Issue #1,110 | Inside the Business of CAD | 25 October 2021
We’re all too familiar with big-spending CAD vendors like Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, and Siemens and their millions of users. We might even have some familiarity with smaller CAD vendors, who are content to serve tens of thousands of customers.
Then there’s a class of CAD vendor that never made it big – or at all. For instance, the years 2012 to 2014 were the start of a fresh era that saw the birth of a brand-new style of design software: collaborative, cloud-based CAD.
Companies had names like Onshape, sunglass.io, TinkerCAD, and To3D. All took advantage of the power granted by then-new WebGL and JavaScript APIs that made interactive 3D CAD graphics possible in Web browsers. None did well.
One that you may not have heard of is SolidFace. (See figure below.)
I was alerted to this MCAD vendor when a reader told me of the company’s odd condition for getting their free 30-day demo: before downloading, you need to provide a credit card number.
Typically, demo software simply de-activates after 30 days or significantly cripples the available functions. What isn’t immediately apparent is that downloading SolidFace represents acceptance by the potential customer of the software’s terms and conditions, a link to which is alluded to during the download process. Within those terms is a paragraph revealing that using the software past the 30-day demo period incurs a monthly charge.
Searching around, I found others caught off guard by the company’s terms. In online forums like Reddit, SourceForge, TrustPilot, and Better Business Bureau and as recently as in May of this year, users complained of credit cards being charged for amounts ranging from $65 to $89. Said one complainant, “I requested a refund and they said it would take 1-3 months for it to be processed due to the COVID situation.”
The Many Pivots of SolidFace
Curious, I spent two weeks digging deeper. The history of SolidFace appears to have begun in 1994 with the launch of a Brazilian 2D CAD program named UniCAD. Over its life, it gained 4,000 customers, primarily in Latin America. According to tech startup community site F6S, SolidFace co-founder Oscar Leite spent more than 20 years at UniCAD before exiting the company in 2008 with $2.8 million. He describes himself as a back-end programmer and UI/UX designer, obtaining his university training in Germany
In 2013, Mr Leite formed SolidFace with Rafael Lima, according to Linked-In. Mr Lima, then 28, had spent his first post-university years dabbling in Bitcoin mining. “During the dark days of BTC [bitcoin] as a younger, savvy tech teenager, I was looking for something different to do with my computers and found BTC in the corners of the Web or dark-Web,” Mr Leite wrote on Linked-In.
The idea developed by Messrs Leite and Lima was to release a collaborative 3D parametric CAD program by combining Mr Lima’s knowledge of bitcoin mining with Mr Leite’s CAD experience. The program would be free of charge, making money through the novel idea of mining bitcoins in the background on the computers of SolidFace customers, with their permission. According to Austin Business Journal, the company could make 4 cents/minute per user through this technique.
At the time, Mr Leite described the new software as “Google Docs for 3D models”, even though SolidFace would run on the desktop, save files to the desktop (for intellectual property protection), and use the cloud to store files and to collaborate. Today, this hybrid approach is common among CAD programs.
According to its Tumblr account, the company spent $2.5 million developing SolidFace, releasing the first beta version in the middle of 2012.
By 2014, the company was working to attract dealers and looking to advertise in publications, such as upFront.eZine. Potential dealers were told, “SolidFace’s growth is in the mid-range CAD market. SolidFace is fully compatible with SolidWorks, Solid-Edge, AutoCad and others through SIEMENS-Parasolid core. The core also allows us to use full 3D modeling power.”
An overseas dealer approached by SolidFace told me, “I tried SolidFace once. For me it wasn’t worth the extra learning curve compared to Rhino and BricsCAD, and also no money in it as far as I could see.”
Pivot to Solid Share
Nor was SolidFace itself making enough money: “Bootstrapping both of our CAD companies, UniCAD and SolidFace, has proven to be a significant challenge. During this period we’ve invested over $1.5 million in research and development...” So in 2015, the company pivoted to services by launching a Kickstarter campaign for Solid Share.
Solid Share was to be a 3D printing, scanning, and modeling service that used SolidFace as the CAD engine. Users would design models with the CAD program for free, and I presume Solid Share would collect a fee on the services accessed by customers.
The campaign failed, raising just US$1,823 toward its US$385,000 goal. (See figure below.)
