Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S5E38 Istvan Csanady | Shapr3D
In this episode, Aaron Moncur interviews Istvan Csanady, the founder and CEO of Shaper3D, a pioneering 3D modeling app that is transforming the CAD industry. Istvan discusses Shaper3D's vision to create a powerful, yet intuitive CAD tool for the modern era, focusing on mobility, ease of use, and collaboration. He shares insights into the company's business strategy, the challenges of balancing simplicity and sophistication, and the exciting roadmap for future features.
Main Topics:
- Shaper 3D's approach to reinventing CAD for the 21st century
- The importance of mobility and native application support
- Balancing ease of use with the sophistication of modern CAD tools
- Shaper 3D's business strategy and first sales
- Positioning Shaper 3D in the CAD market
- Winning the Apple Design Award and its impact
- Future roadmap, including collaboration features and private cloud architecture
About the guest:István Csanády is the Founder and CEO of Shapr3D, a pioneering 3D modeling app that has transformed the CAD industry by making professional design tools more accessible and intuitive. Starting with a vision to create a powerful CAD tool for the iPad Pro, Shapr3D has since expanded to macOS and Windows, gaining recognition such as the Apple Design Award. Under István's leadership, the company has continuously innovated, raising significant venture capital to support its growth.
Links:
István Csanády - LinkedIn
Shapr3D Website
About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
Music. Do you ever work with pneumatic actuators? Our easy pneumatics controller is the easiest way to control air driven motion. I have ever seen the no code programming interface is so easy even I can program it, and that's saying a lot create sophisticated motion in minutes, not weeks, with easy pneumatics controller. Learn more at Team pipeline.us.
Istvan Csanady:I think what we have to do is you start with something very simple, and you add a little bit more complexity, a little bit more complexity, but only step by step did we screw up the workflow for our existing users? Yes, no, okay, if you screwed it up, how can we fix it in a way that it's still going to be better faster for the new targets audience?
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to another episode of The being an engineer podcast today, we are speaking with Istvan Csanady, the founder and CEO of Shapr3D a pioneering 3d modeling app that has transformed the CAD industry by making professional design tools more accessible and intuitive, starting with a vision to create a powerful CAD tool for the iPad Pro shaper 3d has expanded to Mac OS and Windows, gaining recognition, such as the Apple design award. Under Istvan's leadership, the company is continuously innovated, raising significant venture capital support to support its growth. Istvan, thank you so much for being with us on the show today.
Istvan Csanady:Hey, Aaron, thanks for having me.
Aaron Moncur:So tell us a little bit about Shapr3D I mean, everyone who listens to this podcast are, they're they're engineers, and most of these engineers know CAD. They work in CAD, whether it's SolidWorks or Creo or NX or whatever. But what? What is Shapr3D.
Istvan Csanady:Yeah, So at Shapr3D, we are working on reimagining what CAD should be in the 21st century, what CAD would be like if it was invented today. So we are reinventing CAD from scratch. We originally started as a as an iPad only application, and then we we added support for Mac OS first and then windows, and just a couple of months ago, we launched our vision pro product. And basically the essence of our product is that we are questioning every aspect of of how CAD works, like how legacy CAD works. And we are, we are trying to find answers that are a better fit for the 21st century, for a modern workflow for companies that are working in a in a in a world that has completely changed compared to the 1990s because traditional cat systems were designed for the workflows of the 1990s obviously, they are doing a fantastic job with that. But we think that there's a there are a lot of ways how CAD could be better and a better fit for for a modern workflow,
Aaron Moncur:What's, what's an example of one of the more modern workflows where you think Shapr3D really shines.
