Colourlovers (YC W10) launches Creative Market | Hacker News Reader

Colourlovers (YC W10) launches Creative Market

creativemarket.com

94 pointswhalesalad29 comments

I like the idea, really, in terms of goals, presentation, and spirit. Unfortunately the second thing my mind goes to with this is the practical stuff: What are the limits and licenses?

The licensing is required, but the limits on it make me wonder about how much use I'd get out of it. I see links to the license on the FAQ: https://creativemarket.com/license - but there's only one type of license offered. It's very artist-friendly, I'll admit, but... that's the only license. The FAQ says that if that's a deal-breaker, to use the contact form. But there's more about that license that's, well, confusing.

It seems about what you'd expect (by which I mean good for a seller, and not as much as I'd hope for as a buyer, but buying IP is always going to be hard to balance, so it's understandable/expected), though there's one that worries me: "All other items may only be used in a single commercial project." This is referencing items that aren't add-ons.

Does this mean, for example, a purchased WP theme could only be used on one client's site, ever? That's how I'm reading this plus the other terms.

And those packs of between 25 and 500 or so icons, can they only be used in a single client application? It looks like some are add-ons to Photoshop, while others are apparently a non-program specific package, doesn't that mean they have to be used differently per this license since one set of icons is an add-on, the other isn't? I know it's called "SimpleLicense", but licenses are never simple.

And then there's another licensing aspect. The true ownership of the items. The FAQ says that each item won't be checked when uploaded to the market, so the developer can update listings as they please, and to use a contact form for copyright issues.

I'd hope that'd be enough, but I already see one person who looks like they are probably infringing copyright, from what this lay person can see: https://creativemarket.com/Adrien/activity - does this individual has licenses from Braun for his UI product and individual licenses with each car manufacturer listed for the car designs that allows him to create products based off those and resell them with a restrictive license?

A place to report copyright violations in excess of just a contact form is going to be required, sooner or later. But a check to begin with to make sure someone isn't offering an item that already exists... I can see how that'd be an impediment. The texture packs make me wonder for both site and seller, as I wouldn't want to be the person that has to make sure one particular version of the texture "crumpled paper" isn't the same as the other 1000 versions of it.

That all said, it does feel like something that has great potential to succeed. I do some design work, and even with all I noticed, I'd still be tempted to use this site for selling sets of graphics.

We're trying to simplify licensing. That means having to make some calls as to what can fit in a single license and what falls outside. We will add an additional license that allows for resale soon. But if somebody is buying a template from any marketplace and reselling it to clients, they should have purchased an extended license that allows for resale. It is more expensive than the base license.

So our simple license is not meant to be the all encompassing, but as a start and base license, the most open license. ie, you can actually use it commercially.

As for the rights and infringement stuff, we take this seriously and are gating sellers right now while we work on this stuff before letting anybody open a shop. It will always be a moving target, but we'll keep working on our aim.

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.

That's terrific - thank you! I didn't realize the restrictions and dollars-and-cents of the other marketplaces, so that makes sense. And I also didn't realize this was born from CL.

(You should consider posting a version of the above somewhere on the 'About' page - it's heartfelt and reads really well.)

Yeah, thanks for the inspiration to write the answer, I think I'll put this in a blog post on CM soon. We want to tell the story of CM AND CL, but are trying not to confuse our story by saying too much at once.

Yeah, being webkit based it wasn't hard to get ipad support. Most of the work was spent getting the site to look good on retina displays.

There's a lot to mention regarding motivation, especially in terms of user experience for both buyers and sellers. One thing that's not as subjective is our split with sellers. Envato advertises a 70/30 split on themeforest, but you have to be exclusive as well as sell over $75k of goods (http://themeforest.net/make_money/payment_rates). If you're selling non-exclusively, authors only get 33%. We give authors 70%, end of story.

In the free market competition is good, it keeps pricing competitive, and despite Envato's popularity, they are still from my experience, not popular enough. To make it work well for the majority of authors they need everyone who works in the tech and creative space to know about them. I would give more as an author to the market if the market eliminated my need to spend much money/time on advertising.

