The Pre-launch Strategy That Got 70,000 Users In 9 Months for Creative Market (Aaron Epstein)

People talk about startups are hard. And I think one of the things that gets lost there is startups are really hard because you're not just trying to build a successful product, but you're trying to build a successful company at the same time.

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All right everyone, today we have Aaron Epstein, who is one of the co-founders of Creative Market. And Creative Market is a platform for handcrafted, mouse-made design content from independent creatives around the world. Aaron, how are you doing today?

I'm doing good. Thanks for having me, Eric.

Yeah, thanks for being on the show. So can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background is?

Sure. So most recently, I'm the co-founder of Creative Market, but the Creative Market story actually started about 15 or 16 years ago in my dorm room at the University of Maryland. It was 1999. I had a web design company with some friends. Clients would give us a logo and we had to find matching colors to go with their logo colors for the websites we were making for them. And I thought at the time, I was like, there must be a way where I can just give this a tool, a color, and it can tell me what colors go with that color. And I couldn't find anything at the time. So I actually just set out and did the color theory research myself and figured out all the math behind what makes harmonious colors and what makes colors look good together. And I built this tool called Color Schemer. And it was basically a web-based tool where you give it a color and it says, here are your triads or your split complementary colors. And you could just be off and running and know that your colors would look good. So I put that out my freshman year, and I realized that I could actually make a lot more advanced features by making a downloadable version of the software. And so I just taught myself Visual Basic on PC basically and built a paid version of the software that had sales from day one because I had this free web tool that people were using. And so when I graduated in 2003, I was like, okay, I'm gonna see what I can do with this. I'm making $1,500 a month as a college student and don't have to hit up my parents for money. So I was like, this is a pretty sweet gig. And so I graduated from school and I went full-time with it and basically spent the next 6 years through 2009 just building a Mac version of the software, more advanced versions of the software. Just doing Color Schemer pretty much by myself. So I was doing all the design, development, business strategy, partnerships, customer support, everything, which was great. It was a great way to make passive income and work whatever hours I wanted. But by 2009, I started to get really bored because it was so automated. And so I was looking for the next big opportunity. And so that's when I connected with Darius and Chris, who were the co-founders of Color Lovers. And so Color Lovers was this creative design community that they had created in 2005 where people could come together and create and share color palettes and patterns and shapes, kind of like the core basis of a lot of creative projects. And so, you know, we got together in 2009. I was looking for the next big thing. They were too. And we decided to merge it up. So combining my color software and their color community. A few months after that, we applied to Y Combinator. We got in, and what we were trying to do is we had these businesses that had been around for a while and were making money, but not in a big scalable, you know, venture-backed way. And so we're trying to figure out what's the scalable business that we're going to build here using the properties that we have today. And so we spent our time in YC doing that. And we were torn between 2 paths. And the first was trying to figure out, you know, if we could build this really cool color data company. So you might be familiar with Pantone.

Mm-hmm.

Pantone, they basically have a couple of, like, I use air quotes, experts that sit in a room and they say the color of the year next year is going to be fuchsia. And they come up with all these reasons why, based on economic conditions and, you know, all other kinds of mumbo jumbo. But here we had an engaged community that was interacting around colors and color palettes, different combinations of colors, different patterns. And so we thought if we tied demographics to this, we could actually give marketers a better tool to determine, you know, what colors they should use for their next fashion line or for their branding or things like that. So we were torn between that idea. The other idea was a marketplace idea. We had tons of people making creative content all day, just having fun playing in their spare time. And so ultimately, that November after we did Y Combinator, MetLife came to us because they wanted to use a pattern that a member had created on ColorLovers as a wrap for their Thanksgiving display for their building across from Bryant Park in New York City. And so they paid $250, and we gave it all to the person who made it. who made the pattern, but really the light bulb went off in our head where we were like, this is an opportunity. If we can build this in a scalable way, this content that people are making is actually really valuable to these other businesses. And so we set out to build a marketplace around the content people were creating on ColorLovers. And partway through that process, we actually realized like, this is much bigger than the content people are creating with our tools on ColorLovers. There's fonts and Photoshop files and stock photos and 3D assets and all kinds of things. And so that led us to create Creative Market as a separate website. And so we went full steam ahead focusing on building and launching a brand new marketplace in Creative Market.

Nice. Cool. And can you tell us a little, what type of numbers can you share around Creative Market today?