Istvan Csanady:I think if I think of where the gaps are between traditional CAD and how people work today, I think one of the most important aspects is, is mobility, like traditional CAD lacks supports for mobile devices and not I'm not talking about the iPhone, but I'm talking about larger screen devices like an iPad, but also running a traditional CAD system, especially with a larger design, even on a medium tier, higher, higher end laptop can be quite challenging, and that's one of the areas where shaper really, really shines. We run fantastic email even on an iPad. We can load and edit like 10, 15,000 parts even on an iPad. We run really, really well on mobile computers, on laptops. Another key differentiator of our product is that it is a native application, so it is running locally on your devices, and it stores your data locally on your devices, so you don't need to have a network connection to use it, but we are. We have a cloud backend which automatically synchronizes your data across your devices, and that's also the platform for our upcoming collaboration features, where you can easily share design with anyone they don't even have to have shaper installed on their computer. Is they can just open it in a in a web browser and add comments to that design and give you feedback and provide on patience and feedback on that design and and and thanks to our next generation cloud architecture, we are able to do this even in private clouds. So if you are a large enterprise company that has its own clouds, like you have an AWS or an Azure or a Google Cloud back end, we can store all your data there without us being able to access it. So we have all the benefits of the cloud and collaboration without us, like being able to access your data, which is obviously a huge, huge, huge thing for enterprise companies. I think another key differentiator of our product is the native support for Apple vision Pro. And basically what we have seen, we were really, really skeptical about AR and VR, until 612, months ago, when we built a prototype for the Apple vision Pro and we showed it to a few few enterprise customers, and they were just blown away by it. So we decided to actually launch this product and turn this into an actual product. And we are seeing fantastic success with the with the vision pro product, it's a great tool for design reviews collaboration, especially for for remote collaboration. You can have, like, three people in China, three people in the US, and you can have a design review, and you can see each other just like you were there physically in the South. Yeah, and, and, and finally, maybe the one more thing that I would mention as a key differentiator of our product is, is the ease of use. I mean, every, and I hate to talk about this, because this is what every single cat company says that, oh, we are super easy to use. I think we can agree that it's not really true. Like, like, traditional cat is really not very good at accessibility and and ease of use and, and I think what we did with shaper, we made it like truly incredibly accessible and really easy to learn and really hard to forget. So even those users who are maybe lower frequency CAD users can use it really well without having to go to a three weeks long training or a mental training.
Aaron Moncur:It's it's a little bit tough to do this over audio only, without having screens to share, but this is an audio only podcast, so to the best of your ability, or can you share a couple of examples of how Shapr3D is so much easier to use than traditional CAD like, what's, what's the workflow in Shapr3D.
Unknown:The virtual I would say it's very similar to to how you work in a traditional CAD system. It's a 3d parametric CAD system. You have ly sketches, then you apply the 3d operation. So that the workflow, I would say, it's quite familiar to anyone who has who used a 3d parametric CAD system before. And what makes it really, really easy to use is that that there. I think there are two types of complexity. One of them is the complexity that is necessary to provide a complete tool, a workflow, complete tool. And then there is the other type of complexity, which is the best kind of complexity, which is just there because of poor product decisions and and, you know, like, like, ad hoc product decisions, or just lack of Product Strategy and layers and layers and layers and layers of decades of product development, and we remove that completely. So we do have the necessary complexity there, which, like, lets you design something complex in shaper, and it's a parametric CAD system. So it's obviously like the three modeling complexity is there, but the tool itself, that's we really worked a lot on making it as simple as possible and as accessible as possible. And it's not just about UI and UX design, but it's really all like, like, 1000s or like, literally 1000s of small like nuances that, that like that we be improved to reduce the friction in the modeling workflow. And I would say that, obviously we are still not very I want to be, but now I would say that we are getting really, really close to to being, being an almost feature called fully complete Part modeling tool. And by the end of the year, I think most CAD users will feel when they try shape, or most causers will feel that, okay. Now this is something like this is super fast. I can learn this very quickly. I can work in. This, using this tool, like, really, really, really quickly, probably faster than than in my other tool, I would say that we are 90% there, yet there are lots of players, quite a few, like annoying little feature gaps that we are going to close in the coming months, but we are very close.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. That's incredible. I encourage everyone to go out and check out shaper and go through some of their tutorials and look at how simple it is to use I own a business myself, as do you, and so I'm really kind of interested in some of the business aspects of your product. I think that entrepreneurs really at our core. Let me know if you agree with this. We just want to build things that we personally love to use and, and our hope is that enough other people out there also align with with what we love, right? So tell me about your first sale. Like, how did that? How did that happen and, and how did it make you feel,
Unknown:Oh, my first sale. I think I had, actually, I had two first sales. One of them was, one of them was seven years ago, and the other one was a couple of years ago. And the first first sale was when we just launched Shapr3D. It was not really. It was very far from being enterprise ready. We were, in the first few years, we were just focusing on SMBs and and and individuals, actually creative individuals, not even engineering, or nothing even close to engineering, because it was much easier to build a product for that use case first and then a very famous French industrial designer, on the first day when we launched the product, he, he bought the license, and he's, he's, he's amazing, by the way. He's, well, it's Patrick, John. He, we had a customer success story with him on our website. And he's he designed a lot of, like mission star restaurants in Paris, like the street, a lot of the different street furniture in Paris. So he's really, like a top tier designer, and he was just blown away by the product. And he's still a user, and he loves it, and that was a fantastic feeling be I still remember, like, the first time I saw that that purchase, and I checked out the email address, and it's like, Oh, wow.
