2023 Company Update

Where have we been?

When we set out on this journey in September 2022, we had 3 goals:

  • Stabilisation and financial reporting
  • Consolidation and organisation
  • Build and grow

We’re really happy to report that phases 1 and 2 worked, and we managed to do a bunch of behind the scenes stuff:

  • Converted a US-based sole trader to a functioning UK business
  • Providing the financial reporting necessary to fulfil our accounting requirements
  • Paying our bills and all sales taxes (including some missed taxes that slipped through the net)
  • Cost optimisations to make sure company wasn’t losing money
  • Update the store language to reduce the amount of customer confusion (“is this a physical model?” anyone?)

We were hoping to move to phase 3 (“build and grow”) within 3 – 6 months, but there were more challenges with stabilisation and organisation than we expected, so we kept focus on making sure both sites were stable, particularly with respect to payments and withdrawals, well into May 2023.

We learned a lot about what’s possible with the platforms over this time. We looked at the survey results we ran back in October, and paid attention to what was being asked of us.

What have we learned?

From the survey we compared your pain points against the features you’d care most to see, and overlapped that with our ability to have an impact.

Your biggest wins and our priorities

Your biggest wins and our priorities

Looking at the outcome of that list showed us that creators’ businesses work similarly to ours when it comes to high-level priorities, and go through a continuous cycle of improvement:

Business improvement cycle

Business improvement cycle

Given that “business” is a common language between us and Creators, we learned that we would like to consider Creators as business partners, rather than clients or customers. This means we’re able to talk more about the impact of changes in business terms.

Building a strategy

The information from the survey expanded our “build and grow” phase beyond its original intention, and we felt it was better to expand this phase out further as its own strategy so we could get feedback and check we were on the right track.

We iterated on this strategy (in presentation form) and then invited some creators to talk to us individually, so we could get some feedback. These creators were picked for their engagement levels – those who had left their email with us in the survey, creators we’d come to know through customer service and Discord, and those who had engaged us directly to ask about our plans.

What’s with the secrecy?

It’s become traditional for tech companies to hold public presentations, to show off what’s coming next and to get people excited about the future. When you hide information behind closed doors, inevitably there’s some questions.

We believe in transparency and don’t want people to be unclear about what’s going on, however perfect transparency to creators and customers also results in perfect transparency to competitors. We’re not arrogant enough to believe our plans are revolutionary or even that we’re that much competition in the market, however, they are our plans and we’ve done a lot of thinking and research around them. Given our position right now and speed of execution, we felt it would be wiser to be cautious until we’ve done some more execution on the strategy. With only two of us, things can take a little longer to get done! Once we’re a little further ahead, we can be more public about what’s coming up.

While there’s much more we’re not openly sharing right now, we wanted to show everyone that we’re very much alive. As we did with Orynt3D, we’ve opened up a public Trello board, so you can see what’s being worked on and at least some of the things that are coming up.

What’s next

We’ve replaced the 3 pillars we started in September 2022 with 3 new ones:

  • Brand strengthening
  • Ecosystem beginnings
  • Business improvements (cost down, revenue up, feedback)

Brand strengthening

We want to focus on the customer experience for both sites, to help drive traffic and a little customer loyalty.

We’re aware MiniHoarder needs some attention, so we’re working through advertising and cross-branding to help that.

We’re also looking to borrow some of the tactics we’ve seen used on Wargaming3D to improve the customer experience. As these things impact creators, we’ll let you know.

Ecosystem beginnings

With two storefronts and a desktop organiser (plus a bunch of contacts in various places), we have a lot of separate things in the 3D printing space right now. We’re going to start bringing these things together, while retaining the customer-facing brands that people know. None of the products and sites are going away, we’re just looking at how we can better integrate them together to improve the overall value proposition of engaging with us as both a creator and a customer.

Business improvements

In September we said that we were able to keep the sites running as they were, which turned out to not quite be true. What we’re unable to do is provide the same level of support and investment if we change nothing. We want this to succeed, for creators and customers, so we are going to continue to look at our own costs, how we generate revenue and what key metrics we’re using to measure “success” to make sure that we can be in this for a good long time.

