Pear 3D

Andrew Commendoni was stationed in Guam as an Air Force Intelligence Officer when the need struck. The military needed to build new facilities, but shipping materials to a remote Pacific island was prohibitively expensive. One wrong order could waste significant resources. Andrew, who had tinkered with software since middle school and understood augmented reality technology, quickly mocked up an iPad application that let him visualize designs in real space before committing to materials. "I very quickly mocked up an iPad application that allowed us to pull in the designs that we wanted, see them in real space and give a yes or no."

After moving to Washington, DC in 2012, Andrew started shopping the application around to architects. They loved it. He found a co-founder (who received a 30% equity stake compared to Andrew's 50%, with 20% reserved for early investors and future employees), and they worked on the side for a couple of years before launching full-time at the American Institute of Architects Convention in 2015 under the name "VisitDraft." The early traction was real: large architectural firms in DC, Seattle, and New York ran pilots, paying anywhere from $2,000 to $1,000+ monthly for the service.

The first year of revenue came from these architectural pilots. "Our first year revenue through... the product was at the time called Visit Draft... we had just under $10,000 in revenue for about three months for basically from May when we launched it to August." Some deals were one-time payments to accelerate onboarding, others were monthly subscriptions. By late 2015, they had generated about $40,000 in revenue. However, they noticed something more lucrative: "We got a deluge of requests from the furnishings industry and the product industry to have a platform for consumers to see furnishings."

In August 2015, Andrew made a gutsy decision. They completely abandoned the architectural SaaS model. "The biggest size you can get in the architectural model is about 100 million," Andrew explained, referring to total addressable market. "The total addressable market for home furnishings is $101 billion this year." They pivoted to Pear 3D, a free consumer app where manufacturers pay based on clicks and impressions. This required a massive product overhaul—home furnishings manufacturers didn't have 3D CAD models like architects did, so Pear had to build that catalog. By the time of this interview (May 2016), they had onboarded 15 major manufacturers and built the largest augmented reality furniture catalog on the planet with over 2,000 products. Usage was substantial: "Somewhere around 20,000 products get put into any of the spaces on any given month." They negotiated a $60 CPM rate with a 6% click-through rate, and by May 2016, they had "signed contracts for revenue" projected at close to $1.5 million for the year, though they hadn't yet started collecting accounts receivable to allow manufacturers more proof of performance first.

Pear raised just under $900,000 over 18 months and was preparing to turn on its revenue spigot in June 2016. Unlike the old SaaS model where architects paid monthly fees, retailers preferred the performance-based advertising model because they could "track specifically, hey, how are my dollars being spent." The team was using Slack for internal communications and focusing on scaling their user base and manufacturer partnerships. Andrew's vision was clear: "That's really the kind of basis for, or that was one of the big basis for the changes. And by the way, our retailers love that way better than a monthly model simply because they can track specifically, hey, how are my dollars being spent?" The company had successfully transformed from a niche B2B tool into a consumer platform with massive TAM potential.