| Agree with the fundamental premise of the article. We started Thangs.com to allow for actual 3D search, eg. search by uploading a 3D cylinder and find other cylinders as well as engines it fits within. The growth has been mostly quite strong since we launched a year ago, but it’s a very capital intensive product to build - massive volumes of data. Our monetization strategy is to skip the ads and instead use our 3D indexing to allow us to build a 3D, visual, revision control system - also free. However, we plan to charge enterprises for the standard advanced SaaS capabilities - which we then integrate with our current enterprise product. We have a single tenant 3D search product that is doing well in enterprise, without the revision control capabilities yet integrated. Beyond search and reuse, there are massive opportunities in supply chain and many other valuable problem categories where true geometric search is a uniquely valuable solution. It’s not always the case that ads and web3 principles are required to build commercially viable, yet somewhat narrow search products. The world of search is large and there is ample room for commercially viable specialization. |