Aaron Moncur:So you had no idea that he was going to buy it. It's not like this had been set up beforehand, and you let him know, hey, we're launching on this day. Make sure you purchase on this day. It just came through.
Unknown:Oh yeah. I mean, in the first few years, we were fully self service only, and we didn't have a sales team, actually, until a couple of years ago, we didn't have a single sales person. It was just, you go to our website, you swap your credit card, and that's it. Even enterprise customers, that's what we suggested to enterprise customers, because we were just not that the product was not mature enough for larger scale deals. So this is how we scaled the business initially, and then the second, first sale was our first bigger enterprise customer that we signed roughly a couple of years ago. It will be less than a couple of years ago at first like larger scale rollout for significant deal size and and that customer is still in love with the product. Unfortunately, we can't talk about that customer yet, probably early next year. We can, can write a success story about them. But that was, again, like a milestone, and I felt that okay. Now we are on track, like it's, it feels like we cracked enterprise, and now I'm pretty sure that we cracked enterprise, actually, in the last couple of years, we we fully shifted towards enterprise companies, and we have a very, very strong enterprise sales pipeline, and we are working on really large scale deals that we actually even like two or three years ago will be we thought that will take us maybe five more years or 10 more years to get to this scale.
Aaron Moncur:Congratulations. That's so great to hear.
Istvan Csanady:Thank you
Aaron Moncur:So okay, you had these two, these two first sales. I like how you put that and you've been able to scale over the years. Tell me what strategies have you used to scale the your business?
Istvan Csanady:Well, an hour is not going to be enough, so high level, yeah, yeah. Well, so building a product like a like a CAD system is not for the faint hearted. It's really one of the the most complex software out there, and, and, and the market is incredibly well educated about the existing solutions. Everybody. Yeah, like, well, all the potential customers out there already have a CAD system. They are using something it's like, not like that. There are like, 10 million or 20 million more engineers out there who are not yet using CAD and they're just waiting for the right solution. The barrier of entry because of that is extremely high, because you have to reach a certain feature parity with traditional CAT tools that without it, there is, like no workflow that you can actually cover end to end, and then people are just not going to buy so. And because of that, we have to find a niche initially that we can go after and just focus on that and and that niche was, was actually this iPad 3d modeling. And this is how we approach, like, what if we just build a mobile 3d CAD? It shouldn't be, it doesn't have to be feature complete. It doesn't have to be directly like, competitive with a traditional CAD system. But the mobility as a differentiator should be, should be a strong enough differentiator so that we can solve certain problems that traditional CAD cannot solve, for example, designing undergo or taking your CAD with two to the manufacturing shop, where you don't can't take your desktop computer with you, the ease of use, the easy and quick adoption of An iPad app. So, so this is what we were focusing on in the first, first few years. And we really, really focus on lowering the barrier of entry to pad and making it as mobile as possible. And that's helped us get into our first like, 10 million plus annual revenue and and, and that's supported the business in the first few years. And basically that was like, that was our entry point to the market, and from there, we were able to build more and more and more and more and more and more to the product, step by step, so that we could scale into other use cases and find some other niches in other customer segments, first in the in the desktop market, then, using the vision Pro, we managed to build a highly differentiated product that is really like 10 times better than the current VR er solutions out there. Be more accessible so, so I think this was really the key for us to find these initial niches, like really double down on those, and then expand from there. And we are. It's, it's a long, long journey, and and we are. But I think now we are on track to become this, like next generation, disruptive company that is actually going to define the CAD industry for the next few decades, but there's a lot of work ahead of us to get there. Sure it's not going to happen overnight.
Aaron Moncur:Are you as Shapr3D trying to compete directly with the Giants out there, right? SolidWorks and Creo and Onshap, is up and coming? Or is it, is there a different niche that you're still targeting?