Special thanks

To everyone who’s engaged with us during the strategy, but also, for everyone who’s stuck by us and supported the decisions we’ve made over the past year. We hope this goes some way to sharing what’s going on, and we’re looking to be more active in public in future. That said, our emails are always open, and we love meeting you, so if you’ve got any questions just hit us up!

Final thoughts

We know everyone would like to see changes and improvements faster (yesterday is ideal, today is tolerable!) – we promise we’re getting there as fast as we’re able.

Check out the Trello board to see what we’re working on and what’s coming next.

PlayablePrints Public ToDo Board

Playable Prints taking over MiniHoarder & Wargaming3D

TL;DR: Playable Prints, a new company, is taking ownership of MiniHoarder and Wargaming3D. Jon is still reachable, but correspondence regarding the sites will go directly to Piete and Steve of Playable Prints. More information below!

From Jon

I realise the communication coming out of both MH and WG3D has dipped significantly in the past several months, and I wanted to take some time to let everyone know what’s going on, where we’re going from here and why. I started MiniHoarder as a way to serve the artistic and gaming communities in the 3D printing space. It was also a bit of an experiment to see what one person could accomplish with fairly limited resources and a dream to help a community that I care deeply about.

In a lot of ways, I’d say it was very successful. MiniHoarder and Wargaming3D currently provide a much needed service for an artistic community that is being taken advantage of in a lot of ways by other services. Over the past couple of years, we’ve helped distribute almost a million dollars worth of models through our support for Patreon and Kickstarter fulfilment, and continue to have a strong customer base.

One thing I did not correctly anticipate was how much time would be needed just to field and address questions and concerns from artists and customers alike once people started using the site. In all honesty, I also had no clue as to the amount of work it would take to build and continue to engage a budding community. Things eventually got to a point where I was not able to spend any time at all on real site development, and instead spent the majority of my time engaging folks and fielding questions from customers and artists. Slowly but surely, the advancements for both sites crawled to a stop.

This is not at all what I wanted (or currently want!) for the sites and communities. I want them to continue to flourish and add services that fill the needs of both the artists, gamers, and 3D printers of the community. The best path forward for that, I believe, is to find some truly unique individuals to lead the charge going forward. Today, I’m beyond excited to announce that those individuals have been found!

Happy Printing!
Jon

Who are Playable Prints?

We are Piete (developer) and Steve (product owner), we’re based in the UK, and you may have run into us if you’ve ever heard of the desktop model organiser Orynt3D (was Envoy – we recommend the prerelease!), built under our other company Hyperrational.

A couple of years back we started Hyperrational as a way of working differently. We saw problems with the ways models were organised and shipped around, so started playing with ideas on providing some tools around that. We caught up with Jon pretty early in both our respective journeys, and we’ve been chatting on and off ever since, looking for a way to help each other out.

We believe in making life easier for people doing great work, and we see ourselves as force multipliers: providing tools and processes to help people do what they do best. Ultimately this goes toward better experiences for customers.

Why is this happening?

If you’ve met Jon, you’ll know that this is an individual who is incredibly generous of spirit. While he wants to be able to give everything back, the laws of physics dictate that there’s only so many hours in a day. He’s worked diligently over the past 2 years or so to build MiniHoarder and take ownership of Wargaming3D in what little spare time he’s had, and now with a new job (congrats Jon!), the laws of physics have finally caught up with him and he could do with some more time back to live his life.

We’ve always wanted to help Jon, not just because of what he’s built, but because of who he is. We were flattered when he reached out to us about the idea of taking on MH and WG3D. It felt like a really good fit for our skills and a great opportunity to get more involved with artists and customers. We wanted to make sure that we had a strong structure to build from, and so Playable Prints was born.

What does this mean for you?

Right now, not a lot!

Both sites will continue to operate as they are for the foreseeable future.

Customer service should continue more or less intact as we continue to pick up the reins. If you’ve reached out to either MH or WG3D over August and September, you may have already run into Piete.

Purchases and payouts will continue to operate as they are, over both sites and we’re not expecting any interruptions while we transition ownership. If there are any issues, do bear with us!