Yeah, so just kind of a quick high level. So we launched in October of 2012. We used a bunch of different tactics to actually have 70,000 people signed up. when we launched the site. So we put out this teaser site and used a bunch of other tips and tricks to help it go viral. And so we ended up with 70,000 people when we launched, which helped to really kickstart the marketplace because you need both the buyer and the seller side. And then a year later, we hit $1 million in revenue to the day from our launch. And then a couple of weeks after that, we had 2 acquisition offers on the same day. And so we were at a position where we were trying to decide if we wanted to continue with this real high-growth business that we had been building, or if one of these acquisition offers was a good fit for us. Ultimately, one of those acquisition offers was from Autodesk, and we felt like that would be a really great place to continue to you know, all the things people say when they're acquired, continue building the business, serving the same community, having more resources, you know, all those great reasons. So we were actually acquired by Autodesk in February of 2014, and ever since then, you know, we're 18 months into the acquisition now, all my boss tells me is just keep growing and gives us the resources to do that. We've been able to be really autonomous. All the people on the team that were here in this, I'll call it the startup days, you know, before we were acquired, feel like we still operate like a startup today. So we've really been able to maintain our culture. Everything feels very much the same. We just have a lot more resources at our disposal to be able to continue to grow. So we've had double-digit month-over-month growth. Since really since before we went, since we launched the marketplace, and that's continued through our time at Autodesk as well.

Wow, that's crazy. And I was just going to ask you that question too. It's like you must have been growing at an insane rate to, you know, get these acquisition offers. So there you have it, double-digit. Cool. Okay, so you talked about some tricks that you used before launching to get to 70,000 customers. So how did you, Can you share some tricks that you used?

Sure. Yeah, so we basically had an existing community in ColorLovers that had, I think it had more than a million members at the time. But at the same time, they weren't— a lot of the people that were ColorLovers members were the type of people that wanted to kind of play around on the site and use our tools and have fun. And they weren't necessarily the people that were going to buy a lot of things. And so we made a decision early on that rather than repurposing our existing user base, which was huge at over a million members, we were going to start over from zero with Creative Market. And our goal was to really try to capture the type of people that would come to spend money, that would be there for the marketplace, not necessarily to just kind of play around and have fun. And so what we did is Before we ever launched the site, we launched a teaser page on creativemarket.com, and basically what we did is for anybody that signed up and gave their email address before we launched, we gave them a free $5 in credit to spend on content once we actually launched the marketplace. And so that was great, and so people came and they put in their email address, and then once they put in their email address and created an account, The next thing that they saw, which was really the only thing you could do on the site at the time, because it was just this teaser page, was this viral referrer program. So we basically gave people that were coming in order to get the free $5 a way to spread the word with their friends, get them to sign up, and they'd earn even more money to be able to spend. So basically it gave them incentive to promote us, and it also helped us to seed the buyer side of the marketplace with all the people that we could come capture before we launched on day one. So basically what we did is we showed this progress bar and you could reach different tiers that gave you different benefits. So if you referred 5 friends, then you'd get $10 more to spend. If you referred 20 friends, you'd get $30 more to spend. And if you referred 50 friends, you would get $200 more to spend. And so we actually had dozens of people that ended up referring more than 50 of their friends before we had even launched the full site. So all that was great, but it was taking us longer than we had hoped for to actually build out the full marketplace that we were gonna launch. So the next thing that we did is we basically took this growing buyer side of the marketplace that was signing up for the free credits, and we went out to a lot of people that we saw were actually creating content for sale on other marketplaces, or just who we— people that we knew through the design community, And we told them, we've got thousands of people that are signing up that want to be your customers on day 1. Are you interested in selling your content with us, number 1? And number 2, would you be willing to offer up any of your products that you have for sale as a free good for a limited period of time, just while we're in this teaser phase before we launch? And so we were actually able to recruit 30 different products that were offered for free. And so we put together this page called Free Goods, and it was visible to anybody. You didn't have to sign up for Creative Market in order to see this page, but everything that had a download button on it for free, you had to then sign up in order to download anything. So between the viral referral program and this Free Goods page, those were the biggest things that we had that helped us get to those 70,000 members that we had come launch day.

Got it. How long did it take you— okay, so let's say, I mean, I know you started the progress bar thing. I mean, how many months did it take from the start point of that till actual launch?

