"The cost of the hardware needs to be accessible to people," says Schell. "It needs to be a few hundred bucks. Someone who's interested in 3D printing and peripherally aware of it needs to be able to take a chance on that first 3D printer that they're going to buy." From there, Frog helped refine the design in a number of ways. "Their input was, what color scheme do we want, what materials do we want, let's change the curvature on these pieces, let’s alter their aspect ratio a little bit to make it look a little more inviting, all that kind of stuff."

The last factor that New Matter hopes will set the Mod T apart is its design store: an App Store-style market that Frog helped design where users will be able to browse and purchase designs and send them directly to the 3D printer. New Matter believes that a well-designed store full of compelling objects will help convince consumers that a 3D printer is worth having in their homes and also make it a significantly more useful product.

"My belief is that when we have sufficient quality of designs in the store, where people say, ‘That is interesting, that's something I want to print out and give to a friend of mine as a little gift,’ or, 'I want to print it out to have it in my home because it's a compelling design' — that's where we become successful," Schell says. To that end, he’s recruiting designers to submit their work to the store between now and the Mod T’s delivery to backers in early 2015.

It’s a smart plan, but we’re a long ways off from knowing if Frog and New Matter have truly fixed the problem of getting good designs to users. MakerBot already operates its Thingiverse library, and Cubify also has a site full of downloadable designs. While the Micro doesn’t have Wi-Fi, Cubify’s printers do, giving them the similar ability to download and send a design to the printer from a smartphone.

What Schell hopes will set his store apart is an emphasis on curation and tested designs that’ll print reliably each time. "If you look at the majority of 3D printers on the market you really to know what you're doing to make it work," he says. "You need to understand temperature settings and feed rates and slicing parameters … all these things that most people... not only do they not know, but they don't want to know."