The world’s largest 3D printing community
Thingiverse Labs
A platform too big to move fast got a community surface that ships in days, built by one person on a subdomain.
Thingiverse has millions of makers and a codebase old enough that every good community idea, an events map, a design challenge, a calculator, queued behind platform work measured in quarters. The community kept asking. The roadmap kept not moving.
labs.thingiverse.com: an experiments arm that ships without touching the legacy stack. A live worldwide map of maker events, partner design challenges, a licence wizard, and standalone maker tools, with a public roadmap the community votes on.
- unique visitors in its first 15 measured weeks
- 49,858
- of them to one partner challenge, run with Raspberry Pi
- 16,712
- changes required to the legacy platform
- Zero
The problem
I was CMO of the biggest 3D printing community on the internet, sitting on a backlog of community ideas that everyone agreed were good and nobody could ship. The main platform carried too much legacy to move quickly, and every small idea had to compete with real platform work for the same engineers. The practical effect: the community asked, and nothing appeared.
What I built
Rather than fight the monolith, I went around it. I built Thingiverse Labs myself on a subdomain: a static front end, serverless functions, and a Google Sheets backend the team could edit directly, auto-deploying from main on Vercel. No release train, no dependency on the platform team. An idea went from community suggestion to live URL in days, and the roadmap page takes votes, so the community decides what gets built next.
What happened
In its first fifteen measured weeks Labs drew 49,858 unique visitors and 73,192 pageviews, from a genuinely global audience: the US, Germany, Brazil, the UK, Canada and France lead the table. The biggest single draw was a design challenge run with Raspberry Pi on their Pico silicon, 16,712 visitors and 58 printable entries, followed by the live events map and an IKEA-hacks challenge. All of it shipped without a single change to the legacy platform.
Provenance: Traffic queried against the Vercel Web Analytics API on 2026-08-04, window 22 Apr to 4 Aug 2026. Role from the verified 2026 CV.
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