How Dribbble Transitioned To A Marketplace With Constantine Anastasakis | EM Group Chat #201

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk about founders and leaders on some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 201, which is really great group chat just to have with Constantine Anis Plakakis, who's the CEO of Dribbble. Dribbble is one of the largest online communities and marketplaces for hiring designers. Constantine was also previously at Fiverr, so some really great marketplace experience. So it was really awesome and detailed chat with Constantine where he backed his experience at Fiverr and some of his key learnings, what led to him joining Dribbble. We got to learn about the recent transition to a marketplace model How Dribbble is leveraging AI. Constantine shared lots of tips for founders. We also had a brief but great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. I think you'll find it a great watch to the end. So Constantine, many of us have been following along with your updates about Dribbble and the recent transition to a marketplace model. So I'm excited to have you join us here today. I want to start off by saying huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. We have a lot that we're going to dive into with all your experience at Fiverr and of course now at Dribbble. I thought it'd be great if you can start off by briefly sharing a background for those here that might not know you.

Yeah, totally. And thanks for having me. And it's, you know, it's funny when I was reading some of the community posts a few months or a couple months ago and, you know, we'll talk about it today, I'm sure. But, you know, there's been so much over the last few months that has been said about, you know, Dribbble and what we're doing and stuff. And it was interesting because this was the first time when I was reading through these posts that I saw a lot, I saw like questions or comments or observations that were really close to what was actually happening behind the scenes, like the motivation behind some of these decisions and everything. And so, which was very sort of refreshing and fun for me to— you know, to see what other people who had like familiarity with these types of marketplace challenges were thinking and saying about things. But anyway, to answer your question, so I've been at Drippl now for about a year and a half. Most of my career has been spent at online marketplaces. So, Dribbble that has now become a marketplace. I was at a stock media company called Pond5 for about 5 or 6 years that where I was the chief growth officer and we eventually sold that company to Shutterstock. And before Pond5, my first sort of marketplace experience was with Fiverr and really the years that I spent there were what got me very excited about marketplaces in general. And along my career, I've had a couple moments where I done something else, like I've left and joined a different type of business and been miserable and come back to a marketplace, you know, very quickly. But yeah, I can share a little bit about Sort of my experiences at Fiverr and then work my way up if that sounds good. So when I joined Fiverr, it was pretty early on. So this was like 2012, 2013, somewhere around there. And the way I actually ended up there was I really liked Fiverr. I really liked the company and I reached out to their head of HR. And said, you know, I'm based in New York. I know you don't have an office here or a presence here. If you were ever looking for, if you ever were looking to hire a biz dev person, like a partnerships person or something in the US or in New York, you know, keep me in mind. And she responded right away to say, I'm just about to post a head of biz dev role for our new New York office. which was just, you know, just dumb luck on my part. And so that's how I ended up at Fiverr right when they were starting to build out their US presence, even though much of the company's traffic and customers at the time came from the US, they didn't have an actual physical office here or anything. And so I spent about 3 years with the company. The New York office grew to be maybe when I left, it was about I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 people. And like I said, it was really my first experience with the marketplace. Interestingly, when I got to Dribbble, you know, 10 years later or however long it was, it's interesting because there were definitely learnings from Fiverr, which I'm happy to share that translated. But there were also some like big misconceptions that I had coming into Dribbble that were, that I sort of brought with me from Fiverr that just didn't apply. And so it's been, and, you know, I'm happy to share what some of those were. But so yeah, I was at Fiverr leading biz dev. We were doing partnerships with all sorts of different companies to either bring more traffic to the site, like high-intent buyer traffic, or we did a lot of partnerships that were with other companies that wanted to integrate their products as sort of add-on services. So it was, you know, if you get a logo designed and then you want it printed on your merch, you know, and that sort of stuff. So we did a lot of things like that. And then I left Fiverr and joined a different company that one of the Fiverr co-founders had started, which is Lemonade, which is an insurance company, which was also a great experience. But it's so funny going from, you know, one of the things that I love about a marketplace is that, you know, they're very unpredictable. You're, you know, you're kind of smushing all these