Yeah, so we actually launched that in January of 2012, and then it was October 2012 when we launched the full site. So it was 9 months in between, and it was probably April or May when we launched that free goods page, because we got a few months in, you know, we realized We needed to launch with a core set of features in order to convert especially sellers over to use our marketplace versus some of the existing options that were out there. And so, you know, we were like, okay, it's going to take us longer than we expected, so let's put together this free goods page that will show activity and give people a reason to come back and continue to share it.

Got it. Okay, makes sense. And it's funny, you have the— so you have the chicken and the egg problem right now, which is something It's something that I'm dealing with, with something else I'm building right now. And so I guess selfish question is, what was harder for you, building the seller side or the buyer side?

So I think it depends on the type of marketplace that you have, but for us specifically, I think the buyer side is the more difficult thing. We can reach out to a lot of different sellers. and get kind of a base level of content there in order to be able to launch the marketplace. But ultimately, if they don't start to see sales early on, then they're not going to continue to engage. So that's why it's important that, you know, you need to grow the buyer side and the seller side kind of at the same rate with each other. And so we were able to convince people to, to give us a shot because we had these really great seller-friendly terms. So things like we gave you 70% of each sale. Almost every other marketplace out there gives you less than 50%. unless you're exclusive with them, at which point they will give you 50%. And we just kind of felt like fundamentally that's not fair to the creators that spend, you know, all their time and energy making these beautiful products that other people want to buy. And so, you know, we made sure we wanted to give them the 70%. We also made sure that they didn't have to be exclusive. So there's really no risk for trying us out. You don't have to, you know, stop selling on your own website or somewhere else. List your products on Creative Market, let us prove to you that we can get sales for you, and if we don't, no loss, that's okay, it didn't really cost you anything to move your stuff over. We also let people set their own prices, whereas most other marketplaces, they will determine a price for you based on the content that you're selling, and then we also didn't have a per-product review process, So a lot of other marketplaces, you want to offer something for sale, it needs to go into this review process. It could take like 2 weeks. We would think about, you know, Rovio and the, the App Store. They put out Angry Birds and Apple reviews it and it's great and everybody loves it. It's a huge success. And then Rovio wants to sell Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Seasons and all these others, but they still have to wait for that 2-week period while Apple reviews it. And so from our perspective, we just started reviewing people on a per-seller basis. So you would show us the type of content you want to sell. We would approve it or deny it. If you're approved, your shop would instantly be open. You could start uploading your products for sale, set your own prices. They go live instantly. So we had all these really seller-friendly terms that helped recruit people over and kind of made it like a risk-free proposition for them. So the tricky thing for us was just continuing to grow the buyer side.

Got it. Okay. So it sounds like in the beginning, I mean, buyer side is more difficult, but you had to kind of grow both at the same time, right?

Yep, totally.

Got it. Okay. Now, so let's assume you're building both at the same time. My gut feeling, and correct me if I'm wrong, is when you get to a certain point of a certain number of sellers, it just kind of starts to grow on its own.

Yeah.

Do you think that was around like 10,000 sellers or 1,000? What was that?

That's kind of hard to say. What we found is between the ratio of members to sellers is about 1% roughly. And so just trying to kind of keep those in balance, I think, was helpful for us. But you're right, it did sort of start to feed on its own. When we were first getting started, I was always thinking of these milestones where we would know, you know, when we were on the right track. And some of it was just seller success stories, people sharing how they made, you know, $10,000 in a month on Creative Market, and then $100,000 in a month on Creative Market. And now we're getting— we're about a month away from our top seller who's about to hit $1 million in sales on Creative Market. And so—

Wow.

Those are kind of just milestones that are sort of arbitrary, but they let us know that things are working. And so as long as people are coming in and they're being successful, that's the biggest thing that we care about and try to optimize for. You know, there's like, we get our 30% net of each sale, but we look at the total gross transaction volume across the marketplace as kind of our success metric and Our number one KPI that we measure, because if our sellers are being successful and they're making a lot of money, then we will be successful. So that's the main thing that we try to focus on. And, you know, you're right, it starts to feed off itself once you have some base level of content. In our case, there's enough great stuff to buy in each category. Then at that point, it's really just about driving more buyers to buy that great content.

Got it. Okay. And I guess that leads me to my next question, you know, what's working? for you guys right now in terms of user acquisition?