Istvan Csanady:I think there is, like, no different niche there, because everybody who needs a CAD system has one already. On the other hand, I don't think that disruptive products directly compete with the incumbents ever? Just not how disruption works typically, I think disruptive companies typically tend to find a way to differentiate themselves in a way that expands their time, their target addressable market. They typically lower the price. They lower the barrier of entry, and that's how they disrupt the incumbents, by building an extremely differentiated, better, faster, cheaper solution. So but I think by if you mean direct competitive, by mid direct competition, if you mean that that are we trying to get to feature parity with with annex or criteria. No, we don't want to do that simply because there is no CAD user in the world that is using like, 100% of annex or CATIA, or any of the incoming solutions. It just like the a lot of stuff that's in there, in those tools, is there because the world was a com what the world was completely different in in 1996 when these tools were defined and, and what we are focusing on is, how did the world change like, what? What are the things that change in the last 30 years that enable us to build a better solution for the needs of today? And, and, if you like, and I think if shipper will will become this industry defining company, then it doesn't mean that that that usually like kill traditional cat systems. It doesn't make any sense to think about a market this way. I don't think it's a it's a zero sum game. It's perfectly fine to become that. Will their their an engineering design or manufacturing company spends 95% of their time in and then, like, if for the remaining 5% they still need this or that tool, that's fine, like, I'm perfectly fine with it, but it's, it's not a zero sum game, and I don't think that we should aim to for feature parity with these, with these tools, I think we should aim for solving the problems that traditional CAD cannot really solve really well, and just double down on that. And there are a lot of problems that traditional cat doesn't solve really well.
Aaron Moncur:I really like how you're thinking about that, not a zero sum game, not necessarily a directly competition, but just trying to solve, solve the problems that engineers are facing. Going back to towards the beginning of your company, when you were focusing on the iPad Pro, you you won an award, actually, from apple, the apple Design Award. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and how, or if that ended up shaping kind of the trajectory or the division for your product.
Unknown:Yeah, it's, we were extremely honored when we when we got the Apple design award. But in terms of, like, customer acquisition, it's not, it's not a major like, it's not a major thing. It's it obviously helps with branding, and it's obviously something that you're extremely proud of. But our audience are typically not Apple fanboys, who are who are following the latest news about Apple and the Apple design of our store, but, but but obviously it's something that you're extremely proud of, because Apple is a company that really, really nailed user experience design, so getting the appreciation of their UX design team, that's a that's that's a big deal, because we're so UX focused, right? So obviously, we're extremely proud of it. But, and actually, it's here in the office. It's when, if you enter the office, it's in a central place. That's the, one of the first things that you you will see when you enter the shaper office. It's, it's basically there are five companies every year, five to five to 10 companies every year that get this of art out of the like 4 million apps in the App Store. Wow. So even because of that, it's a, it's a, it's a pretty big deal. And I think it really helped with setting an even higher bar for ourselves, because, like we can tell ourselves that we are an Apple design of our winning company. We can't afford to release this user experience or like this design like we have to work on this a bit more, and we have to publish it a bit more, and have to push our boundaries a bit more, because we are an Apple design award winning company.
Aaron Moncur:That's great. I love it. Let me take a very short break here and share with everyone that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom pictures, complemented with product design and r&d services. You can learn more at Teampipeline.us The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. Learn more at the wave dot engineer, and we're speaking with Istvan Csanady today. So Istvan, if we talk about the user experience, right, you got this Apple design award because you did such a great job with design and at UX. How have you balanced the need to keep things easy to use while still allowing your users all of the sophistication of modern cad tools? How have you how have you and your team thought about that balance between ease of use and design sophistication?