different people together and they're gonna do all sorts of unexpected things. And then you go to, from that to what most companies are like, especially an insurance company that is, you know, very highly regulated and everything where there was a very specific way that you purchased insurance. And even though Lemonade did it in a very innovative way, you still had to follow this particular path and you either did that or you didn't. Whereas on Fiverr, we were, you know, we saw people doing all sorts of unexpected things, which like in terms of the types of services that they were selling and which gave us a lot of inspiration on actual features to build. And the same is true at Dribbble, like a lot of something that we talk about a lot internally is, you know, what are people already using the platform for? Is that something we can facilitate? And that's really a lot of the, that might be the most important context for our decisions to pivot the business. But so anyway, I go from Fiverr to LemonAid. I wanted to get back to a marketplace. So I go to Pond5, which is a stock media marketplace focused on video. And I was there for about 5 or 6 years. And then in 2021, we went through a sale process and actually one of the companies that we had spoken to was Dribbble. And that's how I got to know the Dribbble management team a little bit through that sale process. Eventually we sell to Shutterstock and then I left shortly after that, joined a mortgage lender. So that's, these are the, you know, the Lemonade and then Lower, which was the mortgage lender. Those were the 2, you know, detours I took from marketplaces. And again, it's just, there's nothing more jarring than going from like this freewheeling marketplace with, you know, thousands or millions of users to like a financial services product that's very specific. You know, you do it this way and you cannot deviate from this path. And then when the Dribbble opportunity came up and like I said, I'd gotten to know the team a little bit from, you know, a year or two earlier. And I also, I mean, I knew Dribbble from when I was at Fiverr and I've tried to dig up, they exist somewhere, but definitely in like, you know, the early 2010s, I reached out to Dribbble from Fiverr to do a partnership of some kind. And I never heard back. But actually the same was true at Pond5 too. I ended up working at multiple companies that wouldn't respond to my cold outreach from Fiverr. But anyway, I joined Dribbble and Mike, should I sort of go into like the decision to pivot the business or?

Yeah. Well, that's a really great background. So yeah, well, we'll definitely get into Dribbble in a little more detail, but, you know, kind of going back to Fiverr, you briefly shared about, your experience there, you know, what were some of those like key learnings, you know, from your time there as a marketplace that you've then taken with you to Dribbble?

One of the things that I always come back to, if it's relevant to Dribbble, it'll become more relevant for us in the near future. But one of the things that I think made Fiverr so successful, and as a disclaimer, I don't have any special insights into Fiverr. In the years since I left. You know, I speak with some of those folks that are still there periodically, but I'm sharing sort of what I learned when I was there. But one of those things was, I think one of the things that made Fiverr so successful was I think a lot of times your inclination as a founder, as an early stage company is to be hyper focused on one particular niche. And Fiverr took what I think is a riskier counterintuitive approach that, you know, go very wide. And so it's not just gonna be design services or copywriting services or video editing services or voiceover services. It's going to be all of those and more. When I was there, there were about 200 different subcategories. I'm sure it's much more now. But one of the things that we had found was the, and this is gonna sound very obvious, but a buyer who purchases across multiple categories was wildly more valuable of the business than a buyer that stayed within one category, which is obvious, you know, they're sort of, they're buying their logo, but then they're also buying an intro, an explainer video for their website, which includes that animation and the voiceover and there's a copywriting, you know, they're buying across multiple services. But what sort of made this very, what kind of made this more apparent how important it was to be able to move someone, a buyer across multiple categories, which was while I was there, we spoke to a number of other marketplaces that were focused on specific verticals. And I saw something very, I saw something, a pattern across a lot of those businesses, which was basically that, you know, they focus on a particular vertical, for example, design. And they'd go for quality. They're like, we're gonna have the very best design talent here and they're gonna charge very high prices. And in order to get the types of customers that can afford to pay those prices, you need a sales team, an account management team, and you'd end up with these organizations that were, had great, great talent in a particular vertical. And these are all services marketplaces, but you have great talent in a particular vertical, But they'd have a very difficult time bringing in the types of buyers that not only could pay those prices, but could pay those prices frequently enough to sustain the business, but also didn't want to go and hire someone themselves. And so, You know, I spoke to this one business that was doing