Founding Myth
cadjunkie was founded in 2009 by newly self-employed industrial designer Adam O'Hern. Then living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Adam started cadjunkie because affordable CAD-related training was difficult to find online, especially for higher end packages like CATIA and UGNX. One of the first CAD theory videos he made explained surface continuity types, and remains one of his most popular videos of all time.
Over time the format and purpose of cadjunkie changed, and as readership grew, it quickly became too much for Adam to manage single-handed. Simon Martin joined as an intern in 2011, taking on video production and site admin. To fund the extra labor and increasing software and web hosting costs, cadjunkie began requiring paid subscriptions for access to the content. Little did we realize what price this Faustian Bargain would exact over time (see below).
In 2012 cadjunkie joined forces with the venerable Josh Mings of SolidSmack to create the popular EngineerVsDesigner podcast. Adam and Josh became equal partners in EvD Media LLC, which now owns and operates all of the sites together. Simon gradually became integral to our entire operation, and today we are one big happy family working together on virtually everything we do.
Memberships
Membership systems--the back-end software we used to control access to the content--turned out to be both incredibly complex and exasperatingly limiting. After months of trial and error with a half-dozen different membership platforms, we settled on what seemed to be the least-bad one we could find. Feeling we had little choice in the matter, we hobbled along with this high-maintenance, low-efficiency solution for four long, frustrating years.
In 2015, things had changed. Services like Gumroad.com make it easy to sell large downloadable files online--something that was much more difficult back in the early days of cadjunkie. We decided to move our entire library from Vimeo and YouTube to Gumroad as downloadable files and, in the process, move our web hosting to SquareSpace. Where we'd previously used a mish-mash of off-the-shelf and custom coded Wordpress templates and plugins, SquareSpace allows us to focus less on web development, and more on the stuff that really matters: content.
Today cadjunkie is more attuned to its original mission than ever: we want to make professional grade info available in a format that's fun, affordable, and effective. We're proud of what we've done so far, but there's much, much more to do!