Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's episode is part two of my chat with Aaron Epstein of Creative Market.
As you may recall from episode 88, Creative Market is an online platform that lets you sell and buy handcrafted mouse made design content such as fonts and graphics.
Aaron launched his first software product called Color Schema when he was still in college and went on to grow that into a six figures a year business.
A few years later he met his co founders and combined forces to work on an online creative community called Color Lovers and eventually went through Y Combinator.
Color Lovers grew into a community with over a million users and in 2011 they launched Creative Market and raised $2.3 million in funding.
And in just 16 months after launch, they sold the business to Autodesk for an undisclosed amount.
In this episode, you're going to learn seven proven strategies for building an online marketplace.
It's basically what Creative Market did to launch their own product.
And even if you aren't planning to build a marketplace, you will still get a ton of value from this episode and take away some useful lessons that you could apply to just about any software product or business.
And with that, let's bring on Aaron.
Building any kind of marketplace is a really hard thing to do.
And you know, I've had, you know, prior guests like Matt Mickiewicz, the founder of 99designs, Colise Taid from Envato, Gary Swart at Odesk, and all of these guys tell me how difficult it is.
But then they also did really well with building these great marketplaces and I think that's the same with you guys.
So I think that a lot of the times people don't really realize how hard it is until they get into doing that.
And so it would be great to, for you to share some lessons on what you guys did that really worked well.
And I know that as you looked back, you had identified seven strategies that had been really helpful in getting you to build both buyer and seller side demand.
So let's talk a little bit about those, those, those seven strategies and share some insights hopefully with the audience.
Aaron Epstein (03:08.990)
Yeah, so marketplaces are really, really hard because you actually have to build out almost two different businesses at the same time.
You need to build out a product that's attractive to sellers on your marketplace and you have to build out a product that's attractive to buyers on your marketplace.
And you also need to launch with both of those in hand, because if you launched with a bunch of sellers and no buyers, those sellers are going to have a terrible experience because nobody's going to be there to buy their stuff.
And if you launch with a lot of people looking to buy stuff but nothing to actually buy, then they're never going to come back and use you as a resource to buy products.
So it's a really tricky balance that you have to do.
And so there are a few different strategies that we used at Creative Market to make sure that on launch day, we were actually really well situated on both the buyer and the seller side.
So the first thing is trying to sign up buyers before launch.
And what we ended up doing is we put together this viral referrer program.
We launched this teaser page probably about eight or nine months before we actually launched the full Creative Market site.
And it actually said, you know, we're going to be launching this marketplace soon, but if you actually come now, we'll give you $5 in early access credit if you sign up today before we launch.
And so from our perspective, we thought this is incentivizing potential customers to come and sign up today.
I know a lot of times, you know, teaser pages get thrown out there for a lot of different businesses, and some of them actually launch, and a lot of them don't.
And so by adding this incentive, you know, for some people to come and take a look at this, they're like, okay, like, worst case, it doesn't launch.
But if it does, I'm going to get $5 for free to spend when it does.
So, sure, I'll go ahead and put in my email address.
And so.
Do you have a question?
Omer (05:14.800)
Yeah, so I was going to say, so the first step was building out this.
This teaser page and trying to build a list of buy buyers before you had launched.
How did you drive traffic to this page?
Aaron Epstein (05:28.400)
So this is actually where we had an advantage with Color Lovers.
And it was kind of twofold.
One, we had a very similar audience of people that were coming to visit Color Lovers.
And we had a ton of email addresses from user accounts that we had built up over the years.
And so when we launched this, we started messaging the community, whether it was ads on the site or in email marketing, to tell them, hey, the founders of Color Lovers are launching this new site called Creative Market.
Go check it out.
So like we talked about earlier in the conversation, you know, we.
We weren't starting with that same base of A million members.
And it was really difficult to start over at zero users on Creative Market.
But the strategy that we used was to message those million members and try to get all the relevant people to move over to create a new Creative Market account.