Yep, so there's a lot of things. So we had that free goods thing before we launched, and then we launched, and so that page with 30 free assets disappeared. And a couple months later, we actually brought that back but in a different way. So our twist on it was we called it Free Goods of the Week. And so we don't have a concept of free products in our marketplace. But anybody who's selling something on Creative Market can opt any of their products into our Free Goods of the Week program, where every week we pick out 6 new products that are gonna be free for that 1-week period. And so what we do is we send an email blast to all of our members, which is about, I don't know, 1.2 million people today, and every Monday they get an email that says, hey, here's the 6 new Free Goods of the Week for this week. And so they come back, they can download them for free, they share them with their friends. For somebody that's not already a member, you know, they have a 1-week kind of time box thing where they can come and grab this content before it goes back to paid the next week, and then there's a new set of free goods the following week. And so that drives a lot of new people to come and sign up to the site to download the free stuff, and then through our email marketing You know, every Wednesday we send an email to the community that says, here's the top new products added over the last week. Then every Thursday we send an email that says, here are the products that are trending on Creative Market this week. So we're confident that if we can just get people to come and sign up, even if it's to download something for free, then those are the types of people that are in our target audience and we can ultimately get them to buy something.

Got it. You know what I really noticed about the design world is people are fanatics. I mean, how do you— it's different from anything else I've experienced with other businesses. I mean, what's your feeling on that? Do you agree with that?

Yeah, so there's a high standard that gets applied, and this is something that we've always felt too. Even when building the site, it's not enough to just put out a really rough design version of a website. Design marketplace and have the type of people that we want to attract come there and like have the respect for it and like it. And even with ColorLovers, you know, like 8 years ago, that's the kind of thing that we were focused on too, because it's a community that serves design people. And so the standard is just higher in terms of user experience, you know, the visuals, the UI, all this stuff. So we hold ourselves internally as a team to a very high standard. And we hope that that sets the bar for a lot of people that are coming to the community so they have a great experience and they share it with their friends, whether they're, you know, a top expert master designer or whether they're, you know, more of a developer just looking for some design to help them look good for client work that they're doing or something like that.

Got it. Okay. Now you talk about how you, you know, your design team holds a very high standard. Is there like a bullet point list of criteria that, you know, people have to follow Um, we're not that explicit with it, but, um, the designers on our team are—

they have, you know, more than a decade of experience each. And so it's just something that kind of comes from being in the industry, um, and just kind of having a personal high bar. Um, and so really the hard thing is not necessarily like making sure that we hit all the criteria for what our standards are. The hard thing is actually trying to find that balance where we don't like overdesign things or try to get too far down the perfectionist road because there is a balance where ultimately, you know, like something reaches a really good level and we have a high bar and you just need to get something out there and start to get feedback at some point. So that's kind of the biggest thing that we try to balance when we're designing new things.

Makes sense. So on that note, I mean, how do you— a lot of people from the tech world that listen to this and they're wondering, how do you go about finding great designers?

Yeah, so our secret weapon is actually Dribbble, which probably a lot of people are familiar with, but we post ads on Dribbble job board. We're fortunate to kind of come from the design world, so we've had ColorLovers and Color Schemer software, which has been around for a long time. And a lot of designers use that as a tool. So for us, especially before we had launched Creative Market, we had a product that a lot of designers were using, and so that made it easier to attract them. But the biggest success that we had is a lot of the best designers are on a site like Dribbble. Just going through there, finding people that are doing work that looks like the type of work that you want done. That's the biggest thing that I can emphasize when looking for a designer to hire, is to look for somebody that's doing the kind of work with the kind of feel that you're looking for. Otherwise, there's just going to be a lot of back and forth. You're going to be on the wrong page on a lot of different things. But to use that as a starting point and then to just reach out directly to those people and see if they have any interest in collaborating together. That's where we find some of the best people and You know, once— Jaron Lamson is the head of our design and community team, and he's just like an incredible designer, has a great name and reputation in the space. So we actually hired him just before we launched Creative Market, and he helped design and build the Creative Market site out. We were coming from Color Lovers, but he's so well respected that just his name, like a lot of other people know him. And wanna work with him and then, you know, that kind of starts the flywheel of recruiting, which is really great.

Cool. So when, I mean, obviously looking at the, you know, their work on Dribbble or Behance or whatever is really important and kind of evaluating their aesthetic. But, you know, if you had to pick one thing that sticks out from your design interview process, what would it be?

