I onboarded zero creators in two weeks of outreach. 🤦‍♂️

Context

When I bought my first 3D printer last year, I expected the hobbyist experience. Ugly layer lines. Endless calibration. Prints failing at 90%.

Instead, I unboxed something that felt like an iPhone. Setup took fifteen minutes. The first test print had imperceptible layers. I knew immediately that this machine could produce consumer-grade goods.

I opened an Etsy shop on a whim. Demand showed up immediately and kept scaling. By November I was drowning in Christmas orders. I shut the shop down because I was overwhelmed and wanted to enjoy the holidays.

That was the signal. People are ready to buy 3D printed products. That much was clear. What I found too was a flourishing ecosystem of hobbyist creators who shared their designs online. Thousands of creators had already hosted millions of designs across platforms like Thingiverse, Cults3D, MakerWorld, and Thangs. Given I owned a printer, it was super fun to download peoples designs and see them come to life on my printer.

But for regular consumers without printers, accessing any of it is painful. They have three options:

• Order from Etsy - Surely the best option, but only hosts a tiny sliver of what's actually out there.
• Order from custom webstores - Trust signals are low. Quality and delivery expectations are unclear.
• Download the model from a file hosting platform and then send it to a print service - extremely clunky and time consuming. Most buyers will churn out of this process.

Through all of this, I saw millions of great designs, a growing market of buyers, but a fragmented, inaccessible bridge between them. I aim to build the connection.

Original Thesis

I made the classic mistake of going straight into systems design. I saw three roles in the system and defined three actors:

• Shoppers, who want to buy 3d printed goods
• Creators, who design the goods
• Makers, who print the goods

More core assumption was that Creators and Makers needed help collaborating.

I designed something quite elegant. Creators could upload their designs and it would become available for sale in the marketplace. Shoppers could purchase those designs. Orders would go to a global order book that Makers could claim orders from to fulfill. All of it was built on blockchain rails so IP, royalties, and payouts were automatic.

I built a working POC I could use to show "hands on" how it worked.

Humbling Outreach → Insight

I created an Instagram account and made some videos explaining the value prop and technology.

Then, I browsed 3d printing hashtags and followed 100 successful 3d printing creators with a collective 15 million followers and began starting conversations with them. Nobody bit. The responses split into two camps: "I already sell at my own production capacity" and "I'm not investing effort in an empty platform." Both were fair.

But while mapping those businesses, I noticed something I wasn't looking for. About 60% of the creators I'd found sold digital files exclusively rather than physical products. The more successful the creator, the more likely they were to sell files only.

That pattern made sense once I connected it to my own experience running an Etsy shop. Selling 3D printed goods is brutally hard:

Creative work: imagine a brand, ideate products, design them, print prototypes and iterate.

Discovery work: create marketing materials, set up storefronts, run ads across platforms, instrument your funnels.

Fulfillment work: handle payments, scale production around variable demand, find space for printers, order and maintain multiple machines, manage inventory of filament, parts, and shipping materials, print every order, ship every order, handle customer service.

The creative work is why most creators got into 3D printing. The fulfillment work is why most of them avoid selling physical goods. It's easier and more scalable to design on a single printer and sell the files.

Which meant the original premise of MAKE was wrong. Virtually everyone has potential to be both a "Creator" and "Maker", with specific discovery and fulfillment needs. It just depends on their business strategy, constraints, and level of maturity.

New Approach

This insight deeply clarified the right approach.

Value prop. The original pitch was discovery: a marketplace that connects creators to buyers. That still matters, but it's not the whole picture. The real gap is fulfillment. Most creators avoid selling physical goods because production, shipping, and customer service are brutal at any scale. MAKE handles all of it. Consistent quality, reliable shipping, real customer support. Think of it like Amazon Prime for 3D printed goods: buyers get a purchasing experience they trust, and creators get sales they never would have captured on their own. For creators who already have audiences and want to sell through their own channels, MAKE offers the same fulfillment as a white label service. They keep their brand, maximize their margins, and never touch a printer. Whether a creator needs exposure or just infrastructure, MAKE fits.

Architecture. The blockchain was the first thing to go. I'd built it to coordinate trust between creators and a distributed network of anonymous makers. But if MAKE owns fulfillment, there's no network to coordinate. Stripe Connect handles payouts. Done.

Go-to-market. Every creator I'd spoken to was making the same reasonable point: why invest time in an unproven platform? I can't pitch my way past that objection. I need to answer it with evidence. So I'm building internal brands, selling directly to consumers, and proving the supply chain works. Once I have a track record of shipping quality products on time, the conversation with creators changes completely. I'll have something to show, not just something to describe.

Conclusion

MAKE now has a clear value prop, a simple architecture, and a highly actionable go-to-market strategy. The opportunity is massive: a growing market of buyers, an explosion of creative talent, and a gap between them that nobody has closed well. I'm going to close it.