For those who don't know what we are, CreativeMarket is an online marketplace for digital design assets. Think Etsy, but instead of vintage skirts and hand-sewn bags we have fonts and icons. (disclosure: I'm a developer here)

I've been a long time customer of Envato's marketplaces and this is the first I've seen of CreativeMarket. How would you compare yourselves to them? Browsing through your collection, I'm impressed with the level of quality.

It seems like CreativeMarket is focusing a lot on the creators of their content, much like how Etsy showcases their craftsmen with special blogs and features.

I've also been using Envato's resources for the past few years but I use it much more like I would Ebay or Amazon, searching for the right items to purchase and compare and not really noticing the people behind the work.

This is probably more for a hobby than a business, but I'd love it if you extended the site to cover musical 'goods.' Like people could submit riffs, melodies, drum loops, sound effects, to be bought for a small fee.

For me, the curation of the content, and quality of the item thumbnail previews really make this site for me, and I really hope both continue as you expand in content. Especially for the cheaper assets (< $10) I've never felt the envano sites were worth it in terms of how frustrating and time intensive it was to find quality items versus just building it myself. Compare this to CM, where I've already found a few things to buy...

It'll be really interesting to see how the business model is going to work and whether you'll be able to hand curate all new submissions or automate to an effective degree. Apple has been able to do curation but obviously your volumes will be much different, despite similar price points and margins.

A few bug reports --

I wasn't interested in the icon sets - I unchecked the Icons category but many still remained, ex [0]. It looks like you can disable all of the categories and still get 52 results.

Some of the items have contradictory license terms, ex [1]. The license at the bottom of this page seems to contradict the Simple license listed in the about table.

You cannot "Use a purchased icon set as artwork that enhances actual gameplay in your app, such as the birds in Angry Birds" in the simple license seems like it is an unnecessary grey area, and scares me because I don't understand the intent, where the line is drawn, and whether you had a lawyer look over the license.

[0] https://creativemarket.com/Picons/617-Picons-Ultimate-icons

[1] https://creativemarket.com/DottedDaisy/794-Blue-Argyle-Digit...

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

I'm a huge colourlovers fan, so I knew I had to check out your creative market. Congrats... the site looks great!

I just went to buy a font for use in an iPhone app, which in part allows for people to type messages in various fonts. All the fonts I liked had "simple" licenses that seemed to prevent that sort of usage.

Are you guys going to have more fonts with non-simple licenses, to be a bit more mobile-app dev friendly? If you were, I would buy hundreds of dollars worth of fonts from you! It is not easy to find great fonts with a mobile-friendly license.

You're saying the license didn't permit the font to be distributed in the app right?

So you're asking that they include some sort of [re]distribution license?

Yes that would be nice to be able to purchase fonts with license add-ons.

  [ ] Usage        $10
  [✓] Distribution $100
  [ ] Resale       $1000

Yah, exactly: a redistribution/resell license. This is from the FAQ:

"Every product sold on Creative Market comes with our SimpleLicense. This license allows your customers to use your product in personal or commercial projects, but does not grant the right to redistribute or resell your product, whether modified, unmodified, or as part of a new work."

https://creativemarket.com/faq

More info on the Simple license here: https://creativemarket.com/license

Ok, this is confusing. IF the license allows you to use the font in a commercial product, how does it then not allow you to redistribute or sell the same product? Isn't the selling / redistribution part what makes a product commercial in the first place?

Presumably you can sell a product which uses the font, but you can't actually sell the font file.

What we're trying to do with our SimpleLicense is to not create one license that covers all usage scenarios, but cover most of them in one license... and then we will be adding others for things like resale & distribution. So yes, give us some time. :)

So will this always be invite only or will it be opened to the public eventually?

The marketplace is open to the public for buyers, we're gating sellers right now just to have a bit more control during launch and make sure all bugs are flushed out on the payments side of things... and then yes, it will be totally open.

Very well made. Best of luck to you guys!

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

Mousemade is in contrast to handmade. We're like Etsy, but of digital content.

You could also have 'LAN-crafted'

slow clap

I don't think it's silly. I found it to be funny in a good way. At least that's my opinion, and I'm usually a grumpy person.

I have a guilty pleasure for playing with words. I think it's clever and makes me smile. Sorry it doesn't for you.

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