How We Ended Up with HeheSTL: From the First Printer to Our Own Platform

There are five of us on the team. We're not a corporation and not faceless businesspeople — we're the same kind of geeks who once got hooked on 3D printing.

It all started in 2018. One of us bought their first printer, and it took off: endless tests, failed supports, resin on the table, the first successful miniatures and orders from friends. By 2022, each of us already had their own fleet of machines, including resin printers for high detail.

That's when, printing 24/7, we hit the main problem.

Telegram had become a massive dump of STL files. To find a specific model, you had to scroll for hours through dozens of identical junk channels. No structure, no tags, broken archives and reposts of reposts. Finding a model took longer than printing it.

That finally pissed us off. On April 24, 2022, we launched HeheSTL and posted the first curated collection. We just wanted to bring order for ourselves, but quickly realized thousands of other printers needed the same thing. So we began methodically turning Telegram chaos into a structured library where the file you need is a couple of clicks away.