really high-end infographics, $10,000, $20,000 infographics for National Geographic or for other sort of really reputable publications. And the big challenge that they had was just there's only so many times in a year that someone is gonna spend $20,000 on an infographic, if ever. And one of the things that we saw at Fiverr was someone may only need a logo or logo redesign once every so often, but if you're able to bring them in and they have a positive experience there and then you're able to offer them all sorts of other professional services that are related to their business, they can end up making multiple purchases and becoming a really, becoming a power buyer in your marketplace, you know, and similarly at Dribbble, one of the things that just to show how that applies very briefly to Dribbble, one of the things we saw and this sort of fits in the category of What are designers already doing on Dribbble that we can facilitate in some way? And what we saw was that a lot of designers and a lot of agencies for sure, because there are a lot of agencies on Dribbble, but whether individual designers or agencies, the design service they were offering was oftentimes the, was oftentimes Just a way of initiating some sort of relationship with the client and then they would offer them other services, namely development. You know, development was a really big— and, you know, this is sort of more anecdotal what I'm gonna say, but from speaking with a lot of agencies in particular, the design project itself is not all that lucrative for them, but it gives them a way, as I said, to begin a relationship with the client and then sell much more lucrative development services as well as marketing and other things. But on Drippl, we saw that especially with, you know, sort of so many no-code or low-code products out there, Like it's very easy for a designer today to use Webflow or a similar product to actually implement the designs that they're— that they've produced for their client. And we've seen that line get really blurred where oftentimes the client is, what they're really asking for is both, you know, they might say I need someone to design my website, but what they're really saying when you sort of see the conversation unfold with the designer is I need someone to design it and make it a reality. And so I think, you know, with the sort of through the lens of my experience at Fiverr, I see what's already happening on Drippl and I believe that it is very important for a marketplace to be able to move its buyers across other categories, across multiple categories. And so internally, that's become a big priority for us. Like, how can we start to facilitate the buying and selling of development services in addition to design, both because that's what people are already doing, but also because it allows for a more sustainable business. But I think separately, there's a whole other element of generative AI and how does that impact design and the importance of moving into other, you know, other adjacent categories. The other thing on the other sort of main takeaway from Fiverr, and this one is, you know, probably also an obvious, you know, learning, but Fiverr's focus was on delivering an exceptionally easy experience for the buyer. And so it was very buyer-centric of just, How do we make it as easy as possible for someone who, a buyer who, and this has been true of every marketplace I've worked at. Oftentimes your buyers can't even articulate what they are looking for. You know, I myself, I'm not a designer, so I would have a very difficult time articulating what type of design service I have a very clear idea of what the outcome I'm looking for is or what the, what I need this product to do. But I wouldn't be able to give a very specific direction on, you know, this is what it should look and feel like. And so I saw it on Fiverr and upon 5 and at Dribbble. Buyers in the marketplace often struggle to put into a few words, to put into a search query what it is that they're looking for. And the most important thing, and I think this is also changing over the past year or 2, but I think, you know, search is just such an important, if not the backbone of the user experience for most for most marketplaces. Like how do you make it possible for a buyer to construct an effective search query to show them highly relevant search results that they, to help them engage with those search results and where Fiverr's big, you know, big innovation was instead of requiring the client or the buyer to write the sort of very detailed descriptive brief, what they're looking for, and then, you know, put a budget on it. They may have no idea what the value is of these, of the services they're requesting. Instead of doing all of that, which was sort of the more like, you know, oDesk, Elance model, Instead, it was how do we just put in front of the buyer predefined services with a price point that they can just swipe their credit card and purchase on the spot? There are other limitations that come with that, but that was a huge leap forward, I think, in terms of the user experience that a buyer of services in the user experience that a buyer of design services would have on a platform like that. And it's funny because I think at this point, you know, in 2025, I think that the Fiverr, you know, approach of the predefined services with the price on it is now like table stakes. You know, I think it's, we have a version of that, Upwork does it, everyone's created some version of that, which I think is really a, it's a, you know, like an homage. It's a testament to how