Craftcloud and All3DP are two names that everyone involved in 3D printing should remember. The Munich-based startup All3DP has managed to shake up the market in precisely this area with an online magazine and a comparison platform for 3D printing services. An interview with Mathias Plica, co-founder and CEO of the startup.
1. Who are you and what do you do?
With Craftcloud, we operate a price comparison platform for 3D printing services and broker orders in this area online. So, if you need 3D-printed components, want to select materials, and compare prices, Craftcloud is the right place for you. Our customers order online on our platform, and we forward the orders in real time to our partners, the 3D printing service providers. Our partners, in turn, print and ship directly to our customers — worldwide.
Our second product is All3DP.com, an English-language online magazine on 3D printing and additive manufacturing. All3DP is now the world's leading magazine on this topic. We have approximately 1.5 million readers per month, more than any other website publishing on this topic. Around 100,000 readers come from Germany, 500,000 from North America, and the remaining nearly one million come from the rest of the world, with a focus on Europe, of course.
We do all this from Schwanthalerhöhe with a team of twenty permanent employees from fifteen nations. Our founding team comes from the field of digital publishing. My co-founder, Stefan Schwarz-Ulrich, a mathematician, and I, Mathias Plica, an economist, were privileged to build Chip Online over ten years, again with a fantastic team. Our third co-founder, Anatol Locker, is a tech journalist at heart and has seen just about everything that has to do with tech.
20 employees from 15 nations
2. But that's been around for a long time!
That doesn't exist yet. There are numerous professional 3D printing service providers worldwide. There have been and continue to be numerous attempts to operate comparison platforms for these printing service providers. None have succeeded. We alone have successfully achieved this with Craftcloud. The reason: As with all two-sided marketplaces—and Craftcloud is that—you need a critical mass of customers to even attract and retain partners. Customer acquisition in our market is expensive. Unless you have a complete online magazine as a customer acquisition tool. Our customer acquisition costs are several times lower than those of the competition. That's our unfair advantage—hard to replicate.
At All3DP it took quite a while to convince the investors
3. What has been your biggest challenge so far?
Two challenges stand out from the multitude: Achieving product-market fit for our 3D printing platform Craftcloud cost us countless MVPs and product iterations over a period of three years. For the past 18 months, we've been growing at a rate of 20 percent per month.
The other challenge was financing: Explaining to an investor that you wanted to build a hybrid of content and commerce, with the commerce also being a marketplace. That seemed complex. Today, it's immediately clear to everyone that the content side is the perfect marketing tool for our marketplace, Craftcloud.
4. Let’s get down to business: How is business going?
We will generate two million euros in revenue in 2019 and break even, with sales growth of 150 percent over the previous year. We've already achieved the 150 percent increase over the previous year for three years, and we don't intend to slow down.
Sales growth of 150 percent
5. What does Munich mean to you?
Working internationally from Munich works extremely well. We often had a tough time in our initial pitches because investors doubted our ability to operate a global, English-language platform from Munich.
We've proven the opposite. Since everything runs in the cloud these days, a company's geographical location is irrelevant. And we always find good employees in Munich—even and especially those with international backgrounds.
A secret recipe in recruiting: Munich attracts many young IT professionals from all over the world. They often come with a partner who is also highly qualified but initially faces difficulties in the job market due to their German language skills. Since we have English as our working language, we can find excellent talent in this pool.
Occupy 3D printing as a global niche
6. How can your startup become the next unicorn? Or see you soon at Epic Fail Night?
We're leaning toward becoming a unicorn. With our 1.5 million readers, we're already the world's leading online resource for 3D printing. We won't relinquish this leading position. 3D printing is still a niche, but it's a global niche.
With Craftcloud, we've only dipped our toe into the €12 trillion market for the production of physical goods: We're part of the massively growing Production-as-a-Service market. There's plenty of room for improvement.
7. Tea or coffee?
Coffee. In quantities.
