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 Yes, models. Its nowhere near 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 fairy robust and modern CAD application that was being given away for free.

But Onshape may have been more interested in turning freeloaders (er, users of their free version) in customers, not community. Free users were just clogging up their cloud storage, for which Amazon must have been ending a whopping bill.

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