Celebrating $500m In Community Earnings
Reaching half a billion in community earnings is a milestone we should all be proud of.
By Envato
In many ways, Envato is a typical startup success story: the garage-basement office, the bootstrapped business launch, fueled by a passion for community and creativity. But as with most entrepreneurial ventures, that success didn’t happen overnight.
In five months, working from Cyan’s parent’s basement garage, the team created the early version of Envato’s marketplaces.
“I think we always felt like there were just all these creative people around the world, and they were just waiting to be connected with all the people that needed their stuff,” explains Cyan. “If we could make a site where people could earn their livelihoods doing the work that they loved, on their own terms, then that would be an absolutely amazing outcome.”
The first marketplace, ActiveDen, was a market for Flash items – Flash, at the time, was incredibly popular (it’s since fallen out of fashion). Envato built that marketplace, the creatives came to sell their items, and the customers came and started buying them.
When ThemeForest launched, a marketplace for WordPress themes and website templates, it represented a significant milestone for the company and quickly grew to be one of the largest creative marketplaces on the internet.
Over a decade later – after name changes, product launches, successes, and failures – Envato is celebrating a major milestone: $500,000,000 in lifetime community earnings.
This success comes from a focus on community and a lean startup approach. “One of the early things we got right with Envato was our model. At our core is a marketplace model, and it’s a very effective one for online businesses. More importantly, it was very effective for a bootstrapped business with no cash investment,” writes Collis in an article about founding Envato.
Today, the Australian Financial Review calls Envato ‘the most profitable start-up you haven’t heard of’, and Forbes recently wrote about how we’re ‘leading the freelance sharing space’. We like to think that our focus on diversity initiatives in the tech space, our unique brand of values-driven agile, and remote-first work environment makes Envato a little different.
We’re constantly inspired by our creative community and excited that this April we can celebrate the incredible milestone of $500M in community earnings.
Fast forward to 2020, here are some latest achievements by Envato.