I am hard to impress. I don’t care much about awards and prizes. I don’t care much about shiny things. I don’t care about the things that most people care about, including money, fame, or other people’s recognition or appreciation. I am deeply driven by results and values, to which I like to refer as ‘zero-BS’ - something that we appreciate a lot at Shapr3D. We are a zero-BS company. But sometimes recognition arrives from someone whose opinion actually matters. If I were a competitive swimmer and the New York Times called me the best swimmer in the world, I wouldn’t care, but the same recognition from Michael Phelps would mean the world to me.

The business of software is about as competitive as professional swimming, especially the world of apps. Building a top-tier app requires decades of experience, an amazing team, resilience, stubbornness, and a lot of time. Still, hitting the top of the charts isn’t everything, even among the top 100 apps, there are better and worse ones. There is a kind of recognition that very few applications get, about 5-10 every year out of the 4.5 million apps in the App Store. And that’s the Apple Design Award. As John Geleynse, the leader of Apple’s UX Evangelism team said:

We are looking for apps that do really great new things. We are looking for brilliance. We are looking for new ideas. We are looking for uniqueness, platform differentiation, and things that weren’t just possible before. We want to honor the endless hours, the late nights and the dedication that goes into the pursuit of excellence. We want to recognize the dead ends, and the frustration, and the exhaustion sometimes that often goes unseen. And we want to honor the unconventional thinking, the creativity and the new ideas that lead to breakthroughs and innovative solutions.

In 2020, the Apple Design Awards team (and it is safe to say that they are the Michael Phelps of design) decided to recognize our hard work at Shapr3D. This award means a lot to us as a company, and to me, personally. I always said that we have the best product and engineering team in the CAD industry, actually it turns out that we have one of the best product and engineering teams in the world. This shiny little aluminium cube will always remind us that we should never compromise on product quality, and that there is nothing more important than the product. Eventually it’s the product that serves the customer, it’s the product that helps our users succeed. Product is love, product is life. Product is growth, product is everything. Congratulations Shapr3D team, you are the best - and we are just getting started.