One of the biggest questions that's telling for me when I interview designers is I ask them to describe their process. Some people will talk about, you know, the tools that they use. Some people will talk about kind of the workflow that they go through. But generally the right answer that I'm looking for is I'm looking for people that are starting with solving problems. And so some people will go ahead and skip that. And for me, that's an indicator of kind of like what level they're at in their career. Because most senior designers will always start with, you know, we want to identify the problem, figure out what are the goals to solve it, why do we want to do this, and all that comes before actually trying to figure out the best approach. So just kind of an open-ended question there around like, tell me about your design process, is usually pretty telling for me.

Awesome, and I think that really applies not just to design but everything across the board, right?

Yep, absolutely. Yep, I ask the same questions of developers too and And a lot of other people that we hire for.

Got it, okay. Can you tell us about one big struggle you faced while growing the business?

Yeah, so the first was kind of making the decision to stop everything that we were doing on ColorLovers, give up that million-member-plus community, and start over from zero members on Creative Market. We spent a number of years really trying to make Color Lovers into a big scalable business. And we tried a lot of different things. You know, we built this profile design tool called Femillion that actually up until like a year ago was linked on Twitter's design settings page. And it would basically let you just click on a couple of palettes and click on a couple patterns and you instantly have your Twitter profile designed and then you could save it to your profile. And millions of people would use that every month, but we couldn't find a way to monetize that. And then we set up a partnership with Martha Stewart Living and her company because they had paints that they sold through Home Depot. And so we made it so you could map all the colors on ColorLovers to the nearest paint color through Martha Stewart Living, and then you can click to buy a sample directly from Home Depot's website. And so we're trying all these different things, you know. The cool thing about color is it's in everything. But at the same time, nobody pays directly for color. So we're trying to figure out how we can build this color business into something big. And we probably spent more time than we should have trying to do that versus, you know, making the decision to go down the marketplace road and instantly going full force into trying to set that up. But so that's kind of like the biggest one that, that stays with me that I learned from. But another thing is, Like, people talk about startups are hard, and I think one of the things that gets lost there is startups are really hard because you're not just trying to build a successful product, but you're trying to build a successful company at the same time. It's not enough to build a product, you know, build an MVP that users want to use, because if you actually do that, then the next thing that you want to do is build a really big company that a lot of people want to work at. And you kind of have to do those both at the same time, and they're so intertwined and they feed off of each other, and you really need both to be successful for the startup that you're building to be successful. So it's not enough to just focus on product, and it's not enough to just focus on the company and the culture and making a great environment where people want to work. You really have to do both at the same time, and I think that's like the key thing that That makes startups so difficult.

How do you get good at doing both at the same time?

Yeah, so it's not easy. And this is why, you know, solo founders have a really, really hard time doing it. I think for solo founders to make it work, they really need some early employees that are almost like more than early employees. You know, maybe they have a higher equity stake than a traditional early employee. Maybe they're just so passionate about what you're building. For us, we were fortunate because, you know, my co-founder Darius and I, we sort of split some of the roles here where basically I led product. So I was, you know, solely focused on building a really great product that people would want to use. And then his job was a lot of the fundraising and a lot of company culture types of things. Partnerships. And so for each of us to kind of have that focus, it gave us each the headspace to make something really great versus if, you know, it was just me or just Darius, that would have been a lot more difficult because we would have been splitting our time between each of those and it would have been harder for each of them to be as successful.

Got it. So the key takeaway is focus.

Yeah, so I'm big on focus for sure. But it's difficult when there's so many things to focus on, trying to pick and choose the ones that need your attention the most.

Right. Totally agree. Okay. Switching gears here. What's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

Yeah. So my favorite quote is, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. So the advice I would give to my previous self is to start today. You know, when I was in high school, I played in a band and we were always, you know, had like great guitarists, great bassists, great drummer, and we were always looking for like a really great singer. And I always thought like, oh man, I should take vocal lessons, but it'll probably take me a couple of years to like get really good at it. And so I never did. And then fast forward to like, you know, we played in high school and then after college, like I got back together with some of the same guys and we played for like 5 more years. But we spent most of that time trying to find a really great vocalist to play with us. And we had spent so much time that at that point I wish like, man, if I had just started when I first thought about it, then we'd be in a really great place at this point. So I think a lot of people sort of feel the same way about startup ideas that they have or things that they want to do in their life. And you kind of put that off or you wait and you say like, oh, it's going to take me a couple of years to do this. But at some point, like Apple started or Google started with that first step in the journey and you just have to get started. And every single day from that point forward becomes you or the business that you're building sort of building this wall, this ecosystem that will help make you successful. And every day is driving towards that. And every day that you're not doing it is every day that you are not working towards that goal. So the biggest piece of advice that I try to give people is to start today, plant that tree today, and then in the future, you'll be really glad that you did.