important that was. I had a conversation with someone recently where it was funny because they referred to that as, it's been so many years that it's no longer an innovation, of course. And so like they referred to that as sort of being an older approach to You know, facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers in a marketplace. You know, one of the things, and maybe Mike, stop me if you wanna talk about this at a different point, but I can also share one of the things that I took away from Fiverr that absolutely did not apply to Dribbble. If that means so, You know, when I came to Dribbble, I believed that the designers on Dribbble, the hundreds of thousands of designers, I believed that they were all individuals, you know, on Fiverr at the time, you know, Fiverr 2016, different from Fiverr 2025, but Fiverr 2016, all the service providers in the marketplace were they were hobbyists, they were beginners, they were, you know, this was a side hustle, you know, they typically were not at that point professionals in whatever the service was that they were offering. What I was very surprised to discover when I came to Dribbble was that you absolutely had a lot of individual designers, but you also had 100, 200 employee agencies that were on Dribbble. And so you had agencies, you had individuals, but many, if not most of those individuals were professionals, you know, they, this was not a side hustle. This was their career and they thought about it very, very differently Than a seller on Fiverr who could be largely anonymous. Like, you know, there were many sellers on Fiverr who weren't trying to build a personal brand or build a business beyond themselves. Whereas on Dribbble, the designers on Dribbble, whether it's an agency or an individual, are very much thinking about their reputation and their brand and are understandably very, very protective of that. I remember when we first, September of last year, when we first introduced the very basic sort of transactional features to Dribbble, I saw someone had said, so on social media, someone had said like, Oh, looks like they're going the way of Fiverr. And I remember being so confused about, you know, it's why do you— we're not telling people how to price their services. We are not putting any of those restrictions on the platform. Like we're catering to a different type of— and what I eventually realized, and I thought this was really For me at least, and maybe for this group as well, it'll be an interesting and surprising observation, which is that for a lot of these folks, they didn't want to be in a marketplace. Offering their services in a marketplace was inherently bad for their reputation in some, like these were folks who, the agencies think about it very differently because they're thinking about lead flow and they're thinking about this in very sort of transactional terms. But for the individual designer, like I don't wanna be in the sort of mosh pit, like playing the marketplace game with, you know, I'm gonna undercut my competitor on price and I need that star rating. They didn't think that way. They didn't wanna think that way. They felt that it diminished their brand in some way to be a seller in a marketplace. And I thought that that was, and I'm just referring to, you know, sure, specific examples of folks that I spoke to or that contacted us. But I realized that for a lot of these designers, The mere fact that we were facilitating the transaction and doing some of the sort of meat and potato stuff that you'd find in any marketplace, reviews and ratings and things like that. The mere fact that we were doing that was bad because it was no longer like for a lot of these designers, Dribbble for years had offered them something very interesting, which was a way to get client leads without looking like you were trying to get client leads. And now when you make it feel like, look and feel like a marketplace, and now they're the sellers in the marketplace, that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. And that's something that's very There's a little bit of, I think a lot of that is due to the fact that one, like I said, these weren't hobbyists, these weren't, this wasn't a side hustle for these designers. And then 2, because we were pivoting the business from under them, you know, like this was not the same platform that they'd signed up for. And both of those are, I think, very justifiable or I think their reaction is very justifiable for both of those reasons. But you look and you compare to a Fiverr or an Upwork or most other marketplaces, they start like that on day one. So that understanding is already, there's already that understanding between the platform and the service provider or the seller that this is a marketplace. It works in these ways. And you don't have that same, that same type of sort of friction between the platform and the sellers in the— or the marketplace and the sellers in the marketplace.

Those are really great learnings. You got super detailed, so I appreciate it. And it's certainly interesting to see, you know, what translates over to, you know, from one marketplace to another. And then, of course, you know, what doesn't. And, you know, I want to spend some time discussing the actual transition for Dribbble, though, because I think most here will know Dribbble for being, you know, primarily like an online design community. So could you maybe share a little bit more about, you know, what led to the transition to a marketplace model and, you know, walk us through what went into actually transitioning the business?

