MiniHoarder

A cloud based solution with some frontend tooling for organizing  and searching the collection seemed like a good idea. After some poking around, it didn’t seem like there was anything available that met both requirements, so I set out to build one.

At the same time, I also realized that most of the current sites allowing artists to sell their models either had subscription fees associated with them, or took a hefty percentage of the sale, or both. This seemed unfair and like an opportunity to help a community that I really valued.

With that in mind, I decided to build a multi-vendor website that allowed artists to sell their products and keep a large majority of the sale (95%), while also offering collectors a way to manage, organize, and store their vast collections. Thus, MiniHoarder was born.

I spent around two and a half years building MiniHoarder and cultivating the community around it. Through it, I had the chance to meet many wonderful artists and fellow 3D printing enthusiasts, and learned some incredibly valuable lessons in building a product people use. I chose to use WordPress as the basis for the site because it was a framework I was familiar with, and because I wanted to get as much out-of-the-box functionality as quickly as possible so I could focus on the new parts, and see if I actually had something worth continuing.

Along the way, I ended up taking the reigns of another popular site, Wargaming3D, which had been going strong for several years. Eventually, I felt like my ability to help the sites progress had run its course, and I found some colleagues that were interested in trying to pick up where I left off. Fortunately, both sites remain operational to this day.