What next?

Jon’s mission was always to focus on serving the artists, and it’s such a huge compliment from him to entrust his hard work to our care.

Step one is very much us making sure things continue to operate as they should, and getting all the financials correct. Given that this is a US-based company moving to the UK, there are some challenges to overcome here!

Step two is a little bit of consolidation and organisation. We want to look at documentation for vendors and customers, but also dig into policies and make sure everything is nicely described.

Step three is where things get a bit more exciting. We have some ideas on what to do next, but we also believe strongly in data driven decision making. You can expect to get updates from us on broad goals and progress, but also surveys to help us explore what’s important to everyone. These will be used to help create and prioritise our roadmap.

We’re so excited about the opportunity to serve this community, both artists and customers.

Got questions?

We’re active in our Discord, but you can also find us with the existing MH and WG3D email addresses and contact forms 🙂

Jon is still around a variety of places and we’re not letting him get too far out of touch, but he’s definitely overdue some rest!

We wish him all the best with the new job, and we’re really looking forward to working with you all!

Happy Thursday,

 – Piete & Steve

Necromancer’s Tower late pledges are live!

Since the close of the campaign we’ve had several people reach out to us to ask if we would be doing late pledges. Well if you’re one of those people or randomly stumbled across this campaign sometime after it finished, I have some good news for you–we are now accepting late pledges through the Top Doug Design store on MiniHoarder! We wanted to make sure that all of our initial backers had access to their rewards before we opened up late pledges, but now that we’ve sent out rewards to our backers, we’re opening it up to late backers.

All of the reward tiers from this campaign will be available on MiniHoarder, but to receive the Stretch Goals you do need to select one of the bundles. For the best deal and access to the exclusive God Titan model, we recommend going with the All In Bundle. Since all of the files are now live on MiniHoarder, if you’re a late Backer you’ll get access to those files immediately! Also, we are offering the late pledges at the Kickstarter price, but for a limited time only! Kickstarter pricing will only be available through May 27th, after that the models will still be available on MiniHoarder but the price will go up to regular retail price.

The Commercial Printing License Add On is also be available through MiniHoarder; these are limited to 10 total, so if you’re interested in selling prints of the models from this campaign you’ll need to pick one of those up asap because once those are gone they’re gone for good!

Fifth Idólion Kickstarter and 6 month Road Map.

Ahoy People

We have our Fifth Kickstarter in Pre-Launch Fase. The Launch of Idólion Merchant Alley is expected next Week.

Our adventure is taken us through the City of Elderheim and will end up in the wilderness.
We will be continuing to switch between a Resin Set and a Pay What You Want Building for the rest of the Elderheim Chapter in our Story.

Elderheim Break Down:

Resin set: Merchant Alley – Launch March – Delivery April

Pay What You Want Building – Modular Merchant House. – Launch April – Delivery May

Resin set: Mayors Office (Set Name might Change) – Launch and Delivery to be announced

Pay What You Want Building – Modular Mayor House. – Launch and Delivery to be announced

Resin set: Through the Gate (Set Name might Change) – Launch and Delivery to be announced

Pay What You Want Building – Modular Gatehouse, Add-ons maybe Walls, Towers. – Launch and Delivery to be announced

Pictures From Merchant Alley:

First Picture of Wine Shop models in Merchant Alley.
First picture of Street Food Seller models in Merchant Alley.

Join our adventure as a Backer on our Fifth Kickstarter Idólion Merchant Alle.

Sail Ho !!

Necromancer’s Tower is live on Kickstarter!

 

After a long time of work and planning the Necromancer’s Tower Kickstarter is live and we hit funding in our first day! This is a collaborative project between Top Doug Design, Bad Tentacles Studio, and Dwarven Palette and will be delivered through the Top Doug Design shop here on MiniHoarder.

This project brings you some of the largest tabletop terrain to incorporate into your own campaigns alongside a variety of undead monstrosities, skeletons and other characters all for the 3D printing enthusiast. Dive into the realm of the Necromancer’s Tower and defeat the hordes of the undead… 

…or raise your own!

Check out this awesome project on Kickstarter!