Meybaum in Estonia, GrabCAD moved to Cambridge, MA. The charming and handsome Estonian was soon making the rounds with venture capitalists, raising $14 million. He then befriended CAD royalty, including then Autodesk CEO, Carl Bass, SolidWorks top brass, among others. A bidding war may have ensued, with companies more interested in communities than customers. The “winner” being Stratasys who paid an amazing $100 million. Maybe Stratasys thought all the models in GrabCAD needed to be 3D printed?

The next big collection of mechanical designs may have been Onshape’s. Every user of free version of Onshape has to make all their models public. Let’s say a 100,000 users had 10 models each, that is a million models. Its nowhere near the size of GrabCAD, SolidWorks’ 3D ContentCentral or Sketchup’s 3D warehouse, but a good start. We have to think that it would have grown fast, fueled by a fairly robust and modern CAD application that was being given away for free.

But Onshape was more interested in the professional community. The users of free software, many of them makers, were not easily converted to paying customers. Onshape could not spend a lot of time and effort on them, or build a very public library, as it were, like 3D ContentCentral and 3D Warehouse, or a virtual community gathering place like GrabCAD, on their behalf. 

Users may have been considered an expense rather than an asset – and, so, an opportunity to make the next MCAD community was ignored.

Comments

[Devon Sowell]

Hello Roopinder Tara-

Just one more thought about GrabCAD. So they create a website to upload work. The people making these files are not paid for their time and effort (and many of the files have mistakes). Then they take the work and turn around and sell it for 100 million. Isn't that stealing? LOL

[Devon Sowell]

Hello-

1. RE: "Users may have been considered an expense rather than an asset – and, so, an opportunity to make the next MCAD community was ignored." This was puzzling to me. They created a great community at SOLIDWORKS but made no effort to repeat that at Onshape. As an early adopter of Onshape, my experience was not good and I stopped supporting them.

2. My new client really enjoys their new Stratasys 3D printer and using GrabCAD as the software to manage the printing process. They print daily.