Sarah Gooding
Envato is celebrating 10 years in business today. Founders Collis and Cyan Ta’eed started the company out of their garage in Sydney in 2006 with the launch of ActiveDen (originally called FlashDen). Envato expanded to provide an umbrella for a variety of different endeavors in the following years, including PSD Tuts and Freelance Switch launched in 2007, followed by Themeforest and AudioJungle in 2008, and CodeCanyon in 2010.
In a video created to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary, Collis Ta’eed said the couple had no experience with starting or running a business and in the early days they thought, “I sure hope we make it.” Both founders used to sell products like Flash templates and photographs and worked to build a marketplace they would want to sell on.
As of August 2016, Envato’s community has earned more than $400,000,000, and a significant portion of that revenue comes from WordPress products. Christian “Kriesi” Budschedl, a WordPress theme seller, became the first author to reach $1 million in sales on the marketplace in December 2011. Four years later, Themefusion, makers of the Avada theme, became the first author to reach $10 million. According to stats Envato posted last year after Pressnomics, WordPress products continue to play a key role in the company’s growth and dominate sales for the marketplaces’ top authors.
“Our success metrics are based on community earnings…Having recently passed the $400M community earnings mark, we’re aiming for that coveted goal of $1B,” Cyan Ta’eed said in Envato’s 10th anniversary post today. The company is focusing on launching two new products: Envato Elements, a membership site for design templates and assets, and Sites, a website creation and hosting platform.
That’s so amazing and as Author there, Envato helped me (and still doing) a lot.
I’m so thankful.
Bought a WooCommerce plugin from CodeCanyon once. It was of extremely bad code quality (despite having a rating of about 4.5 from almost 50 reviews). Also it did not have the functionality we needed. So I wanted a refund (within 14 days).
But I did not get my money back, but instead the money was add to my Envato account. So I could spent it on other CodeCanyon products – which I had no interest in. I wrote half a dozen emails to them, all being ignored.
This is something that’s illegal in the EU. Money back means money back, and you have a legal right for this. Since CodeCanyon / Envato are based somewhere in Asia (I think it was Philipines), I just gave up. Also it was only about 40 € or so. But still it makes me that angry today that I feel writing this comment in order to warn others.
you rarely get refunds on digital products.
also…many stores all over the world (offline) they give you back in store credit instead of your actual money. which is still technically a refund.
Most countries in north america and europe think refunds are a must when in reality it is not, stores are being nice but nothing in law says they MUST offer refunds.
Miroslav, I’m sorry, but you are wrong.
In EU there is a law that allows you to get a refund. See more on this link.
You’re all right, and wrong. The gotcha with the EU ‘cooling off’ law is that it does not apply to online digital content if you have started downloading the content so no digital sellers do not have to refund in all cases.
If you have purchased and downloaded the content (e.g. Plugin), then installed and evaluated it does not suit your needs and the seller has a record of the download attempt against your Order then the seller is not by law required to refund your purchase. Messy huh?
(I think refunding on incompatibility reasons is just good practice)
Great to hear and congratulation!
Envato have built up an incredible network and enabled thousands of authors who, before, would have no chance of getting their name out there and become successful in the WordPress space.
Are there negative experiences? Of course there are, and with thousands of authors there always will be, just as there is on the official repo too.
Chapeau to Collis, Cyan and team!
Although over the years I’ve found some really terrible coded pieces of software in Envato, I’m glad that this platform exists because it doesn’t have the stifling constraints of the official theme and plugin repositories.
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