DynaBits

DynaBits is now out of business. Read its story, achievements and my personal (bitter) thoughts about this defunct startup.

History

  • 1999/2 Ph. Guglielmetti starts his own business as a consultant for technical software (LabView, Matlab, …)
  • 1999/6 reseller of MSC Working Model (Visual Nastran)
  • 1999/10 first contact with SolidWorks through e-Systems
  • 1999/12 purchase of source code of the “ToolSuite” from ShapeSolve ltd.
  • 2000/3 becomes SolidWorks “Solution Partner”
  • 2000/6 start of development of GeniusWorks.
  • 2000/11 SolidWorks purchases CimLogic and its Toolbox, killing all other partner library products
  • 2001/1 US provisional patent granted on GeniusWorks technology
  • 2001/2 GeniusWorks demonstrated at SolidWorks World in Orlando, FL
  • 2002/2 SolidWorks World Las Vegas, NV
  • 2002/3 DynaBits sàrl incorported. partners : Ph. Guglielmetti, e-Systems and F. Georgeon
  • 2002/10 4 people working full time.
  • 2003/1 SolidWorks now offers ToolBox in their “Office” bundle almost for free.
  • 2003/6 GeniusWorks doesn’t sell. Running out of money, back to the single man-company…
  • 2003/9 SolidSketch released
  • 2004/3 cadML and cadDoc released
  • 2004/3 consulting and development for famous swiss watchmakers
  • 2004/9/1 Business taken over by e-Systems

the Bottom line

Developing CAD add-ins is fun, but definitely doesn’t pay back because:

  • reliability standard is high, so are development and support costs.
  • resellers are not interested in selling add-ins, unless they are required to win a market against a competitor.
  • users don’t purchase, and even don’t search add-ins direct on the internet. If they do, they use your shareware without paying.
  • CAD editors integrate your good ideas (or your competitor’s) in their core product. “Partnerships” are really asymmetric. See some proos below:

Ex-products

  • SolidPlus (2004) (called SolidSketch in 2003) add-ins for SolidWorks : wraps a sketch on a surface (very limited in SW 2004), Multiple sweeps, 3D curve-driven patterns (very limited in SW 2006)
  • Many various Macros for SolidWorks developed over time, often as responses to requests on the comp.cad.solidworks newsgroup.
  • TableWizard Hole Table (1999) 4 years before SolidWorks implemented the same functionality in SW 2004. Is now specialized for watchmakers needs.
  • MathSurf and SketchFile macros to create mathematically defined curves and surfaces
  • Contact macro to keep 2 parts in contact while moving and create a relative position table that can be used for CAM.
  • UltraLight (2001) speeds up work with large assemblies by creating configurations with small features and parts suppressed, and sub-assemblies replaced by “shrink-wrapped” sufaces. SW2003 introduced the “save assembly as surfaces”…
  • GeniusWorX (2001), an intelligent library of standard fasteners with automatic insertion capability based on a much more advanced technology than Toolbox. SW 2006 introduces Smart Components, which can adapt their size to the geometry they’re dragged onto, 4 years after GeniusWorks …
  • GeniusExplorer (2003) a library browser that embeds the feature palette functionality in the feature/property manager. SolidWorks 2005 now offers exactly the same functionality.
  • RedLight (2003), add-in to block rebuilds and account time spent in editing and rebuilding each model. SolidWorks 2005 introduced a way to block assembly rebuilds…
  • Spliner (2003), a SolidWorks to display length of selected segments, curves and edges in the status bar. SolidWorks 2005 has an improved “measurement tool” that offers exactly the same functionality, except that it doesn’t update the length of a spline while being edited, as Spliner does.
  • and much more…

2 Responses to “DynaBits”  

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  1. 1 nick on April 3, 2007 said:

    Interested to read your story about Dynabits.
    SW appears to be an aggressive organisation to try and work with.
    Would you advise people against developing a Gold Partner product at all?
    Or are very specific products OK, and it’s only when a nice, general product that can be integrated into the SW core/suite comes along that SW either buy/copy the technology. I remember PDM Works being a standalone product and one of many basic PDM solutions. I think SW have bought them out and integrated them into the core premium suite. Same with COSMOS. Surely some start ups win?

    PS how easy is it to program actually proper components (e.g. integrated tabs etc.) into the SW environment. I have done plenty of macros and they are easy enough, but have not created proper functionality, menu items, etc. inside the SW window.

    Nick

  2. 2 Dr. Goulu on April 4, 2007 said:

    Well, SW isn’t particularly « aggressive », they just follow their path, and since they’re much heavier than any partner, you might get crushed. But you might also get rich if they decide to purchase your business.
    You’re right about PDM and Cosmos and several other modules such as Toolbox+Hole Wizard : when SW was small, they relied on partners to grow on the market. Now they don’t need partners anymore. Partners need them.

    So my advice if you want to start a « Gold Partner » product would be :

    1. Selling your business to SW (or another CAD company) should be the goal of your business plan

    2. So make your product also for at least another CAD (Inventor).

    3. Direct sales through internet are very marginal. To sell through resellers, you need a very easy to demonstrate product, with a nice documentation and a very simple and reliable licensing system (I work for a reseller now, and licences management has a dramatic cost). You must convince resellers they’ll get easy, recurring money from your product.

    4. Prepare to handle the support yourself, resellers won’t do any (unless your product is in the $5000+ range)

    Technically, it’s not very difficult to make a « simple » add-in with menus and buttons. Events management (notifications) and Propertiy Manager Pages are slightly more difficult. Making a reliable add-in that combines all this and works with all kind of parts (surfaces, imported geometry) and assemblies (lightweight, in-context) or drawings (detached, multisheet…) might become very difficult.
    The main problem with add-ins is error handling : when your macro crashes, 90% of the time you get an error message from VBA, the macro stops and that’s all. When an add-in crashes, it crashes SolidWorks also unless you handle the error explicitely in your code (using try/catch blocks)

    Good luck !


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