Omer (06:25.530)
So if you hadn't had that advantage, what do you think you would have done instead to try and build that list?
Aaron Epstein (06:34.649)
Yeah, so we reached out to press people at the same time when we were launching this teaser site to let them know, hey, we had this thing that was coming soon and we had some articles written about us which helped spread the word.
But outside of that, in order to get people there, we found that offering free products works really well too.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is something actually that we use today.
Even now that Creative Market is live.
We have a program called Free Goods of the Week, where people, sellers in the community can offer some of their products for free for a limited one week period of time.
And it works out really well for everybody involved.
But we actually started this concept before we had even launched the site.
We were trying to attract more people to come and sign up.
And so in order to incentivize them beyond the $5, we actually put together this dedicated Free Goods page in addition to the teaser page.
And so we just reached out to a lot of top content creators and we said, hey, do you want to offer up something for free on Creative Market?
And then when the site actually goes live, you know, we'll get more exposure to your paid products.
And so we actually compiled 30 different free design assets before we had even launched and put them all together on this one page that we called Free Goods.
And you had to sign up and create an account in order to be able to download any of those products.
And so when people did that, they got access to 30 free products.
You know, they help spread the word and share it with their friends.
Because in addition to giving $5 when you signed up, we had this viral referrer program that we built where once you got in there, you could either through email or Facebook or Twitter, we gave you tools to message your friends, to bring them on board.
And if you referred five friends, then you get $10 more in credit.
If you referred 20 friends, you'd get $30 more.
And if you referred 50 or more friends that came to sign up, then you'd get $200 more.
So that kind of added the viral aspect of it.
The free goods added more incentive, and the $5 was incentive as well.
So, you know, it started getting shared around on Facebook and Twitter.
And we were Just seeing tons of tweets.
And once we launched that free goods page, that's when a lot of the registrations, besides the initial teaser launch day, that's when the registrations really started to pick up really fast.
Omer (09:02.690)
Okay, let's.
Let's kind of break this down, because I want to make sure that the audience kind of get all this.
So strategy number one you talked about was building this teaser page and signing up potential buyers before you launch.
But you went further than that, which leads us into strategy number two, which is giving your buyers some free money to spend and offering this $5 in free credits.
Now, the interesting thing here is that this isn't like a SaaS product where you can offer somebody a discount and it doesn't really cost you anything.
You actually had to pay your sellers as well.
So there was an economic impact for you guys from this, for every $5 credit that you gave away.
So how did you work out the economics of that?
Aaron Epstein (09:55.450)
It was actually kind of a scary thing at the time.
You know, here we were, we had raised, like, a million dollars.
So we had some money in the bank, less than a million, because we had spent it, you know, on growing the business and getting to that point, to that teaser launch point.
But we do a 70, 30 commission split with all of our sellers, which means that they get 70% of each sale and we get 30%.
And so this meant for every $5 that we gave away, we would actually have to spend $3.50 to pay the seller because we would keep 30% of that $5 ourselves.
So that made it a little bit easier.
It was really just 70% of everything that we gave away.
But, you know, as we were building all of this and we launched it and it was going viral, and we had all these people coming to sign up.
We started looking at the numbers, and by the time we launched, we actually had 70,000 people signed up.
And so that times $5 is $350,000 that we were potentially on the hook for.
And so, you know, that got kind of scary for us of what if on day one, everybody comes and uses that $5?
But the other way to look at it is that if everybody comes and uses that $5, then that means that all the sellers will have a great success.
They'll be earning money from day one.
And that's what we really needed to kick off kind of that virtuous cycle where, you know, sellers come and add products for sale, buyers then come and buy those products.
That money then goes to the sellers, which, you Know, gives them that positive reinforcement that selling on this marketplace is actually a really good idea.
So then they start telling their friends who sell, who come join and open their own shops on Creative Market, and, you know, things are kind of off to the races from there.