Istvan Csanady:Well, it's a great question. It's brutally hard, and that's basically the secret sauce of shaper and I, I would say that we still haven't nailed it yet. We still, you know, have the legacy of this SMB prosumer focus from the first few years in the app, and they are still like we still need to add a bit more complexity every week or every two weeks, because we are releasing new versions every two weeks, or new updates every two weeks to the app to uh, to better cater the high end and professional audience and and like, even even in among professionals, um, it's a spectrum. Like a CAD users are on a spectrum like, like, and on one end you have the extremely sophisticated CAD users who know their tool in a. Now, and they are just using their cat system, like, literally 10 hours a day, and then they have, like they didn't know everything about that tool, all the bugs, all the workarounds, everything, and now, step by step, but we are getting closer and closer to that audience now. Serving that audience is extremely hard, because these are the people who will need, like, a magical keyboard shortcut for every teeny, tiny feature they want to customize, everything they want to like, want everything to work the way their old tool works and like not becoming a legacy tool on this journey. It's it's really hard because it's, we have to say no to a lot of, like, a lot of things, and we have to figure out, like, what is the like, the the true shaper way of of doing this or that behavior. But now I was, in the last maybe 18 months, we, I think we, we managed to find this balance to the to the medium sophistication and the low sophistication CAD users. But getting there for the for the for the extreme high end, the hardcore audience of of these legacy tools, it's it's hard, but I think we are getting there probably again. What I can say is, like in six months, we will, we will be much closer to serve even that audience really well. But I would say that right now, they are not our, not our primary users. We are mostly used by medium sophistication or low sophistication CAD users who are like, maybe using CAD like process engineering, for example. That's a that's a major use case for shaper in automotive company, we have large automotive OEM customers using shaper for process engineering. And process engineers very often not. They just don't use CAD, like, eight hours a day. They are using it two times, two hours a week. And, for example, for these kind of users, shippers, already a fantastic tool and and eventually, I think so, answering the original question, it's, it's all about good taste, which, which is, which really, and I don't, I haven't really found like a better like a more analytical method to find a balance between complexity and simplicity. It's really a matter of good taste. And I think what we have to do is you start with something very simple, and you add a little bit more complexity, a little bit more complexity, but only step by step, and then every week, you learn something new. Like we added this tiny bit of complexity here, with this tiny bit of complexity there. Did we screw up the workflow for our existing users? Yes, no. Okay, if we screwed it up, how can we fix it in a way that it's still going to be better, faster for the new targets audience.
Aaron Moncur:I really like that a lot. I think that's a great method or approach. You start with something basic that works really, really, really well, and then you slowly, incrementally layer on sophistication, but not just add the sophistication. You add it, and then you go back and check yourself. Did I screw anything up for my users? Is the workflow still very, very simple, and if yes, great, move on to the next layer. If no, you stop and you rework things. That's a I think that's a really solid, effective approach.
Istvan Csanady:Yeah, I think it's a bit like cooking a big ball of soup and adding salts to it. If you add too much, then you're screwed. Right? Like, you can't, can't remove that. So you, like, you have to be super, super careful and really just add a little sleep at all salt every single time, and then taste it. And if it tastes, if it's still not good enough, you can add a bit more salt, but if you add too much salt, then you are done.
Aaron Moncur:And over time, even though you're just adding a little bit of salt every time, over time, that adds up, right? And all of a sudden, a year from now, two two years from now, you really have made some very significant improvements without messing up your simplicity.
Unknown:Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also extremely hard to estimate what, what, what, what complexity means for certain certain like customer segments or user segments. And something that is very complex for a certain user segment is going to be very basic for another one, and balancing between these, it's also very hard. Like CAD systems tend to be quite horizontal tool, so a process engineer will use the same CAD system as a DFM engineer, right? And because of that, CAD systems have to cater to this really wide spectrum of users. And building a tool like this is really hard to make sure that all of these customers. Segments are happy, and they can use your tool in a frictionless way, and all of them can do their work end to end in your tool.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, of course, a lot of different engineering disciplines could use and find value in Shapr3D. If you had to summarize, what does your ideal customer look like? How would you answer that?
Unknown:Yeah, Now I would say that large enterprise companies, like fortune 500 enterprise companies or companies with at least 10,000 employees, that's where we have been focusing in the last couple of years. But we actually cover the entire spectrum, from three day printing hobbies to to like fortune 10 companies. And we have use cases in design, engineering and manufacturing. In design, we are mostly being used by home appliances companies, consumer electronics companies, mostly for the conceptual design phase and design communication ideation, where, for example, our augmented reality capabilities are really, really strong and and the visualization capabilities of stripper are providing a really quick way to communicate ideas and do design iterations in engineering, I would say that the biggest use case that we are seeing in the last 12 months is Process Engineering at automotive OEMs. We this was a use case that we haven't really foresee, and then an automotive OEM reached out to us that, hey, by the way, we would like to implement Shapr3D for like, 1000 users at our company for process engineering. And we are going to replace a legacy tool, legacy, which is a major, major, we can't talk about it yet, but again, this is a story that we can probably talk about in a few months, and that's that's huge. That's mostly because these users tend to be lower frequency users, so they use cat like two times two hours a week. So an easier to use, easier to learn and harder to forget. Solution is extremely beneficial for their use case. The iPad is a fantastic tool for them to use. Shaper in the factory. In the manufacturing shop, they can use it next to a CNC machine. They can they can take it to the factory. They can do modifications right next to the to the manufacturing equipment real time. Ultimately synchronizes their their changes, back to their desktop computer. They can go back to their desktop computer and continue the design there. So, so it's a it's a fantastic game changer for for for these larger companies and in manufacturing, we see see a lot of fixture use cases. Jake's fixtures shaper is being used by by machinists for designing their own fixtures, because it's so easy to use and it's a it's a great tool for part design, and you can design your own fixtures without having to rely on someone else, which is a major, major time saver.
