I onboarded zero creators in two weeks of outreach.

My pitch was a three-sided marketplace for 3d printed goods. Shoppers, creators, and makers, connected through smart contracts that handled licensing and payouts without middlemen. On paper, it was elegant.

The reality of MAKE V1 was nobody cared. I'd built an elegant solution to the wrong problem.

This is the first in a series about MAKE. I'm building in the open and writing about it to crystallize my thoughts and share what I learn.

In this episode: why the original concept missed, and what I'm doing about it.

The Signal I Almost Missed

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. 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 couldn't keep up.

That was the signal. People are ready to buy 3D printed products. The supply side is growing fast too: the desktop 3D printer market is projected to grow 24% annually through 2030. Thousands of creators are designing incredible things across Thingiverse, Cults3D, MakerWorld, and Thangs.

But for regular consumers without printers, accessing any of it is painful. They can trust a creator's janky custom webstore, or download a model file and send it to a print service. Trust signals are low. Quality expectations are unclear. The best option is Etsy, which hosts only a tiny fraction of what exists.

Millions of great designs. A growing market of buyers. A fragmented, inaccessible bridge between them.

I decided to build the connection.

Lessons

The Cold Start I Created

I made a mistake that technical founders make constantly: I jumped to a system-level solution without thinking deeply enough about the people involved.

Trying to onboard creators was humbling. I built an Instagram presence, made posts, reached out to 50 creators. I thought they'd be excited about a new revenue stream.

About 90% never responded. The 10% who engaged declined. The pattern was consistent: they weren't willing to bet their time on an unproven platform.

Classic cold start problem. But that framing alone wouldn't have fixed MAKE V1.

The Real Barrier

Another mistake I made was thinking creators who design and makers who print are separate personas who need tools for collaboration.

The reality was simpler: virtually everyone in the space is a creator. They're just monetizing in different ways.

I learned this during outreach. Browsing 3D printing hashtags, I followed over 100 successful creators with a collective 15 million followers. I mapped their businesses. About 60% monetize digital files rather than physical prints. Creators selling files had 2x the average following. They appeared more successful across the board.

This is when the data connected with my own intuition from running a 3D printing brand. I realized why creators choose files over physical goods.

Selling physical goods is brutally hard.

Think about what it takes to get a 3D printed product to market:

(🎨 = creative task, 🔎 = discovery task, 📦 = fulfillment task)

🎨 Imagine a brand
🎨 Ideate products
🎨 Design them
🎨 Print prototypes and iterate

🔎 Create marketing materials
🔎 Set up storefronts (Shopify, Etsy, or both)
🔎 Run ads across platforms
🔎 Instrument your funnels

📦 Handle payments
📦 Scale production around variable demand
📦 Find space for printers
📦 Order and maintain multiple machines
📦 Manage inventory of filament, parts, shipping materials
📦 Print every order
📦 Ship every order
📦 Handle customer service

The barrier to entry is enormous. It's easier and more scalable to do the creative work you love on a single printer and sell the files.

This is also why model repositories overflow with free designs. Many hobbyist creators know they won't do the fulfillment work to sell physical goods, or even the discovery work to sell files. They're satisfied with comments, likes, and remixes on MakerWorld. Millions of great ideas stay locked in a space regular consumers can't access.

The lesson: creators don't need a coordination layer between designers and makers. They need infrastructure that handles discovery and fulfillment so they can focus on designing.

The Pivot

Once I understood the real problem, the solution got simpler.

If creators aren't selling physical goods because fulfillment is too hard, make fulfillment easy. Handle production, shipping, and customer service so they can focus on what they love.

This reframing made the blockchain obviously unnecessary. 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.

It also clarified how to solve the cold start. I can't ask creators to trust an unproven platform with their fulfillment. So I'm proving it myself first.

I'm building internal brands, selling directly to consumers, validating that the supply chain works. Once I have a track record of shipping quality products on time, onboarding creators becomes a different conversation. I'll have something to show, not just something to pitch.

The value proposition splits by audience.

Creators with followings don't need discovery help. They need someone to handle production and shipping so they can stop packing boxes. A brandable storefront backed by turnkey fulfillment. They promote to their audience. Orders flow in. They never touch a printer. This is why I'm offering white label fulfillment as an option.

Creators without audiences get that plus marketplace exposure. The creators with reach bring traffic to the platform. That traffic becomes discovery for everyone else. Network effects lift the whole community.

I also realized I need more trust signals in the product itself. Stripe checkout instead of a custom flow. Bright, approachable design instead of dark tech aesthetics. Clear shipping expectations. Reviews. Testimonials. The mundane things that make regular people comfortable buying online.

MAKE's Path Forward

The next phase is proving demand with maximum experimentation velocity. More products, more data, more signal. Enough to know what's working and double down.

Looking back, the original MAKE wasn't a good idea implemented too early. It was a symptom of not understanding who I was building for.