Omer (11:47.700)
Great.
So in addition.
So I think that was a really important point because it wasn't like just a discount and giving away sort of additional licenses on a product.
This was like a real check that you would have to write for, like, $350,000.
Right.
So, yeah.
Okay.
So then strategy three, you talked about as well, a little bit, which was creating this viral loop.
And so can you talk a little bit more about that?
And how did you incentivize people to kind of share what was going on here with people that they knew?
And then also, what was the infrastructure behind this to track all this stuff?
Aaron Epstein (12:35.960)
So the tracking wasn't that difficult.
It was really just creating a unique share code for every member that signs up.
And then we would just.
They would share it out on Twitter or Facebook or via email or just link to a friend.
And then whenever somebody clicked through to that, we would just cookie them so that if they registered, then their account got tagged as this other account referred me.
So that was actually relatively simple to build out.
We could track all the referrals through that.
But the scheme that we had built is, you know, you come and you either sign up to download these free goods, or you sign up to get the $5 in free credits that we're offering you.
And then once you've created your account, the only other thing that you can see or do is this kind of progress bar that shows how many people you've referred and how close you are to getting to our.
We called it like VIP status, which is 50 refers or more.
And so people could see what the kind of goals were.
They could see that it was possible to earn even more money.
And even beyond that, we actually gave them the tools to share it out so they didn't have to worry about going to Twitter and tweeting or going to Facebook and posting it and writing up their own copy or emailing through their mail app.
We gave them a box to enter email addresses and just send it off, click an invite button, and it was good to go.
You know, we gave them buttons for Facebook or Twitter.
You just kind of click the button, and it automatically tweets it out or shares it out on Facebook with your referral code built in.
So we just made it really, really easy for people to share, and by giving them that incentive of earning more money.
We actually saw a lot of people take action on it.
Omer (14:23.190)
So I really like this.
And I'll include a link to a screenshot of, of what you're talking about here in the show notes.
But, you know, in addition to making it really easy for.
For people to share, I love the way that you kind of had this little progress bar which showed them, like, at which stage they were at, whether they were like a supporter or an ambassador or a vip.
And I wondered whether was there some kind of like open loop psychology that you guys had sort of thought about when you designed this, because when you sort of look at it, you sort of have this natural instinct to want to move that, that progress bar further along, right?
Aaron Epstein (15:03.720)
Yeah.
And.
And it's not something that, you know, we uniquely came up with.
You see this on, I think Facebook does it and LinkedIn does it and a ton of other sites.
When, when you see that incomplete progress bar, it's just kind of human nature to want to complete it.
Or you see, you know, Your profile is 75% complete, and it's like, oh, what do I have to do to get it to 100%?
So there's something about that that I think just drives people in human nature to want to take the steps necessary to fill up the progress bar or to make it get to 100%.
So that's kind of what we were playing on there and trying to let people see in a visual way what they needed to do in order to reach these different rewards.
And.
Omer (15:48.140)
And you had several people who went through and referred.
50 people.
They went all the way and got that $200 credit.
Aaron Epstein (15:59.180)
Yep.
Omer (16:00.140)
Wow, that's.
I'm not sure I would do that.
Aaron Epstein (16:04.540)
And for some of them, you know, what's interesting is some of them just had really large active Twitter followers.
And so all they had to do is tweet it out and know, hey, here's the new thing that's coming soon.
And people would want to go check that out and they'd sign up and, you know, before they knew it, they were at 50 or so.
So it was pretty incredible to see some of that happen.
Omer (16:25.670)
Okay, so that was strategy number three, creating a viral loop.
And then strategy four, you also talked a little bit about which was attracting buyers with these free products.
How did you go about getting these free products and what was kind of like the offer there?
Aaron Epstein (16:47.560)
Yeah, so we reached out to a lot of content creators that we either had a relationship with or we had seen in the design community.
We knew that they were making products.
