The Shapeways website was originally specified to handle only 10,000 users and was not set up to for the complexities of our growth: two distribution centers, over 10 suppliers, thousands of shops selling hundreds of thousands of products in a broad range of materials. We have used the tools at hand for as long as we could, doing some tasks manually that we could not convince our software to do. In a start up, you build the tools as you need them, and automate processes as resources become available. We are now working on rebuilding the back-end of the site to handle our growth and to automate many of the tasks we currently do manually.

One of the processes we have been working on really hard to automate is the Shapeways shop owner payments and reporting, allowing you to effectively run your businesses. The entire team has had their heads in this project for recent weeks working long days, late nights and weekends to make the accounting as clear and transparent as possible. It's been something we've been promising for a long time, as we realized it is one of the most important processes to automate.

We released the update this week just before the monthly shop owner payments, gave each other a high five and went straight for the liquor cabinet. We then proceeded to make the silly mistake of sending out last month's payments instead of this month's.

We have corrected the error, notified all those who were affected and put in place extra checks to ensure we never, ever, ever make the same mistake again.  

We are working really hard and fast to make the Shapeways website scale with our growth. We have made mistakes in the past and we will make mistakes in the future until the robots take over, but we will continue to be as transparent as possible to ensure you understand exactly what is happening. Finally, we will always fix our mistakes.  

We really appreciate your patience and understanding as we deal with these growing pains. We thank you for making it possible for Shapeways to enable anyone to make anything with 3D printing. The future is here, and we're excited to create it with you.