That same year, the company took a stab at selling SolidFace 2015 through Steam, the online computer games portal. For the first and only time, pricing was on a non-rental basis; the student version went for US$199, while commercial versions seemed to range in price from US$500 to $1,000. This sales channel fell through after the company decided the software was “considered not profitable enough to warrant bringing [version] 2016 to Steam.”
By 2017, SolidFace had sold just 600 licenses. Of these, 100 were paid for by bitcoin mining, making the company $1,400 a month, according to the Austin Business Journal. The non-mining version was $29.99/month.
The same year, the company looked to raise $500,000 as a seed round. According to CrunchBase, it landed $50,000 from four venture capital funds, lead by growth accelerator firm Turn8. (See figure below.) I contacted Turn8 about the investment, but received no reply.
Pivot to Solid Network
In either 2018 or 2019, Messers Leite and Lima formed Solid Network for distributing software packages. “We partner with software companies to distribute their software for free in our marketplace using their user’s hardware (GPU) to monetize it while the device is online,” Solid Networks reported on its Linked-In page. I found a solidnetwork.com domain, which appears to have been set up in early 2020, and today resolves to an empty placeholder site.
I contacted Mr Leite about the software, but received no reply. I wrote to SolidFace company, and also received no reply. The SolidFace Web site still lives today. (See figure below.)
The site offers these software packages:
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SolidFace PTV — 2D CAD at $89 per quarter with “30 days free and cancel anytime.”
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SolidFace 3D Pro — 3D modeler at US$129 per month and listed as “coming soon.”
That the 3D version is not available could perhaps be due to this possibility: I speculate that the firm could no longer afford to pay Parasolid’s royalties.
While the company’s software does not seem to have found success in the marketplace, the training materials it provides are very good. There are lots of 2D and 3D tutorial videos on Youtube (some of which which I watched) and the user manual (which I skimmed) is well written. The most recent video was posted in July of this year.
To test SolidFace, I downloaded a 2015 version from C|Net, installed it in Windows 10 Sandbox, but it did not run. So, I cannot attest to its abilities, but in videos it appears to have supported advanced functions like parametrics.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
The story of SolidFace is a remarkable one, as two founders, flush with cash and full of ideas, launch a CAD program, and then pivot repeatedly in multiple attempts to succeed.
As the founders of Onshape, sunglass.io, TinkerCAD, and To3D discovered, launching a MCAD program as new does not predict success.
Onshape, for example, spent $100 million on development to gain just 5,000 paying customers, and then sold itself to PTC. Sunglass.io was acquired by Wikineering, a engineering knowledge sharing platform. TinkerCAD sold itself to Autodesk just as it was running out of funds. To3D, as best as I can determine, disappeared.
[This article first appeared in Design Engineering magazine and is reprinted with permission.]
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And in Other News
Virtual reality/augmented reality metaverses are bound for failure with consumers, because VR/AR demands increased inconvenience, the face goggle. Consumers don’t do inconvenience. Smartphones replaced digital cameras slung around the neck not because they were better, but because they were more convenient.
VR/AR does have a niche in environments in which inconvenience is expected, such as with safety gear in workplaces, or spending what it takes to get an edge in gaming.
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TestFit is algorithmic configuration software for optimizing the design of “commodity buildings” — like apartments, offices, hotels, industrial buildings, and parking structures — during the feasibility phase, which I wrote about in upfrontezine.com/2020/02/upf-1040.html. The software is now integrated with Enscape for real-time visualizations; TestFit in turn is Enscape’s first SDK partner. More info from testfit.io/lp-enscape-in-testfit/.
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EnSuite-Cloud ReVue from CCE always has been a Web-based viewer of 3D models, and now the software has taken its first step into the realm of 2D.
The first to be supported are CATIA V5 2D Drawing viewables, with 2D drawings from Solidworks and NX coming in the next few months. You can try it out free for 15 days at viewer.cadcam-e.com/EnSuite-Cloud/Login/index.html.
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Matrox celebrates 45 years in the business, having been launched in 1976 with the VideoRAM alphanumeric display controller as its first product. In 1979, the Canadian firm released the first ever video board to handle four monitors. More on the history of the longest-lasting graphics hardware company in the world at matrox.com/en/corporate/history-of-innovation.
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CIMdata reports that “…with free registration to Autodesk University’s virtual live content and streaming sessions, they expected over 100,000 global participants. According to Autodesk, the first three days attendees watched more than 51,000 hours of content.”
Notable Quotable
“We need to find an emotion that hasn’t been hijacked by one of the big brands.”
- Management Speak
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