Colourlovers (YC W10) launches Creative Market

Looks awesome! Thought this was an envato-owned operation for a moment or two. I'll be on the lookout for cool icons // artthings.

Mousemade sounds silly to me. Is there content out there that isn't mousemade, that isn't hand crafted?

Beautiful site. Looks (and works) really well on an iPad. And it looks like you've got some great content on there already.

A question, because I'm curious: Seems like there are several marketplaces online for stuff like this (mostly the Envato universe of stuff - themeforest, etc.)

What's the motivation for building this? Not knocking the project - I dig it. But I'm curious what specifically you guys feel is missing from existing offerings and what advantage you guys offer. Would love to hear the pitch and what's driving and motivating your team. Thanks!

First, we've been in the design space for several years. COLOURlovers.com is our property and we've been building apps & services for creatives for a while. In the process of being designers, hackers and builders of web things... We've been customers of other design good marketplaces. So what we're doing is trying to address problems with those marketplaces & do something big and new.

But first, the genesis for the idea to do CreativeMarket.com actually came out of COLOURlovers. It's been a passionate thriving company, and the one we took through YC. In the process of trying to understand the busines of CL we'd explored a few ideas (Real Time Color Forecasting, Selling Design Software, etc.), but those were all bolt-on business models and they didn't feel like they really meshed with our users and mission. "To make design simple and accessible to everyone." Then we realized there was an opportunity to help our users sell the beautiful vector patterns and shapes they were designing with our tools. To be able to help COLOURlovers make a living and participating in our community was very compelling.

But as we built the marketplace into CL we realized two things. 1. That a marketplace inside of CL was going to be confusing. CL is already a beast of a community with lots of stuff going on. We didn't feel like putting the marketplace in CL would do the best job for it to tell it's story. 2. We realized that there were more kinds of content that we could help people sell.

So, with the bigger vision for CreativeMarket we wanted to address problems with the existing marketplaces and do something more, bigger and really game changing.

As far as existing problems... Our royalty split better than almost all other marketplaces. +70% cut to sellers regardless of sales volume. +No exclusivity clauses. +Anybody can be a seller. (we let the market decide what is good) +Our content license is super simple. +Our pricing is 1/1 with a dollar. No hiding real prices behind credits. +It's beautiful. :)

The biggest thing I think we're doing differently is we're not a media company trying to do a tech thing. Tech is in our DNA and we're bringing that to the way we build and iterate on CM, continually working to make it better for sellers & buyers.

What we launched to day is the foundation. It's the basic platform for a marketplace, what's being built on top of it right now behind closed doors is going to change the way people buy/sell content.