So Dribbble started off as an invite-only community in 2009. Dan Sederholm and Rich Stornett were the founders and they really were creating in its truest sense, like a community of of peers. So it was supposed to be top design talent, invite only, a place where you would share your unfinished work. It was not to share your portfolio, it was share your unfinished work, share your, what, just like, you know, show and tell for designers. That was the original like tagline. And so the idea was, you know, you and I are professional designers, We respect each other. We like each other's work. I show you something I'm working on. You make an observation about it. You ask a question, you make a suggestion. I get your feedback. I give you feedback on what you're doing. That was what it started as. And I think a lot of— there are a lot of very established, successful designers today who are, you know, 10, 20 years into their careers. That remember that triple. At some point, the platform moves away from the invite-only aspect and opens up to everyone and the user base just increases exponentially at that point. And to monetize that user base, Again, this is all before my time, so I'm sharing as best as I know the story. But in order to monetize the user base, it's still meant to be a community. It's still meant to be, you know, sort of a community/social network for designers. It opens up all sorts of new monetization opportunities for Dribbble. But the con is that a lot of, again, what made this such an attractive place to be, a lot of that went away and you started to, you know, you started to hear from, you know, I mean, I've given our users all sorts of other reasons to other issues with Dribbble, but One of the classic issues is, oh, you guys should have never opened, you know, it should have remained an invite-only community because that's really how you kept a very high caliber of design talent and everything. Once it opened up again, lots of new monetization opportunities, lots of advertising opportunities. We introduced a number of different products that were meant to help designers sort of showcase their work in a more compelling way. To help hirers like hiring managers, recruiters find designers to hire. So there was a lot of new products that were introduced and the business grew and grew. And then there's a job board, a number of different things. And then Like so many businesses, you know, 2022 was a really difficult year and a lot of businesses slowed down. It was a very bad year for hiring, you know, so much of Dribbble's business was tied up in, you know, it's sort of a version of like sort of what like LinkedIn Recruiter is. But if it was meant specifically for of recruiters looking for designers within the Dribbble community. And so that business, that side of the business really slowed down. The idea of pivoting to a marketplace or the idea of introducing a marketplace to Dribbble was not new. One of the reasons that the company had never made that leap was that it would likely be very disruptive to the community, you know, which it has been. And so before we, you know, I came in sort of, like I said, biased towards doing the marketplace model, but before we actually started making any changes. Like there was a period in those first couple months where we really wanted to validate that this was the right way to go. And I had a couple conversations, more than a couple, but conversations with some of the designers on Dribbble and including some of the agencies. And I was really stunned to hear, especially these agencies, I was really stunned to hear them describe Dribbble because and what and how they use Dribbble because it was really very transactional. It was yeah, we we we upload our work, we share our work on Dribbble because that brings us clients. And I remember speaking to one agency that had full-time employees whose whose jobs were to create and post work on Dribbble as a way of getting more client leads. And it was so fascinating because I started to, that was sort of the beginning of realizing that we may or may not decide to call this a marketplace, but it is already a marketplace. It is already a place where service providers are coming and are advertising through the, through our, through Dribbble's product, advertising their services to prospective clients and inviting those clients to contact them and transact. Just because the transaction wasn't occurring on the platform, And just because Dribbble's homepage didn't say anything about, you know, this is a place to buy and sell design services, doesn't change the fact that that's what folks were using it for. And one thing that we saw, that was another sort of very important step in the thought process to actually make the leap and say, we're gonna go full bore towards a Marketplace was, you know, we looked at lead flow, which we described as, you know, anytime a message was sent, the initial message in a thread was sent to a designer. We mapped that out over the previous, you know, 5, 6 years and And then one thing we realized is that a lot of the social networking features, the, you know, posting, commenting, liking, saving, a lot of those features were really, they were really Engagement would really vary depending on how much lead flow, how many inquiries were being sent to designers. In other words, if lots of designers were receiving inquiries from potential clients, they did all the other things. They uploaded more work, they commented, they liked, they followed each other. In other words, when they were getting real value out of the like actual, you know, economic value from the platform, they were willing to invest more time in the platform. And when they didn't, when there was less lead flow through Dribbble, all those other metrics would suffer. And it was really interesting because for me, and again, it's easy for me to say this with like the benefit of of hindsight and parachuting in year 15. But so that's my disclaimer. But it was very interesting because so much of our, how we position the company was still that 2009 dribble of this is this intimate community where you're gonna, you know, talk shop with your peers. And over a decade and a half, it had turned into a lead source for designers, individual designers and design agencies and full service agencies. It was a lead source for them the same way that a Clutch or a G2 or so