Aaron Epstein, Creative Market
The SaaS Marketplace That Sold to Autodesk in 16 Months
Aaron Epstein's first product was ColorSchemer, a color-picking tool he built during spring break in his college dorm room in 1999. He grew it into a six-figure-a-year business and ran it solo for six years. The business was so automated that Aaron got bored. That boredom led him to merge with co-founders who had built COLOURlovers, a creative community with over a million registered users. Together they went through Y Combinator in 2010. But investors were not excited about a color data business. Aaron and his team tried pitching a crowdsourced color trend platform - a competitor to Pantone - but the market felt too small. Then MetLife reached out and paid $250 to license a pattern that a community member had created just for fun. That single transaction changed everything. The team realized the SaaS marketplace opportunity was far bigger than color data. They raised $1 million, but quickly discovered that building a marketplace on top of COLOURlovers was not the right approach. The scope was much bigger than palettes and patterns - it included fonts, Photoshop files, website themes, and stock photos. So they made the painful decision to abandon their million-user community and launch Creative Market as a separate brand starting from zero. They raised another million dollars, launched the full SaaS marketplace in October 2012, and grew 20% month over month from day one. In October 2013, two acquisition offers arrived on the exact same day - one from a company that wanted to gut the team, and one from Autodesk that aligned perfectly with their culture and vision. Aaron chose Autodesk. The deal closed in February 2014. What looked like a 16-month overnight success was actually 15 years of building, pivoting, and trading up from one opportunity to the next.