And so we reached out to them and we said, hey, we're going to be launching this marketplace soon.
You made great work.
We'd love to have you open a shop on Creative Market.
And if you're interested in giving away something for free until we launch, then we'll make sure to get your shop A lot of promotion when we actually do open the doors so we could help them sell more of their paid products.
And so for a lot of people, that was just a no brainer.
They wanted to get more exposure on this marketplace that was coming soon that a lot of people were kind of talking about because it was getting spread around through that viral refer program.
And so this was a way to get more access and exposure for them.
And so, you know, it worked out really well.
We ended up with 30 different products by the time we launched this page, which was just a couple months, two or three months, I think, after we launched the initial teaser site.
Omer (17:54.180)
And so this was like a combination of like what?
Like icons and things like that that people could just get for free.
Aaron Epstein (18:03.450)
Yeah, icons, themes, textures, patterns, graphic design, widgets, you know, all kinds of stuff.
Omer (18:11.610)
Cool.
Aaron Epstein (18:12.250)
But.
Omer (18:12.730)
But people had to sign up first and set up an account before they were able to download those.
I think you said that earlier.
Aaron Epstein (18:18.330)
Yep.
Yeah.
So each, each individual item on the page had a download button on it, but clicking that download button would just pop up a modal to get you to sign up.
And then once you signed up, then you could start downloading all of them.
Omer (18:31.500)
Cool.
Okay, so that was strategy four in terms of using free products as well to attract buyers.
What else did you guys do?
Aaron Epstein (18:42.940)
Yeah, so once we had reached this point, we had done a lot of work to attract a lot of buyers, and we had just started reaching out to some potential sellers as part of this free goods program.
We actually kept pushing on the seller side now because, you know, we had the viral thing going, we had the free goods attracting a lot of buyers to come sign up the $5 in free credits.
We felt like we were doing okay there.
So now we shifted our focus to wanting to make sure that we actually had a lot of great content for people to buy when we opened the doors.
So what we did is some of those people that we reached out to around the free goods program and many others, we actually said to them, hey, we've actually got thousands of customers that are signing up on our site because of all these other strategies that we were using.
And when we opened the doors on day one, they're all going to have $5 to spend.
And beyond that, you know, some of these people were already involved in selling in other marketplaces, but our proposition, you know, those other marketplaces were much more established at the time.
So how are we able to compete as like a brand new small guy?
And so our proposition to them was, you know, we've got thousands of customers that are signed up, they've got money to spend.
And not only that, but you're not going to have nearly as much competition in terms of products available for sale, which means your products and your work is going to get a lot more exposure to this audience because you're not competing with thousands of other sellers on the marketplace.
So we actually used our small size as an advantage to get people excited about giving creative market a try.
Omer (20:23.410)
That's really smart.
So you built up this list of buyers and then you leveraged that list that you had to then go to the sellers and give them a compelling reason to want to participate and sell in your marketplace.
And then sort of with strategy number six, you also focused a lot on creating favorable terms for them, because I think that was pretty important to you guys as well, from what I understand, to make sure that you gave them a really compelling reason and sort of like a no risk sort of offer.
Aaron Epstein (21:09.240)
Yep.
Yeah.
So the next piece of that was creating these favorable terms where, you know, like I said before, we weren't the first marketplace for graphic design assets out there, but we actually had a very unique approach.
And this was intentional from kind of looking at the landscape.
And ultimately, we felt like just about every other marketplace out there was structured to take advantage of the independent creators that were selling their content on those sites.
And so we just felt fundamentally at our core that that was not right.
So there are things like other marketplaces will give you 50% max commission on each sale, and most of the time, if you're not exclusive with them, they give you less than 50%.
And we just felt like fundamentally that was wrong, that the person who's taking all the time to create this.
This great content that other people want to buy is actually getting less of a cut than the marketplace that's helping them sell it.
And so we wanted to flip that on its head.
So we actually decided to structure our commission as that 70, 30 split where sellers would get 70%, we'd keep 30%.
