Bootstrapping a $10M Creative Marketplace: Envato Founder Couple Collis and Cyan Ta’eed (Part 6)

Sramana: That is a very common structure now days. Our team is entirely virtual. I find things like Google Docs very helpful for running a virtual team. Cloud computing in general is very beneficial. We use Zoho for our CRM. Everybody who needs an account on those systems can do it from wherever they are. We don’t need to be collocated to access these systems. We use Skype a lot as well.

Collis Ta’eed: That is fantastic. We have an intranet with Igloo Software which really helps. Every week we have an all-hands meeting at the Melbourne office. We record that meeting and send it out to the remote staff. Being a 50/50 office is tricky because I want to make sure that all the people who are outside the office don’t feel left out.

Cyan Ta’eed: We have a biannual meet up where we bring all of our staff to a different location. We did one in Chicago in 2010, and earlier this year we took the whole team in Malaysia for two weeks. That is great for bridging the gap between remote and on-site team members.

Sramana: Where are your remote workers from?

Cyan Ta’eed: We have lot in the U.S. and a few in Europe. There are also a few in Canada and Asia.

Sramana: You have a company with $10 million in revenue. Where do you want to go from here?

Collis Ta’eed: At the moment we are really concentrating on growing the marketplace platform. We are looking at moving into different markets. In a couple of weeks we are launching a new site called Crafts Tuts, which is focused on DIY crafts.

Sramana: Are you looking to compete with Etsy there?

Collis Ta’eed: Yeah. Anything that you would sell on Etsy could be learned on our Crafts Tuts site. We are branching out in terms of our audience, and we hope to be able to cross promote that into our core.

For our marketplaces we are looking at all the new e-commerce services out there like Shopify, Magento, and OpenCart, and we want to provide e-commerce themes for those sites. We want people to be able to get their theme up and running very quickly. A lot of our marketplace tools connect entrepreneurs and small businesses. It is a great way for them to find new tools and services.

Sramana: What is the global breakdown of your authors and your buyers?

Collis Ta’eed: Our author distribution is global. The top authors are in countries like the U.S. and Canada, but we have other top authors in India, China, Austria, and throughout Asia. When it comes to buyers, 40% are from the U.S., 40% are from Europe, and the rest of the world makes up the remaining 20%.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping a $10M Creative Marketplace: Envato Founder Couple Collis and Cyan Ta'eed
1 2 3 4 5 6 7