Looking for ideas to support a 3D models sharing site

Hi all

I would be really grateful if anyone could suggest ways I could support the fabfabbers.com site I released around a month ago now.

A few of the more obvious ones:

1) Plain old advertising (Google Ads etc)
2) Selling models for a commision (already done - places like Shapeways of course having a huge advantage)
3) Some kind of kickstarter campaign, perhaps the goal of which would be to open source it. I would have discounted that idea immediately, but I've seen some successful community-based kickstart projects.
4) A community buy/sell page, with a small cut for sales

I think there's a lot of scope for improvement, but at the moment I can't see a way to make it even minimally viable.

Any ideas welcome

Marcos

maybe "Venture Capital / Kickstarter" and ads, the next step is to pay some money (*1) to the designer, X% of the Ad income form his designs, at the beginning you would have to add money from the venture capital

(*1) a lot of designers have a other motivation that money and for most of the objects the ad income would be very small, so this designers can donate there share of the ad income to open source projects (which they can choose)

my point is, i like to design stuff, i don't think i can make a living from it, but instead i could support open source projects, if i going to publish my designs on thinkiverse, i am supporting a company which tuned away from open source

here is the intro
"hallo kickstarters, i wont your money to run this website and to give/spread your money to the awesome designers"

1. seems relatively straight forward, but be careful not to put anyone off. (Nothing too obtrusive) I dont know what order of magnitude of money it brings in with those constraints.

There is the off chance that some existing 3d printer companies are willing to fund the costs of servers just in order for there to be a good alternative to thingiverse. Well, of course maybe you'll/they'll find other ways to make it useful.(like -again- advertising, the below might be indirectly useful for them)

About 2, fabfabbers could be the middleman between the person printing the object and the one that wants to buy it. There was another site that aimed in that direction ... I forgot its name.. the idea was that people could offer to buy and people would make bids for the price to print it.(Probably impossible to make enough money out of for most people here, but companies might bid aswel)

You could also connect the non-printable 'vitamins'(hardware/electronics with plugs) to the objects so people can easily purchase the required stuff. However, i dont think there is enough demand for it due to the lack of designs that need it. Also it requires distribution and stuff, probably would need to have an existing company who can do it.

However, if such a website existed and could pay back to developpers, it'd take sourcing, the website and maybe some of the finding of the userbase/what the userbase wants out of the hands of developpers. Efforts of developpers to sell stuff might induce demand, and the prospect of making a living developping these things might bring more designs.(now that some obstacles are removed) However tbh, i feel it is a bit of a long shot, and early. There are probably some other obstacles?

Maybe venture capital would see such a thing as a low-probability of success, but high profits if successful situation. But i think the interests of everyone involved should count?

an other idea, sell accounts to 3d printer companies, if they find a nice object, they can attach a picture of the object printed on their printer "this is how it printed on XYZ Machien" and the settings they used,

this could have two uses for the manufacturer, first advertisement and second it would be nice service for his costumers, to see how it looks and what they have to set on their printer and they if their costumers ask where he can download some models, the manufacturer doesn't need to say "go to this website of our competitor and try your luck with the STLs", they can say the costumer "this is a website we working with, there are some nice models and these are the settings we used, just copy and print it on your printer"

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2013 06:27PM by Gerard Choinka.

Hi Gerard & Jasper

Thanks for all the suggestions - I think at the moment my best bet is some sort of crowfunding, but just thinking about the parameters of that.

Marcos

Maybe you can start putting some designs or codes that would generate parts that people can use for their rep-rap / 3d printer. That would attract people to your site.

bump

I think you need more sharing and advocacy, I think this idea is what is good. If the design is in place I think I need this information.

Two years ago our game development company was in dilemma what technology to use for new concept, we wanted to implement in 3D. We sure did not want our game to an installable. We wanted it to run inside a browser and we did not know how to help ourselves. At that time the best option was Papervision and Away3d 3 which was library in Action Script 3 and we cannot explain, the pain was excruciating since both the libraries did not use computer graphics card acceleration after rendering of 10,000 triangles the game used to go so slow. We did everything to make it right. From material sizes to removing lights, everything but we knew with the technology in hand we could not meet our end user expectations. Lucky for us our team had great experience in OpenGL ES, we understood this low level API inside out. We had done many experiments on iPhone and iPad with it. Android phones had great support for it too. But we knew our knowledge was useless for web. We did not want to use Unity.

Then came along Stage3d by Adobe, it was fast, damn fast. Render 80,000 triangles with lighting, shadows, fluid mechanics it worked. Beauty of it was that anybody having knowledge of OpenGL could adapt to Stage 3D quickly. The same concepts of Matrices Transformation we used for OpenGL were directly applied in Stage 3D, it was amazing, it was virtually zero learning curve for our game development company. And then came along our personal favorite Air 3.2 so this means use Stage 3d create a browser based game, and recompile for Android, iPhone, iPad it was amazing. Before we could even stop playing with it we were neck deep in WebGL , it was like a dream come true. We could stop trying both of them. We never knew our knowledge of OpenGL ES would just make us future ready. We never knew our knowledge of Matrices and Transformation would just change the way we perceived web.

But what about those people who did not want to learn maths and did want to play with this low level API, it is actually writing code in assembly language when you have Java. It is true both API’s require strong Mathematical background and thorough understand of Matrices. But we love our open source community they have never let us down, Away3D 4, a library using Stage 3D and three.js using WebGL both extremely classy and fast. So you do not need to know anything about mathematics when using any of them.

Odd - how did this become an entirely different thread?

Via 3d-printroom i found out that you can make programs using html+javascript, like with node-webkit, that said Sumeet is *completely* off topic. Take it somewhere else.

> We sure did not want our game to an installable.

I take it so you could run ads or something. Blegh, reality.

marcosscriven Wrote:
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> Odd - how did this become an entirely different
> thread?

Spammers get everywhere!

Hey Marcos,

A little off topic, but your fabfabbers.com site is only labeled "Home". You should change that to a more relevant description.

Cheers

Norm