????What the beginnings of a good VR application looks like??????

Making something that people love is hard...really hard. You have to look past the hype, the pre-rehearsed pitch, and get to the heart of WHY it deserves to exist, for whom and what form it should take. And when you meet a founder who has this deep conviction and who has been building and iterating on the idea for several years, you back them to the hilt and try to remove any roadblocks they run into on their mission.? This is the story of one such founder-Inga. Thanks for the opportunity to be a part of your story. We at Meta are grateful to support Shapes’ journey from day 1.?

Inga has been on this journey for 4 long years, never once giving up on her mission to make 3D design better. About a year ago we started jamming on the idea of how to use the superpowers of VR to make 3D design more intuitive, collaborative and easy for designers. We asked the question what would Figma or Adobe for design, made and born in VR look like? The result is?ShapesXR which launched on the Oculus VR store last week. Charlie Fink announced the Shapes launch here.

Product launches can be giddy, exciting moments. Press releases, awards, PR are all great for a startup. ShapesXR won the Auggies for the best collaboration tool at AWE 2021. As an aside, the picture below also features Jonathan Gagne, the formidable founder of MasterpieceVR who won the Auggies for the best creator tool. Both these founders edged out design and creator tools from established players like Snap and Adobe.

But the ultimate signal of whether your product is useful comes from people you built it for; will they use it? What are they doing inside the product while they are there? Are the core engagement loops working? How do they feel about the experience??

And all of this happens after the dust settles, the initial launch bump ends and tech twitter moves on. This is when the real work starts. 10 days after launch here is what Shapes impact looks like:

1. Nearly 9K spaces created by designers! Think of this as project spaces, each with multiple boards/stages, each stage with multiple objects and designs. So the sum of things people have created within Shapes might be higher.
2. ShapesXR rating on store is 4.5, 47 ratings and 21 reviews. It looks to be great compared to other apps that were released 9, 10, 6 months ago, some apps are on Quest for 2 years. People come to the Oculus store to find games, entertainment and fitness experiences. Getting such a high number of reviews and ratings unprompted signals that both Shapes is delivering value to the user and that there might be an audience of designers and creators who are beginning to use the Oculus Quest for getting things done. Getting people to care enough to write a review is hard. Getting over 40 of them unprompted is a good signal.
3. And the icing on the cake...unprompted user love messages from far from corners of the world.?Sample this from a young designer

“The following is a letter to first say thank you for developing such an amazing tool as ShapesXR, it saved my semester because I was able to prototype and test with users a project for my industrial design course at university. Now i'm working on a bigger project for my thesis and also the timing this app was out helped me a lot to work thru the deadlines and keep creating.? Now I'm looking forward to keeping working with this amazing app and was wondering how I can get to make more spaces, as I reached the limit per user. I really want to keep prototyping and working with ShapesXR. Let me know if there is a way I can keep working”. - Industrial Design Student, Colombia

AR and VR helps people defy distance and reality. It does not matter where you live or who you are, if you can access a Quest you can create and the world can experience your creation. Someday you’ll want to mint that design and sell it on OpenSea. :-)

Congrats on building a great V1 Shapes. Now the real work begins and we are grateful to be able to serve you on your journey. Serving founders who are changing the world is a joy. This thanksgiving season, I am grateful to Meta for enabling us serve founders such as Inga who are building the future.?