Aaron Moncur:We have been developing our own software product recently, and wow, it is. It's a product for, I'm going to talk about our product only because it helps me build some context to go back and talk about your product. But it's a product for controlling motion, specifically pneumatic driven motion. So historically, you need to, maybe you need to cycle test something, and you want to use a air actuator, air cylinder, pneumatic actuator, to just, you know, cycle a button, push a button back and forth, or trigger a lever back and forth, 10,000 times whatever. You have to go out and find the different components. You have to make them talk to each other. You have to do some programming. You have to do some wiring, some assembly. And then finally, you know, a week or two weeks later, you have a little cycle test break that you can use. So, so we've built something a little different, where we've pre integrated all of these components, and we've, we've created some software, and the software is just stupid easy to use. Literally, my nine year old daughter could use this software to program fairly sophisticated pneumatic driven motion. And I feel like what we've done is we've we've democratized this ability of creating sophisticated motion using pneumatics. So people like me who know nothing about programming, right? I don't know how to PLC code. I don't know any Python or anything like that now I can, I can create my own programs, and it's really empowering, and it democratizes this skill. And I think what I'm hearing you say is kind of the same thing. So for those, for folks who aren't power CAD users, you know, these are not the. Guys who have been doing it for a decade, and know all the ins and outs these these individuals now can pick up shaperd And very quickly learn the tool and start doing meaningful work without having to spend, you know, a year becoming skilled at a more traditional CAD program. Is that an accurate description?
Unknown:Yeah, I think that actually, to be here is a lotto that we are democratizing CAD or democratizing access to manufacturing data, or three data inside these companies. Yes, that's that's very, very common. I think there is this. We are seeing a strong need at these companies for it kind of feels like that in that meeting the last like, 1020, years or 30 years, the pendulum swing spunk towards our specialization. Like everybody, like, became like, like, extremely specialized in what they do. And then now, obviously, like this has benefits and drawbacks, and now everyone is realizing that all the drawbacks are that we will have a bunch of single point of failure. All the teams will rely on each other. We are creating a bunch of dependencies between 25,000 teams, and that we can't really move forward as quickly as we want to, because everyone is just waiting for someone else, right? So what if we remove those dependencies? What if we empower teams to do more by themselves, without having to wait for each other. And then, then we can move faster forward. What if we remove the friction from the from the communication process, because everyone can easily access the 3d information and can give feedback? What if? What if I can, I can share a design with a single click. And anyone who has Event Browser, they don't have to have a CAD system installed, but they can just have a web browser on their computer. What if anyone can open that web link and can give feedback on that design? How will that change the workflow? And the reality is that the traditional CAD is fantastic for documentation, creating manufacturing documentation that's over the final like 5% of the workflow. But the reality is that 95% of of the time between the idea and the and the part or the design in hand or mass production is spent with something else, which is ideation, conceptual design, exploring different different solutions, communicating, aligning stakeholders, and that's where traditional cat is not really good, because it's not democratic enough. It's not accessible enough, right? And suddenly, when you make make it more accessible, suddenly 95% of their process is going to be way more efficient and way more effective, because you have removed this friction of the like you made, made. Made the entire process more democratic, more inclusive, more accessible.
