graswald’s Julius Harling on expanding access to 3D art

Today, we’re talking to Julius Harling, founder of graswald, a startup that is giving companies the tools to create and scale their own 3D models from videos. From his initial idea at the age of 15, graswald has grown into a groundbreaking venture, and his work has been seen in adverts, video games, and architectural plans. Today, Julius reflects on his entrepreneurial journey,? his leadership style, and the lessons he has learned through the cultivation of a "no ego zone" within his team. Join us as we explore the 3D world of graswald and find out what the future holds for Julius and his team.?

Robin: I heard that you started your company while you were doing your Abitur, is that right?

Julius Harling: Yes, more or less. Well, to be fair I started a little earlier, when I was 15 while I was in Canada for 6 months. During this time, I didn’t have many things to do. We had four classes every day and two of them were vocal music and design, and in my design class, I was the only one using a computer while everyone else was just drawing. That gave me a lot of time to learn the ins and outs of 3D and create the first professional 3D projects. I shared my work online, and got some really exciting feedback from people asking ‘Hey, can we download this or can we buy this?’ and I thought that was a really good idea. So that's how I started building.

So you started when you were 15 - that's when the idea came - and then it became bigger and bigger over the years?

Yeah, I mean when I was 15 I just wanted to build something cool - and that's still my main motivation. But I also wanted to make a little bit of money because people close to me were saying things like, “You’re just sitting in front of the computer all the time, why don't you get a real job?”. Other people had just started commercializing 3D tooling and building products for 3D. Back then, while there was a huge nerd community, 3D products were in no way commercialized. It was a very artist-focused kind of place and for the free tool Blender, which is where I started, I was one of the first people who started selling stuff. It was a big deal, and it was quite controversial. People were saying “This is an open-source software - why are you selling this stuff?”, “It should be free” etc. but at the same time, there were a lot of people who were interested in the product. So I just started showing my work and getting feedback from people online, and then I? released the first version of graswald. Ultimately, I was hoping to get $1000 by the end of the year to buy myself a decent workstation because I was doing everything on a really bad, old Acer laptop that was almost falling apart. It was terrible for 3D work. And then I made over $20,000 in the first month. And we were selling these things for $50-60 per package.

Then I did my Abitur and hit the pause button a bit - I did continue working on it but it wasn’t my main focus. And then when I graduated, I wasn't sure what to do. I still had no idea about building a business, or anything like that - I just wanted to build something cool that people could use. At the time, I never really wanted to become a founder, but I did want to do something creative. I almost started studying classical music to become an opera singer, I was doing a lot of music - and I still do - but then I learned about startups. Someone told me, look - you want to build this out a little bigger. You need some money to do this. You might not want to invest your own money. You might want to get people to invest in the company. And I thought that sounded like a smart idea. So that's the first ‘touch point’ I had with the startup world and then from there, things got more serious. I figured out more and more on how to handle the business side of things and now we're here.

Tell me about that moment when you first got 20K in your PayPal account – what was that like for you?

Yeah, funnily enough, it wasn't my PayPal account because I was too young to legally own a PayPal account. So it was my dad's family account. I didn't understand what was going on back then. I just thought okay, that's a big number. Wow.?

I thought there’s some money to be made here and that's interesting but what excited me the most was essentially seeing what people did with the stuff I was building - that people liked it, and that they were able to solve some problems. Seeing people use it and all the different things they did with it and still do... I think that has been the main driver and that's exciting.

Could you give me some examples of what people were using it for that maybe you hadn't expected?

I mean people have been using it for a lot of different things and the product has changed quite a bit. In the beginning, people started using it for architecture visualization scenes, for sci-fi - I think there was one person who built a crazy spaceship and in the spaceship, there were natural hubs and vegetation from Earth- and then people started using it for scientific visualizations for an art magazine. But I think the most exciting thing was that back then,? in the beginning, especially, I was selling things over Marketplace and of course had no idea about marketing, sales, or customer relationships and so on,? and had no idea that people were using our tool. But from time to time, I would come across something and see that it was a tree model that we made. And then, for example, there was this one trailer for a video game, but that was done by Amazon games that got millions of views and I watched it, and only then did I realize - they're using our stuff. And there were quite a few situations where I discovered our work by accident, and that was amazing.