Totally agree with that. I always like to make the comparison To compound interest. So I like that.

Yep.

Okay. Now, how do you structure your day?

So my day nowadays is largely just a ton of meetings. So I will normally come in and focus on knocking out any email in the morning. Then it's a lot of meetings throughout the day. More email, you know, as I have gaps in between. But kind of the biggest productivity hack that I have is I keep a to-do list that I really call like a do this next list. Because given, you know, kind of the structure of meetings, sometimes they'll end and you have 15 minutes to spare, or sometimes you have 5 minutes, or sometimes you have 30 minutes. It's just kind of the nature of the manager's schedule. It's not always clear like how best to use that time. So what I do is I keep this list called do this next, and I rank all the things that are at the top of my to-do list. And then I, whenever I have any downtime, I jump into that list and I just pull from the top of it and I say, is this something I can do in the amount of time that I have right now? And I just kind of go down the list until I find the most important thing that I can actually fit in that amount of time. And then I focus on knocking that out before the next meeting or whatever it is that I have to move on to.

Got it. Okay. Now, I mean, what's your take on, you know, you're going from the startup world where you're actually in the trenches all the time to being more on, like you said, a manager schedule where there's just a ton of meetings all the time?

Yeah, so if you haven't read PG's blog post, Paul Graham's blog post, The Maker Versus Manager Schedule, that's one of the most important blog posts that I tell people to read. I find myself telling people to read all the time. I've seen it on our own team as people that are, you know, kind of start out as individual contributors transition to a management role. And the tricky thing is, you know, people that make really great individual contributors have a core set of skills that make them really great at whatever their functional area is. And then becoming a manager introduces a completely different, different set of skills, which is great because that's like a huge growth opportunity for a lot of people. But a lot of times, kind of the initial reaction from people is they say, okay, well, I'm gonna continue doing my individual contributor duties at, say, 75% of the time, and then I'll do my management duties at 25% of the time, or 50% each, or whatever it is. And what ends up happening is you actually end up doing the individual contributor and the management stuff at about 80% each. So you're not doing as good of a job on either, yet you're still completely swamped and overwhelmed. So the schedules that people live by are different, where individual contributors typically need a big block of time in order to, to like really get into their work and accomplish something really great, versus managers are on that 30-minute meeting schedule. And that meeting schedule is super disruptive if you're trying to create something really great. So the biggest thing that I try to tell people is to be conscious of it, to pick one, And to be very explicit around how you're spending your time to make sure that you're growing into the role in the right way. Okay.

What's one must-read book you'd recommend to everyone?

I don't have one must-read, but the type of stuff that I like to read is I love to read and learn from founder stories. I always find those so fascinating. One, because I can identify with them, and so It's nice to feel like, okay, I'm not the only person who went through that or had those feelings or went through those struggles. The other is I just like to learn from some of the successes and failures of other people without having to make them myself. So one of my favorite books is Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. It's filled with tons of stories how some really big companies got started. I'm also a big fan of Delivering Happiness about Zappos. Hatching Twitter, I read that in like a day because I thought that was super interesting. The Hard Thing About Hard Things from Ben Horowitz. Any type of founder stories, I'm a sucker for.

Yeah, those are all great books for sure. Yeah, it's the biographies. I think it's the nobody like telling you what to do explicitly, but you kind of telling yourself what you need to do from, you know, by learning that story, right?

Yeah, totally.

Yep. Cool. All right. Well, Aaron, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online?

You can find me at Aaron_Epstein, E-P-S-T-E-I-N. That's my Twitter handle. I blog super rarely at AaronE.com. And of course, through Creative Market is, you know, my big focus these days, continuing to grow that and build a really great product for creators out there everywhere.

All right, awesome. Everyone, this is Aaron Epstein from Creative Market. Make sure you check it out and see what you can find from there. Thanks, Aaron.

Awesome. Thanks, Eric.

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