Aaron Moncur:That makes so much sense. And just listening to you talk about this is getting me more excited about about Shapr3D. So talk a little bit about that transition between you the 95% of the 5% so let's say that an engineer spends some time designing a part or an assembly, a product in shaperd, and then you get to the point where, okay, now it's time to create our manufacturing documentation, 2d drawings, detailed drawings, tolerances, material, call outs, service finishes, things like that. Can Can you do that in shaper 3d or is that the transition? And if so, what does that handoff look like between shaperd and, say, SolidWorks? So
Unknown:You can do most of it in shaper, but especially our drawings module is not as sophisticated as as it's quite complete, but you know, like you can't use, for example, like custom templates and stuff like this. So we are, we have, we have quite a few feature gaps there, in terms of part modeling. We are quite complete. But it's not like when you ask, ask about the handover, it's not, it's never a linear flow. It's not like that. We have the conceptual designers and the design engineers, and they just, like, figure it out, and then when they finish, they hand it over to the FM and oh, now everyone is happy, and the process is over. It's always a back and forth. And the very tight collaboration between like, five different teams, the designers, the engineers, the manufacturers and like, it's a, it's a back and forth between these teams. It's not like that. Oh, we are done with the design. Like, let's hand it over to to the to to manufacturing and and I think that's where shaper really shines, this, this back and forth, that, that, because we are running on Siemens parasolid, we are very well like we are, we can very well handle, like, really large data sets and and really complex CAD data. And we can import seamlessly, like legacy get CAD data, you can open it in shape, or you can, you can edit it in shape. Or we have a really powerful direct modeling. Tool chain. So even if you don't have the feature three of of the design, you can you can edit it, edit your designs in in shaper, and that's extremely powerful. So you don't have to like, like we we see customers, enterprise customers, using especially these higher end tools at an extremely low efficiency, like very often, they are using it through a, you know, through a remote desktop connection. They have a locally hosted server on which they have a remote desktop connection. They have to log into that computer, and then they click, and then they wait three seconds for the remote computer to respond. And this is literally how they are using these, these tools versus the open shaper. And is there because it runs even on your iPad. It runs on any computer you can do like most of your modeling, especially in the exploration and conceptual design phase there. But I would say that we are getting closer to, like, being a completely production, ready, manufacturing ready modeling tool. We are like this, like, super, super close, really, to be there. So you can do like, like, 95% of the work in shipper. And then, of course, when you need to, like, I will not use shipper today for, you know, for preparing a design, for manufacturing 100 million parts, for example. There you need, like, more sophisticated analysis tools. You need more sophisticated you need simulations. You need need a bunch of tools that are just not there in shaper but that's really the final, like 5% when you have the final design, when you, when you, when you aligned all the stakeholders, when everybody was on the same page, and then you decided this is going to be the final product. This is what we are going to sell. This is what we are going to sell, send to manufacturing. That's, that's when you switch to complete that. That's your shaper is out of the game. But, until then, it's an incredibly powerful tool. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense. If you can spend if you're going to be spending 95% of your time doing more like the design phase, the ideation phase, anyway, why not use a tool that makes that phase so much faster and more efficient, and then the last 5% switch over to whatever the other tool is that makes sense to me. Is shaper more useful for trying to think of how to word this, I guess more like product design, consumer product design where you have more organic shapes, versus machine design and fixtures, where everything is kind of blocky, chunky, you know, 90 degree angles everywhere.
Unknown:If you look at consumer products, like most consumer products, are actually not that complex. Because, you know, in the early 2000s we had this trend that finally we had lofts. And g2 lofts in every cat system. Everybody started to design these organic surfaces. Oh, hell yeah, right. Let's, let's make, let's make everything like, super funky. And to be honest, that's a bit over. And no one, no like, there are very few companies that are designing these super funky shapes, or most companies just don't. If you look at most consumer products, they tend to be like fairly simple in terms of geometry, which is not a bad thing, to be honest. It's much closer to my my taste than the 2000s so so we are, I would say that we have some really powerful use cases in consumer product design, but not because we have incredibly sophisticated surface modeling capabilities, but because we are super fast and we are very easy, and you can do design exploration much faster than you can in a traditional CAD system. For example, in our vision pro product, just put on a vision Pro. You have five stakeholders in a room. Everybody puts on their vision pros. And you see that the design in 3d in the front of you with textures and materials. It looks fantastic. And then you can do real time modifications on the design, and change the materials, change the geometry, real time. So now that's incredibly powerful, especially for products where the visual appearance is extremely important. Let it be we see these use cases in automotive as well. Actually, in automotive conceptual design, the vision pro product is resonating incredibly well with automotive companies, with the industrial design teams of automotive companies. But not because we are we have, like alias level surface modeling capabilities, but because the real time modifications and the and the ease of use and the speed is so powerful that's, that's, that's indeed a very important market for us, but, but I would say that the largest. Deals we are. We are making in in more in Process Engineering, for example, that we are, they're extremely excited about that, jigs and fixture design. It's it's a fantastic use case for us as well. So there, I think our differentiators are incredibly powerful, and we can provide a lot of value compared to the traditional tools. And these teams tend to be large, like, like an automotive OEM will have how many, like, 500 or 1000 or 1500 process engineers running their their factories like, it's, it's a it's and the efficiency gains are really well measurable, and we can, like, quantify the ROI on investing in shaper really, really well. So I would say that that's, that's, that's use case that we are really excited about. But we are working with some of the most popular consumer product brands, as well as industrial design and conceptual design.