You've talked a lot about kind of making it up as you’ve gone along and learning as you go – what do you think is the biggest strength in doing that?

I honestly don't know - I will probably be able to talk more about this in 10 years or so. There's this one really funny quote and a lot of different founders I've met have been saying this as well: it’s the founder's naivety. I think it was the CEO of NVIDIA being asked if he had advice for his younger self. His advice was: Don't do it. It's just so hard, and given the chance again, he wouldn’t have founded the company. But if I’m honest, not having a clear plan when I started in terms of where I wanted this journey to go was a good thing. I think I know much more now. While it has been changing the last few years, when I first started I had no idea what was coming, and knowing what’s coming can be quite scary, so if you only see the next few steps, that’s something you can handle.

Additionally, there are downsides and upsides of not having experience when starting. I think it gives you quite a free mind and a very focused one at the same time which allows you to really focus on problems and how to solve them and not so much on which tech stack are we using here, what are our best practices, etc. So I think it also makes you more flexible, in terms of moving around and following the right ideas and solutions because you don't have this big ego of knowing how everything works and that your ideas are the best - which I think can kill, and does kill, a lot of startups because people are just too proud of their ideas.

My network has also been quite small since the beginning. There are still a few things almost every week that I’m doing that I’ve never done before, and I don’t have a lot of references on how to do them. Having said that, I believe that this is the same for every founder, regardless of their age or experience – it's a new journey every time you do something as a founder, even if you've done it before and as part of a big team. The main difference I feel is that I've never done anything as part of a big team.

Could you please explain how graswald works and what problem it's solving for some of your customers? What's the niche? What’s it doing? How does it work?

What graswald does is enable 3D as a medium for everyone. I think 3D is a really exciting medium. I strongly believe 3D is the next generation of how we communicate. The information density is super high; it's the closest thing we have to interacting in real life, and I think it bridges the gap perfectly between - when it's done well - between the virtual world and the physical one. However, 3D is (admittedly) super hard and has been since its beginning. There haven't been a lot of changes in how 3D is done. It's a very manual task. It's a very labor-intensive task.

There’s a reason why it’s called a 3D Artist. It’s a craft at the moment. It's a lot about self-expression and storytelling but it's also a lot about just moving pixels around in a very complicated matter and that means that a lot of people can't use and work with 3D. However the demand for 3D is growing so strongly right now and has been over the last years and yet, the way we do it just doesn't scale. It's super expensive, you always need external studios and agencies and specialists to work with and we're trying to solve this problem.?

We started solving these problems for 3D specialists, which allowed them to focus on the storytelling and the creative vision and not so much on manually moving pixels around and all the manual stuff - and now, we're solving this problem for big enterprises in the eCommerce space. This means getting their content into the 3D world completely on scale and allowing them to leverage having a 3D digital twin to create a lot more content from it. Essentially, they’re using 3D visualizations on their store to allow people to interact and engage with the product, which has a huge impact on how much they buy (it improves conversion rates, reduces the refunds very drastically, increases average shopping value on the card, and so on).

It also allows them to build more content that so far could only be done in a physical studio - like product photography or 360 videos with animations or cutouts that you use for your store. So essentially, with our platform, companies can reshoot anything from anywhere, and in theory, this can be done by an intern. You don't need a special setup. If you have 500,000 products, you can't send every single one to an agency to take photos – it would cost millions. But with our tool, you have all these products in 3D and then you can just create a template of one of these objects and what it should look like and then you just let it render through all of them. And once the calculation is done, you have all of the input.

