A lot of creators are looking to buy complete environments where they can just drag and drop in order to quickly and cheaply create VR experiences. Do you see asset purchasing being part of the Sketchfab process in the future?

AD: For now we have stayed away from the asset store concept, and we have partnered with most of the asset stores. We are integrated with the Unity asset store for example. And so someone who wants to sell assets there is going to list it at the Unity store and is going to upload it on Sketchfab, and this way can embed a 3D preview in the store, and also generate leads from Sketchfab. People will discover the work on Sketchfab and then if they want to buy assets, they can go to the Unity Asset store. It’s a bit like on Soundcloud: some tracks are available for sale through itunes. We don’t exclude moving in that direction in the future.

I think there is possibly a bigger opportunity around monetizing the viewing of the content. Almost like what other music services started doing like Spotify or Soundcloud. Once they reached a critical mass, they switched part of their content to premium and so all the free content is free to browse, and ad supported. And the premium content is ad free and you needed to be a paying member to browse it. And so I see an opportunity around that, where most of our content would be free to browse and possibly ad supported while some of it would be longer form like — higher resolution, like a private collection from the a museum and you would have to be a paying member to be able to browse it.

What has your experience been like with investors, with the series of funding? Founding the company, explaining to investors, what was that like?

AD: It depends on the stage of the company, each round is different. We started in France, we were first time Entrepreneurs and we were very early with a very frontier technology. We did not have a specific business model and so it was pretty hard back then to pitch the concept and explain why it would matter.

The great thing about France is that when you leave your job, when you are unemployed, you are able to keep receiving your salary for almost two years. As a subsidy from the government and that’s how a lot of entrepreneurs bootstrap their company. And so when we started Sketchfab, we bootstrapped for one year out of that money.

Another company started at about the same time as us. They were out of Stanford or MIT or something like that. They raised two million in Silicon Valley, and they spent that money building lots of features and hiring lots of people.

At the end of the year, we had spent no money at all, and we grew 10x faster than they did. Because our product was much simpler with much less features because we had no money to build 10,000 features.

It is never as simple as that but it is also good to be limited in budget at the beginning, as it forces you to focus on what matters. I think someone who starts in France can build as much as someone who starts in the US with one less zero funding. So with 300k in France you can build as much as with 3 million in the US.

I know you have learned a lot of lessons in all the years that you have been growing and building. What are some core lessons that you think other people could use?

AD: I think one of the core lessons is to do less things but do them better. When you just start you have a tendency to try and do everything you can and — to do every user requests and I think you should focus on only one thing but do it very well. And instead of doing 10 or 100 mediocre things you should just really focus on this one thing.

“I think one of the core lessons is to do less things but do them better.”

We have always focused on displaying a 3D file as well and as fast as we could in a browser, so we always said no to features like 3D printing, marketplace… And we became very good at that because we were only doing that.

“We became very good at that because we were only doing that.”

I think the other key lesson is to figure out distribution of your product very early on. There is a tendency to think that if you have an awesome product users are going to come to you naturally and it’s going to work out just because you have an awesome product, but it never works out this way.

So you need to figure out scalable ways to distribute your product and have people discover it. For us it was to get integrated into creations tools. Getting in blender or Photoshop means those tools are going to tell their users about Sketchfab which means they are doing the work of distributing our product to their users, which is much more efficient than us trying to do that.

THE FUTURE!

Where do we see Sketchfab going in the future?

AD: We see a future where everybody is becoming a 3D creator and a 3D consumer. We started in a very B2B world of professional 3D designers, and it was very niche.

We see a future where Sketchfab can be a consumer platform just like YouTube or Soundcloud, where a lot of people share their 3D captures or 3D creations. On Sketchfab you will find the long tail of content made by normal people and then we will also host the high level and high value content coming from movie studios, consumer brands and game studios. YouTube started as a service for individuals and then brands realized that it was an awesome marketing vehicle for them.

We see a future where, when Tesla releases a new car, they will tease it on YouTube as usual, and will also release a virtual version of it on Sketchfab. Every brand will have a channel to unveil what they are working on.

It will be a platform where both individuals and companies meet to share and experience virtual things.

“It will be a platform where both individuals and companies meet to share and experience virtual things.”

You can follow Alban or Sketchfab on Twitter @albn or @Sketchfab