What to Bring to Your First Meetings With Tech Soft 3D (or Another Vendor)

The right preparation can transform how an initial meeting goes for everyone involved. At Tech Soft 3D, we believe in creating Strategic Technology Partnerships with our customers. This means we do far more than give you some code and wish you luck: we support you through the entire lifecycle of your product. To do that, we need you to help us help you.

This is a list of things that you should have prepared for your first meeting with Tech Soft 3D. This information will help us learn about you, so we can be as helpful as possible and lay a strong groundwork for our working relationship going forward. 

Your first two meetings with Tech Soft 3D will likely be as follows:

1. An initial, high-level meeting

2. A detailed technical discussion
   

Here, we will cover what to expect in each meeting and what to prepare.

The Keys to a Successful Evaluation

The most productive evaluations result when proper time and resources are available with a specific agreed-upon goal in mind. An example would be a functional proof-of-concept that achieves three clearly defined objectives. The evaluation runs for 60 days, and though this can be extended, it’s best to set time aside for one or more of your engineers to become familiar with the technology and use it daily. 

We work hard to provide you with top-tier support and guidance through our Consulting Engineering team, and we ask that you provide your developers time and resources to take advantage of this support.

Your First Meeting With Tech Soft 3D

Your first meeting with Tech Soft 3D allows us to get a feel for what it is you’re looking for while you get a better understanding of what we can offer you. This call is normally done with a Partner Development Manager from our team and sometimes a Consulting Engineer. If you want to go into deeper technical talks from the start, please request a Consulting Engineer join. 

Below, we have assembled a list of things you will want to have prepared in advance of this meeting, in order to help both of us get the most out of the meeting. 

• Clearly outline the problem you are solving

  • What is the specific problem that caused you to reach out to us?
    

• Create an overview of your ideal solution

  • In your dream situation, what functionality would you add and what benefits would it provide both you and your customers?

• Think about the flow of data through your application, from its source to usage downstream

  • Can you talk about that workflow in great detail? Can you show a demo?

  • Where are the sticking points?
    

• What tools have you identified that might solve your problem?

  • What solutions do you have in mind? Other vendors? Feel free to ask us, we may have transparent, direct comparisons between ourselves and other technology providers.
    

• What is your proposed architecture and platform? Include:

  • Development language

  • Cloud, native, or mobile

  • Operating system

  • Proposed technical stack

  • Version dependencies

  • Other 3rd party libraries
    

• What are some of your specific requirements? 

  • If importing CAD data, what specific File formats? Geometry and Topology, PMI, attributes, etc.?

  • If looking for 3D Visualization, what functionality do you need? Cutting planes, Photorealistic rendering, PMI viewing, etc.? 

  • If looking for a modeling kernel, what specific modeling operations are needed? Etc.
    

• What ideas do you have regarding your business model?

  • How do you plan to license your tools?
    

• What is your development timeline?
  

  • Do you have hard or soft dates of what sprint(s) will you use for the evaluation when will you schedule development, customer demos, trade shows, target release date, and investor meetings, etc.?
    

• What is your team's experience with 3D development?

  • Your team likely needs training on SDKs, but do they also need an overview regarding 3D? If so, who from your team will need training and what time zones are they in?
    

• Are you going to use 3rd party services for evaluations or building your product?

  • If yes, do you know who they are? 

  • If yes, but you do not know who, we can make introductions and recommendations.

• What does a successful evaluation look like to you?

  • What questions do you need to answer to make your decisions?

  • What functionality do you need to prove out?
    

• Come with questions for us!

  • Would you like us to demo anything specific?

  • If you're looking at other technology, do you have questions about how we compare?  We have direct comparisons between ourselves and common competitors for many products.

  • We have HOOPS and CEETRON pricing content available, on our blog.

The more questions we can answer early on for you, the better.

For the most successful evaluation possible, treat this like a checklist. 

Follow-Up Technical Call

Assuming that our initial call was successful, and both parties want to advance, we then suggest a follow-up technical call. On this, we ask your developers to join an hour-long call with one of our Consulting Engineers. 

Prep for that call

To have a successful technical call we ask that you do the following:

• At a minimum please read the technical overview for the product(s) you wish to evaluate. overview of our technical documentation.

  • HOOPS Exchange

  • HOOPS Communicator

  • HOOPS Visualize

  • HOOPS Publish

  • CEETRON Solve, Access, and Mesh

• If you are ready to evaluate, we ask that your team download an evaluation copy of our SDKs from here

• Please email our team a list of any specific details you would like to see or discuss. That can be:

  • Demos you wish to see

  • Deeper technical discussion on certain topics

  • Concerns from your evaluation so far

• Please come with a detailed specification sheet of the functionality you would like to implement and the specific features you need. 

During the call

This is your call and we can take this in many different directions. Our Consulting Engineers are Software Developers and can help in many ways. The most common activities are: 

• Answering questions on what our tools can and can not do. We often go through a spec sheet and say what we can do, what you would need 3rd party tools for, and what application logic your team needs to build on its own. 

• If you are not familiar with our SDKs, then our Consulting Engineer can walk you through the packages and help with a getting started session. 

• If you have already started an evaluation, they can help troubleshoot any places you are stuck, answer questions, and guide your next steps. 

Assuming these are successful and you want to continue, then we suggest we establish regular calls between our teams to:

1. Assist you in your evaluation

2. Continue understanding your business so we can provide you with a custom quotation. 

We look forward to our first calls with you.