So how is your approach different from what people do in the studio?

What we're essentially doing here is digitizing the entire process, allowing brands to do it themselves. All you need with the tooling that we provide is a video of your object that you can just take with your phone which you then upload and then we essentially do all the work. It's harder to explain this than to show an input video and output 3D model, but essentially the video gets reconstructed and then we use a very innovative AI technology called ‘Gaussian Splatting’ where we essentially train the shape of the points in the point Cloud until it resembles the input images from the video. And then we do this for every single camera position and then we get a photo-realistic 3D model out of this; we detect the model automatically, we mask it out and once we have the whole scene in theory, we can get a full real estate 3D model right out of the box. All you need is a video.

And then in comparison to how studios do this right now; now, depending on what the company does they send some images, they send some materials, they send some input to the 3D studio. Then, the studio tries to essentially put them on the screen and then takes a 3D artist who sits down and models this by hand - drawing it from all sides until it looks like this or that, and then they have the general shape. Then, the studio will try to put textures on it so they go through some online library or they have to generate textures themselves. This costs up to €4,000 per 3D object and it takes a couple of days.?

The other alternative is that the company sends the product over to the studio where they unbox it and they have very elaborate systems such as a technology called photogrammetry to create a raw base scan out of the product. But even then there needs to be a 3D artist who then cleans up the 3D images manually, adjusts them, and creates the kind of structure that works for the website. It’s very time-consuming. With our service, you essentially take a video within five minutes, you upload it and then it gets processed and you get the result directly.

All you need is a quick capture that can be done anywhere. This could be done directly in the warehouse. We don't need it to be done on any special equipment. You can just use your phone and that's it - you upload it and we essentially run it through a pipeline and then you can use this within our platform and use it for AR, or to create further 2D or 3D content.

What does graswald look like five years from now?

That's a good question and I'm already scared of looking back at my answer in five years. I do strongly believe that 3D is the next big medium. I do believe that to make this a reality and see the positive impacts of having more information in a more engaging way than just with a photo video or text you (first of all) need a lot of content and you also need (to find) a way to on the one hand scale this up for a big companies and also to use it and interact with it like a ‘normal’ person. And what we want to do is we want to build the foundational structure and tooling for this.? At the moment, there are very, very complicated tools that no one who hasn't had years of training can use, but there is no ‘Simple Solution’ for interacting and creating with 3D - and that's what we want to do.?

There are lots of things and use cases where this is required and where it can grow from our experience building solutions for 3D Artists. We already had and still have a super diverse user base from a lot of different angles and what we want to build is an industry-agnostic tool like Canva. We're essentially building the Canva for 3D - making 3D creation easy with templates and setups to both automate and scale even if you've never worked with 3D before.

Do you personally believe that the Metaverse will become as big as Meta is trying to make it?

I don't want to judge what Meta has been doing. I think the Metaverse itself as a term is quite misleading and it ignores the reality of how we work and live right now I don't necessarily think that we're just gonna have some weird bodysuits and just lay in our bed and everything else is going to be in virtual space? I do believe 3D is the medium that can enrich our lives; enrich our work lives and our personal lives very dramatically probably more than other mediums because it's so engaging and we're a very visual species as humans.?

The Metaverse has this idea of everything becoming a virtual reality and, as I mentioned before, I do believe that it's just a matter of how we access and interact with this 3D data. Is it VR, is it AR, or is it something else? I think that the virtual-only-reality might be a case for entertainment and maybe collaborative working to some degree. But in general, I think the future of 3D is not condemned to the Metaverse and these super isolated hyper, fantasized big worlds - where's the value there? Why would I go there? What's the point? - but rather, it's about solving hard problems that right now are super expensive.?

Take what we're doing in eCommerce - there are so many things where 3D as a medium can create more enticing, more impactful stories and communication strategies - regardless of how people experience it. And while I do believe we will be seeing increasing interest towards the more immersive side - including hardware, like the Apple Vision Pro or other spatial computing slash AR/VR headsets- I think it's more like an additional type of accessibility that we can use to communicate more effectively.