Aaron Moncur:Great, terrific. Looking ahead over the next, you know, three, four or five years, what? What can we expect to the degree that you're able to share from Shapr3D what? What new features, or, you know, what's in the roadmap?
Unknown:Oh, well, yeah. So, a lot. So we recently added parametric modeling to Shapr3D. We used to be a direct modeling only tool for years, and roughly a year ago, we added parametric modeling to Shapr3D. And there are lots of feature gaps there that we have to have to fill. We are dramatically improving our sketch engine. The sketch rate is going to be way more powerful than it is today. We are adding collaboration at SMDs, first we are adding assemblies, and then we are adding assembly based collaborative editing. So the way we think about collaboration is that we don't really think that that part level collaboration makes any sense. I don't think that anyone wants to work like that. It's like I'd never seen anyone saying that. Oh, it would be so great if the two of us could collaborate in a single part. And I'm moving this hole, and you're moving that hole, and it's going, it's just, that's just not how it works. But I think collaborating on the assembly level, it makes a lot, lot of sense, because that's how engineers work. Because when, when you are working on a large assembly, you will just split it up to 100 different sub assemblies, and you will split the work up between a few engineers, right? And you are going to own these 20 sub assemblies. Someone else is going to do own those 20 sub assembly. So the collaboration on the assembly level, that's the most natural way to approach collaboration in CAD so collaborative editing is coming together with assemblies next year and and this year, we are adding, sharing, commenting and annotation. So with a single click, you can share the design, anyone can annotate on it or give you feedback. And all of this we are implementing on on the top of our private cloud architecture. So this is something that even large enterprise companies can easily roll out without having to be concerned about their data privacy or security, which is fantastic. Actually, this is, I think, one of the, one of the best things that we have ever done with product that we build this private cloud architecture, because we are so easily going through the it checks of these large, large enterprise companies that I couldn't believe it, to be honest, like it's written in a week, we usually get the approval from the IT teams that we can be rolled out. And yes, we are SOC two certified, we are ISO certified, and we have all the certification. But still, I think we are the only vendor in the in the industry that that has a has a cloud architecture that is so seamlessly can be adopted by these large enterprise companies, which is, I think it's truly outstanding. I'm very proud of our engineering team that they came up with this solution
Aaron Moncur:That's amazing. Yeah, wonderful. Okay, Istvan, wow. Thank you so much for sharing all of your time today and sharing about Shapr3D what an exciting, disruptive, innovative product. Is there anything else that you'd like to share? I mean, any last thoughts that you'd like to leave listeners with?
Unknown:Oh, try Shapr3D and give us feedback. There's a there's a lot, lot more that is coming in the next next few years. We love to get user feedback. You can download this from for free, from our website, and you can start playing around with it and let us know what you think and and the I probably. Is that we will do our best to make this tool the best tool for you.
Aaron Moncur:Wonderful. And is there any way for people to get in touch with you? Of course, you're the CEO of the company. You can't field, you know, all these emails. But if people have a legitimate cause to reach out to you, what's the best way to get out
Unknown:of you? Actually, I'm super active in our online communities, and people are very often like, surprised that Oh, like, this is you can be the CEO of the company. Had several debates on our in our online communities that this must be a fake account, because you cannot be the CEO. And actually I am, so I and I spent a lot of time with all of our customers, from 3d printing hobbies to Fortune 10 companies and everything in between. So you can find me in our online communities, and you can also write me an email anytime it's Istvan at Shapr3D.com so it's Istvan at Shapr3D.com.
Aaron Moncur:Wonderful, wonderful. Istvan, congratulations and all the success that you and your company have had, and best of luck moving forward.
Istvan Csanady:Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team with expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and r&d services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening.