But beyond that, you didn't have to be exclusive with us in order to get that rate.
Everybody did.
And so ultimately what we wanted to do was prove that we could Be the best marketplace and give you great terms rather than trying to lock you into something because like, oh, you want the higher rate, you can only sell with us.
So don't think about selling on your own site or selling on another marketplace.
And so that was kind of a no risk way where people really had nothing to lose to come add their products to Creative Market.
They didn't have to remove them from sale somewhere else.
You know, they could give us a try.
And if it worked, then awesome.
And if it didn't work out for them, then know, no, no harm, nothing lost.
Omer (23:04.510)
That's great.
So with, with strategy number six, what you did was you, you created these favorable terms and you thought about the objections that these sellers were likely to have, basically addressed all of those and then basically presented an offer which was like, I've got nothing to lose, I've got everything to gain.
Yes, of course I'm going to participate.
Aaron Epstein (23:31.570)
Yep.
It made it a no brainer for them.
And so especially in the early days, you know, and we didn't have this big track record or you know, a really large marketplace to point to to get people excited to sign up, a lot of people really bought into the philosophy that we were offering.
Omer (23:48.450)
Cool.
Okay, so let's talk about the final strategy.
Aaron Epstein (23:53.180)
Yep.
So the last one is really just targeting buyers and sellers through our existing relationships.
So, you know, for us this is potentially unique from maybe what some other people are able to do out there.
Because we had spent all this time in the design space building Color Lovers and Color Schemer.
You know, we had contacts at popular design blogs and press in the industry just because we had been in it for so long.
And we also had this existing community at Color Lovers where, you know, we could market to them to get them to come over to Creative Market in the early days before we were even launched.
But another thing that we actually did was people knew the Color Lovers brand, the types of people that would be interested in using our marketplace, both on the buyer and the seller side.
And so that initial teaser page that we launched, it explicitly said from the creators of Color Lovers.
So that was kind of a way to de risk the investment of getting involved with this brand new marketplace that nobody had heard of before.
People would come there and they'd say, oh, I know Color Lovers, I like that site.
So if this is anything like that, then this is probably going to be something that I'm going to be into.
Omer (25:09.350)
Cool.
And then so you get to launch day, you'd mentioned that you'd build up a list of 70,000 people, all of them who had these $5 credits.
So you're on the hook for $350,000 if they all buy.
What happened when you opened the doors?
Aaron Epstein (25:32.390)
Yeah, so we were both nervous and excited to open the doors.
And.
And all this time during trying to sign people up, while we had the teaser page live, I'd been envisioning we send this email, and the messaging is just kind of like, hey, you remember that free money that we gave you?
Well, now the doors are open and we're live, and come back and spend that free money.
What do you have to lose?
Right?
And so I thought for sure that we'd blast that out to 70,000 people.
And we just have a ton of sales on the first day, which is also what made us nervous that we burned through so much of our cash in the bank trying to pay all of the shops out for this.
But what actually happened when we sent the email blast was that first launch day, we actually had just $3,000 in sales in the first 24 hours.
And of that, 2,100 was in free credits.
So it turned out we actually weren't on the hook for a lot of money.
And it was very gradual where some people spent the $5 over time, some people never spent it at all.
And for various reasons.
But another reason that we actually wanted to offer just $5 was a lot of the products on the site cost more than $5.
So if you're buying a $10 item, you have the $5 in free credits you can spend, but then you also need to get your credit card out and spend another $5.
And we made the purchasing flow really simple.
We'd remember your credit card for a future purchase, made it just two clicks.
So this was kind of a way to get people in the door and start adding their credit cards for products that they wanted to buy.
And, you know, when you look at it, nearly a third of the sales in the first day, when we had blasted all those people who had free credits, was actually credit card sales.
So it was interesting.
It was potentially lower than our expectations, but at the same time, we didn't really know what to expect.