I've got one more question about graswald – how are you currently making money with your product?

We’re pre-revenue at the moment as we've been focusing on building a really big community - we've gotten over 170,000 sign-ups in the last one and a half years and that’s happened completely organically. Our marketing spend was zero most of the time. People are just really excited about what we're doing and there is this really strong sense of community in the 3D space because it originated from this big nerd space.

But what we are essentially doing right now is allowing brands to use 3D on scale. A lot of brands are trying out 3D at the moment: they might be digitizing five to six products and then say, okay, it's too expensive but I have 500,000 SKUs or products right now. So how do I do this? This is essentially where we come in and where we allow them to save a lot of money: save costs on the production process, save a lot of time, but also become more profitable by leveraging 3D as a medium to increase conversion rates drastically - 30 or 40 percent on average - and drastically reduce refunds, which is a huge thing for the eCommerce at the moment.

Do you currently have a seller's platform, or is that in the works?

Yes, we're rolling it out right now to the first big pilot companies. I can't say too much yet about them, but I'm excited about the brands we’re working with.

Do you think that you might launch into other applications??

The technology is not a foundational model that we're training on specific categories, but because it works with real data, it works for almost any object or even entire scenes. We do believe that from where we're starting with product visualization it's going to be possible and relatively easy to expand into more applications.

What’s to stop somebody else from building what you have?

I think that’s a question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now because we're seeing technology becoming more accessible than ever before. Even huge companies, like Open AI or Google for that matter are being outperformed in certain ways by open-source technologies.?

I do believe what's important is focusing on problems that are really really hard to solve - and which, when solved, have a big impact instead of trying to build shiny technology.?

We've seen startups that have been funded with millions of dollars being outperformed by universities around the world who are researching the same thing and have more resources in sum, even compared to a hundred million funded company. I think it's really about knowing your users, knowing the problems, and then being good at understanding what the actual solutions are; understanding what makes a good product, and then delivering on that because there are no shortcuts here. In my opinion, this takes a lot of work along with continuous understanding and iterating and improving.

That's really where the value is. It's not about what technology you use and what is hard to replicate but it's really where you can provide the most value which I think is what companies in the end are all about or should be at least.

How many are you on the team right now?

We're a small team of about 10 people right now. When I started, I only knew a couple of artists. And so for me, actually building a really good team has been one of the main learnings and main goals of this journey. I'm incredibly thankful and happy, I think our team is amazing.?

This last question is about your ‘no ego’ zone policy. Was this your idea? And how does it work?

I hope to think it’s a widely adapted concept. It’s about acknowledging that people are very emotional beings and that they often talk about or worry about things that have nothing to do with solving the problem. I really love the book Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, who's the founder of Pixar. He is one of the heroes of 3D artists because he wrote most of the early 3D tools from scratch. He's also a great leader and talks a lot about culture and creative places. I noticed this in my journey as a founder myself, we are so often limited by our fears, our emotions, our worries… and most of the time we don't even notice. That's a big problem because we start making stupid decisions, hurting people, and avoiding the harder path - the right one - because we’re afraid.

I think most people are not even aware of this because we're good at finding logical reasons for very illogical feelings and problems. But that doesn't lead to good results. What I noticed in my own journey is that it’s good to acknowledge when you don’t know what the right solution is. It’s good to be open and transparent about how you feel because you can bring this into the open and take the ego out of finding a solution. It's about being very self-reflective, reflecting on your feelings, and then being very vulnerable within your team and with anyone you meet as much as you can. I try to support and foster this approach throughout the company and in all of my interactions. In the end, it leads to a higher quality of life and faster self-growth, and, equally important, it adds value.

Thank you, Julius, I'm really excited about your journey.?

Thank you so much for the time, it was a pleasure!