many others are lead sources for them, except we weren't, no one was saying that, you know, we weren't saying that to them and we weren't trying to monetize that transaction activity. We weren't trying to monetize that lead flow. We were trying to monetize the activity on the platform in all these other ways instead of really trying to insert ourselves into the value that we were actually creating, which was bringing together a designer with a client. And in 2023, again, it's an effort to monetize the activity on the platform. Dribbble introduced a, or paywalled the search and messaging features. So if you wanted to search through a designer's, if you wanted to search through profiles, not through the design work, but if you wanted to search through profiles and you wanted to message a designer, you had to pay a subscription. What it did was it really throttled lead flow on Dribbble. And if you sort of go back to those, you know, like I said, we had sort of a, you put on a line graph, client inquiries that designers are receiving on Dribbble, they declined precipitously. Obviously, when you say that you now have to pay $300 a month in order to send this message to a designer. And when that happens, all the other engagement metrics suffered 3, 6 months later. So when people stopped getting leads, they stopped doing any of the other community things that you wanted them to do. And so we see all of this, we speak to designers, we speak to agencies, we see how lead flow is really the rudder of this business. More lead flow, everything works. Less lead flow, nothing works. And that gave us the confidence to begin this pivot, which the very first step was actually unpaywalling those features, which we did for end of May, beginning of June 2024. We unpaywalled those features to get clients sending requests to designers again so that designers can start feeling like their investment of time in the platform was resulting in client inquiries. That was in, that was late May, early June. A couple months later, September, we roll out the very basic functionality so that I can send a request to a designer, they can send me a proposal, I can pay, they can deliver the work, they can get paid. And then since then, over the next year, it's just been bit by bit layering on all the additional functionality that we didn't have that at this point is just sort of table stakes for For any marketplace for services, at least. One big thing though that we discovered along the way, which I think makes Dribbble a little unique, at least compared to the other marketplaces for services, is that, and again, this is like, this goes back to Dribbble not beginning from day one as a marketplace. Which has been like a blessing and a curse. There's been a lot of positive that has come from that and a lot of negative as well. But because unlike a Fiverr, unlike an Upwork, unlike a 99designs, unlike a lot of these other platforms, because designers didn't or service providers on these platforms didn't They join those platforms expecting that it's a marketplace, knowing the deal. I'm gonna get buyers, I'll convert them and the platform will take a fee. The designers and agencies on Dribbble didn't think that way. And so we discovered that the vast majority, while we were doing a much better job of bringing clients to designers, the vast majority of those conversations would be taken off platform. And again, unlike a Fiverr, at least Fiverr when I was there, these aren't hobbyists again. Like these are in many cases businesses that are much bigger than Dribbble itself. They've got, they can process payments, you know, they've got their own workflows. They've got in some cases very complex workflows. that are just incompatible with working through a marketplace and created a lot of friction and led to a lot of disintermediation. You know, these established workflows, all sorts of different reasons why there was a lot of disintermediation on the platform. And, but what's interesting is that sucked, that was bad, you know, that was a real struggle for us. But one thing, one very positive thing that's come from that is we've realized that from speaking to a lot of these same agencies and designers who were taking their clients off platform, from speaking to them, we realized that they were in fact perfectly willing to compensate us in some way for the lead. Or share the revenue in some way for the lead. They were perfectly willing to do that, but they again had an established workflow that they didn't want to deviate from. And so we developed products that what we call our designer advertising products, which allow these designers and agencies to Have their cake and eat it too. They get the leads on Drippl just like they always have and they don't have to transact on Drippl. But for us as a business, our sort of our mantra internally is like we've got to monetize every single lead we generate. We'll either monetize it through transaction fees because the transaction occurred on the platform Or we can monetize it through designer advertising revenue because the service provider has paid upfront to receive those leads and can transact with them elsewhere. But we've already monetized the— we can feel comfortable about that because we monetize it. Compare that to an Upwork, for example. It's all about transaction. They cannot let the transaction occur elsewhere. That does not work with their business model. It must be completed on the platform. They must take the transaction fees. And so it's interesting because we kind of came to this realization after the fact. Like if you look at our sort of our, you know, company strategy slides from 18 months ago, there's no mention of this. There's no mention of designer advertising. There's no mention of off-platform transactions. It's we're gonna live or die by transaction fee revenue. And interestingly, again, because of the types of service providers that are on Dribbble, in some cases these big accomplished agencies or these very successful designers. They're not like, they are very willing to invest in acquiring clients and they're very willing to share or compensate Dribbble in some way if we are willing to provide them solutions like these advertising products that allow them to continue to get their leads but transact off the platform. Anyway, let me pause there. I know I just, I did a really long monologue. I apologize.