But it gave us a great starting point to really kickstart things.
Omer (27:38.530)
Yeah, I mean, that's great.
I mean, it's probably fortunate that you didn't end up having a huge bill out of that anyway.
But I think what the sort of.
The more important takeaway there for me is that it was actually a great way for you to build both a list of buyers and sellers to get the word out about this new marketplace.
And even though the launch didn't turn into this sort of huge thing where people were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars profit of your money on the first day, it seems like this was a really important catalyst.
It was like it lit the fire for what you were then able to do and then sort of see consecutive month over month growth.
Aaron Epstein (28:32.950)
Yes.
And you know, kind of related to your question earlier where we talked about, you know, just starting and getting past some of that indecision or maybe wanting to even get to perfection.
I think a lot of times people kind of have these visions of they launch and press picks it up and then it goes viral and all these people are coming and signing up or using their product or service.
And the reality is that it's very, very rare that things happen like that.
But those are the stories that you read about a lot of times because they're the edge cases.
They're, you know, the really exciting things that the press likes to cover.
And generally what really happens is you launch, not a lot of people care.
You know, you do everything that you can, but you really want to hold on to the people that do care and make sure that you're building a really great product for them and that you continue to iterate on the product and build it so that they will want to tell their friends and other people like them and you can really start to expand this audience that you're reaching and grow in an organic way.
People like to just do this, like, well, I gotta wait till everything's perfect and then get it out there in a big splash.
And it's really, really difficult to make that a success.
And even you know, us, when we had 70,000 people, we had built up on this list and all of our contacts and connections from our color lovers days, it still was, you know, it just was a small blip kind of.
And then we had to really do the hard work of day in and day out, continuing to improve the product, make sure we were building something that customers really wanted and valued and just grow the business the way you typically do over time.
Cool.
Omer (30:22.020)
Thank you for sharing that, Aaron.
I think those strategies have been really insightful.
I think there's a combination of things that you were able to do because you had an advantage or an existing community or a brand that people knew.
But there were also a lot of things you did that anybody out there could do today to, to improve the chances of building their own marketplace.
So thanks, thanks for sharing that with us.
Let's move on to the lightning round.
So I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
Aaron Epstein (31:01.080)
Yeah?
You ready?
Yes.
Omer (31:03.020)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Aaron Epstein (31:07.100)
I think this is YC's motto, which is make something people want.
I like to say tweak it a little bit to make something people love because it adds the user experience component a little bit.
But, you know, if you talk to and listen to customers, the money will follow.
Omer (31:22.540)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Aaron Epstein (31:26.860)
Without trying to sound like a YC fanboy, it's actually not as much a book as an article, but Paul Graham's essay on the Maker vs.
Manager schedule is something that really resonates with me, especially going from, you know, a founding team of just three of us to now a team of 27 people.
You know, a lot of times when you start, you're a founder and a doer, and it takes a while to learn the, the transition you need to make to a manager.
And this outlines it really well.
Omer (31:58.540)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Aaron Epstein (32:03.740)
I think relentless drive.
You know, it leads to working inhuman hours and refusing to quit.
You know, I feel like everybody as a founder has their own superpower, and for mine, I'm just fortunate that I was born with the ability to work long hours without burning out.
And that actually dovetails really nicely with being an entrepreneur.
Omer (32:28.560)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Aaron Epstein (32:33.920)
I make a lot of lists, so I use this app that I'm not even sure if it's still updated on the Mac, called the Hit List, but it allows me to do nested to do lists.
So I just create lists around what I need to do each week and I can drag them around to prioritize them, and then I just check them off when I'm done.
I also just.
It's kind of old school probably, but I flag a lot of emails.
Things that I can't respond to in the moment, I just flag them.
And then when I have gaps in between meetings and things like that, I'll go through and fire off responses.
Omer (33:05.850)
I love making lists, too.
What's a business idea that you have that you'd love to pursue if you had extra time?
