March 2025
User Focus Wins 🗒️
I’m packing the final things for my trip to AMUG and Rapid – no better time to procrastinate by writing you this.
Really, it’s quite silly to have 2 additive shows in quick succession. At least it’s not three I suppose. But the whole episode brought back to mind that we all seek exchange of ideas and collaboration. Which brings Threads to mind…
Speaking of which, Threads – which as you know is our AI-powered engineering collaboration tool - got a major facelift this month. The clunky sidebar has been replaced with a slimline interactive version. This is a continuation for the push to be more mobile native in Threads – something that I wrote about last month.
Threads has been an interesting learning curve. The teams that are strong users of the platform love its all-in-one capability. But others, already collaborating on Slack etc, are reluctant to fully switch to a new platform. This month we started the process of doing something about this dichotomy. While still early stage, we decided to build open-source extensions that leverage AI to capture contextual collaborative data where it occurs, categorize and secure it, and make it available to other apps like Threads. This is a major initiative, and we’d love to work with you on it. So, if you’re interested, hit me up for more information.
Materials Management is less of a “problem child”. It’s one of our most popular products and we have some of the world’s biggest manufacturers using it. But it’s still a surprise to me. Mostly because I personally didn’t see how deep the feature requests would get for it. I thought “how difficult tracking powder be?”. But after several years of development, there doesn't seem to be an end to feature requests. Like deferred builds: We have now added support for deferring your Builds and Powder Reclamation processes which is commonly necessary for modular-style printers. Deferring these transactions opens up your print system for more powder and more builds before you spend the time unpacking and reclaiming powder from earlier runs (and recording this in Flows!).
There’s still a pipeline of dozens of additional feature requests of Materials Management – so expect to see more. Constantly improving is the only way to stay on top. I got a reminder of this a couple of times this month, as not 1 but three companies approached us because they’d run out of money and are looking for a buyer. Maybe they saw my post of the mayor deal we submitted an application for, thinking that we’re now flush with cash. We haven’t won the deal yet! But we will look at these opportunities. I’m sorry to see people who have spent years, sometimes decades, working on their vision having to close their doors and if I can help it, we will try and allow them not to shutter completely. They created value, and yet the additive industry’s current situation means that for those who were barely clinging on, there is just no breathing room at the moment. From that perspective we were just lucky – we made it through that trough several years ago and have been profitable for a while, not least because of the relentless focus on customer and (counter to Venture Capital wisdom) a willingness to work with them closely, against non-recurring revenue, to make the products better bit by bit.
No matter where we go – as DOD Prime or as software supplier to some of the world’s most innovative manufacturing organizations, we will never let go of that relentless focus on the user. Let me tell you more about it in Detroit or Chicago. Let me know if you’ll be there.