3DPOD 311: Romain Kidd on Rebuilding Thingiverse From the Inside

The latest episode of 3DPOD, episode 311, is a long conversation with Romain Kidd about the state of Thingiverse six months after MyMiniFactory bought the platform from Ultimaker. Kidd founded MyMiniFactory in 2013, ran it for years, then moved into an operating role at Thingiverse after the acquisition closed in January 2026. The episode, hosted by 3DPOD, covers the practical work of taking a platform many users had written off and trying to rebuild it without repeating the mistakes of its previous owners.

Why MyMiniFactory, Not a Hardware Giant

Kidd's core argument in the episode is that Thingiverse's decline was a management problem, not a technology problem. Under Stratasys and then Ultimaker, the platform was treated as a side project for a hardware company. The team running it was small, the investment was modest, and the feedback loop between the people who owned the site and the people who used it was essentially broken. MyMiniFactory, by contrast, is a content company. Its core business is creator tools and designer marketplaces, not printers. That distinction matters because it changes what success looks like and who is accountable for it.

Kidd said the acquisition had been in discussion for more than eight years before it finally closed. That timeline is worth noting. It means the MyMiniFactory team did not buy Thingiverse on impulse. They watched it go through multiple owners, watched the community erode, and decided there was a specific type of asset there that someone who actually understood content could rebuild.

The SoulCrafted Label and the AI Problem

The episode spends meaningful time on the AI-generated content problem that dominated the conversation around Thingiverse's relaunch. Kidd said the share of AI-generated uploads had risen significantly before the acquisition and that the team moved quickly to get AI content off the homepage. The first visible change was a homepage reset that removed what Kidd called cheap, low-quality automated content from the front page of the site.

MyMiniFactory had already developed a response to this problem on its own platform. They call it SoulCrafted. It is a self-certification program, similar to an organic label, that lets human creators mark their work as genuinely made by a person. The system combines self-certification with human review and community reporting. The team does not rely on automated detection at the mesh level because 3D model classification is still unreliable enough that false positives would damage trust with real creators.

Kidd emphasized that the policy is not a blanket ban on AI-assisted design. Engineering communities that use AI as a design tool may get different treatment than tabletop and art communities. The team wants to be pragmatic rather than ideological, but the default assumption is that Thingiverse is a space for human-made work first.

Monetization Without Breaking the Deal

One of the more delicate topics in the episode is monetization. A large part of Thingiverse's community expects free downloads. Kidd said the team is not changing terms of service or retroactively putting price tags on existing content. What they are doing is building optional monetization tools that creators can choose to use: direct file sales, premium features for verified profiles, subscription-style drops, crowdfunding integrations, sponsorship arrangements, and an ad-free tier. The model is borrowed in part from MyMiniFactory's existing Tribes and Frontiers products, but Kidd said the specifics will depend on what each Thingiverse subcommunity actually wants.

The comparison he draws is to MyMiniFactory's tabletop gaming community, where creators sell bundles and subscription drops successfully. Thingiverse's audience is broader and more engineering-focused. The monetization playbook will not translate exactly. The team is taking a category-by-category approach, starting with five identified segments and building features around those communities before expanding.

A Long Road Back

Kidd was honest in the episode about how much work remains. He set a low initial bar for success: clearly identified categories, a defined roadmap, and new features starting to ship. That is a deliberately modest target for a site with 8 million users and 70 million monthly page views. The message is that the team is prioritizing sequencing over grand announcements, and that the next phase is about execution rather than positioning.

The full episode is available on 3DPOD. For anyone who followed the Thingiverse acquisition when it happened, it is the clearest public look yet at what the new leadership is actually doing with the platform.