What's a.
What's one of those crazy ideas in your head that you just would love to do one day?
Aaron Epstein (33:20.070)
I don't have anything specific around this.
If I had to do things over again, it would probably just be something in the design space because I just really care a lot about helping independent designers and creators and like our creative market mission.
Just helping them make a living doing what they love.
So it'd probably be something focused in there.
Omer (33:41.350)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Aaron Epstein (33:46.800)
I actually oddly enough mentioned this earlier, but I've played guitar and in bands for like over a decade and did some touring locally when I was growing up on the east coast.
So love music and love playing guitar and that's something that actually got sacrificed during my startup days because I was just working all the time.
So really nice to be able to pick up my guitar again.
Omer (34:14.949)
Did you guys ever find a singer for the band?
Aaron Epstein (34:19.029)
At the time when we found a really great singer was the time when our bassist decided that he needed to go find another job somewhere and ended up moving.
So we tried to carry on for a little bit after that, but yeah, fortunately it was difficult.
Omer (34:35.029)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Aaron Epstein (34:39.839)
My family for sure.
No kids yet, but hopefully soon.
But my wife and I were actually high school sweethearts.
We've been together about 16 years, married for six and we have a dog, Chloe.
That is the world to me.
My kid before kids, but ultimately my family is really why I do what I do.
One story that I like to tell is I remember When I was 13 years old, my dad was working crazy hours.
He worked at the Same company for 33 years and he was working on a big project and it was my parents 20th wedding anniversary.
And so we all drove down, we picked him up from the office, we had dinner at TGI Fridays and then we dropped him back off at the office.
And that was my parents anniversary.
And I remember from that moment saying to myself that I never want my job and my work to dictate how I'm able to spend time with my family.
And so that's kind of what's led me down this entrepreneurial path.
And the ironic thing is I worked so much, you know, trying to build this startup, literally 24 7, that it was difficult at times.
But now kind of having reached this successful exit, I have a lot more freedom and flexibility to do the things that I want to do and, and be able to be there for my family on my own schedule going forward.
Omer (36:06.480)
Yeah, that's great.
And I'm completely with you on that.
And I think, you know, one of the dangers of that is I quit a corporate job to do my own thing and A big driver for me was to be able to spend more time with family.
And the irony is that probably now I spend more time working than I did when I was in a job.
And so you have to remind yourself to kind of have that balance.
But I do love the idea of just being able to, whenever you feel like it's, you know, take the afternoon off and go and do something with the kids or something.
Aaron Epstein (36:37.700)
Yep, absolutely.
To have that freedom and flexibility makes all the difference in the world.
But it's difficult sometimes, too, because I remember, you know, I would work remote, especially on the software business, and a lot of.
And I'd work from home, and people would say, well, how do you get anything done?
I would never get anything done at home.
And the irony of it is that working from home actually makes it a lot harder to turn it off, not to actually get something done, because you don't always have those structured work hours.
It's every hour is a work hour, or, you know, there's your wife's out at a dinner with some friends one night, and it's like, oh, I guess I'll just go ahead and hop on the computer and do some work.
So it becomes kind of the default for, for every moment.
So it's, it's really important to make time for, for those types of things.
Omer (37:25.890)
Yeah, I hear you.
I struggle with that too, because.
Aaron Epstein (37:29.090)
Cool.
Omer (37:29.810)
So, Aaron, thank you for joining me today.
I love having this chat and you shared so much useful stuff, both in terms of the story of Creative Market and the journey that you took right from the college days to where you guys are today.
And then also you shared a ton of useful information on what you learned about building momentum with a marketplace and what our listeners can, can learn from that.
Now, if folks want to check out Creative Market, they can go to creative market.com and there are some cool goodies that you can download for free if you sign up.
So go and check those out.
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Aaron Epstein (38:16.670)
Aaron, creativemarket.com is great.
Or Aaron Underscore Epstein is my Twitter handle.