No, that's really interesting. So I appreciate, you know, walking us through it and all the details. So definitely lots of considerations, you know, when shifting an established business. So I realized too, we're going to get into the group Q&A here and actually have, you know, founders that raised their hand and wanted to come on. So actually, you know, we might have to kind of make this more of a quickfire kind of Q&A. But there's actually a question that someone sent me in advance, and it was related to your post, you know, sharing about Instant Match. So it was, you know, they were asking like, what are some other, you know, specific ways that you're leveraging AI for ModDribbble? And, you know, what are some initial kind of learnings from launching AI-powered features like Instant Match?

You know, we see ourselves as being in the lead generation business, and it's our job to help the service providers on the platform make money. And the reason I say that is I think that generative— I'm gonna get to your question. I think that generative AI, we're already seeing it's having a huge impact on design. I think that it's eating or has eaten the smaller design project, the $200, $500, $1,000 design project, you know, the landing page, the logo. I think it's taken a big bite out of that. And when we thought about, again, this goes back to, you know, when I first joined, well, like, you know, what is Dribbble in this new world? And as we've, as our strategy has sort of unfolded and we've We now have that like clarity of we are in the lead generation business. Our thinking is individuals, agencies are going to always find something to offer clients. And our job is to be versatile enough and effective enough that whatever service they're looking to provide, even if it's not the $500 logo project, whatever it might be, we just need to be capable of providing lead flow for whatever service it is that they're looking to offer. And so part of the reason why, to sort of go back to what we started talking about, it's gonna be so important for us to move into other categories because You can't, you know, 99designs built a big business off of $300 logo design projects and like, that's not possible anymore. I don't think, but we have to get into these bigger projects and everything, more complex projects, higher price points. And so the reason I bring that up is that At different times, we kicked around different ideas of like, you know, should we be teaming up with these generative AI products? Should we? And different comparable platforms have tried similar things and ultimately like, that's not us. That's not what we are. We're in the lead generation business. So to come back to your question, Instant Match, it's how do we make it as easy as possible for a client to articulate what they're looking for and to connect with highly relevant providers. And it's now, I mean, you know, like I said at the start of our conversation, until recently, I believed very strongly that it's, it's that a marketplace is all about search. Search is the backbone. I still think that that's largely true, but it's changing. And I think that now marketplaces more and more, or at least ours is going to, is that more and more the client is not going to enter a 1 to 3 word search query and then scan a grid of results and pick their, you know, spot what's most relevant. More and more they're going to have a conversation with us, the intermediary, and Based on their inputs. And again, the conversation means that we're gonna be communicating to them as well and giving them the right context to think about their project and asking them the right questions. And we're going to together develop a very robust descriptive project outline that a service provider can take action on. And so Instant Match was our first step in this direction. And there are a couple of components to it. One is what is the client actually looking for? And so we ask them a handful of very specific questions about obviously the type of, you know, are you looking for a landing page? Are you looking for a website? Are you looking for branding? What are you looking for? What types of styles are you interested in? By the way, each step of this, for anyone that takes a look at it afterwards, each step of this can be infinitely better than it is currently. So take it for what it is, which is our first sort of our first effort here. But understanding the style that they're looking for, understanding who, what their business is about, which makes a huge, a huge difference. And I see, you know, I mean, over the last 18 months, I've read many, many, many thousands of requests from clients. And it's so interesting how often it's like, I've got a crypto startup. I love this design you did for a landing page for this other crypto company. It's so interesting how often like the client is thinking, because again, me as a non-designer would say, Isn't that the same? Don't the same skills apply to a restaurant or a tech startup or Amazon or anything? Like, aren't these the same skills? But it's interesting that often for clients, they want to see that you've worked with similar businesses. So Instant Match tries to understand more about what this business is about and any other information that we can, that we can, you know, gather from the client. And then we use AI to turn that into a very descriptive, detailed brief that not only includes the information that the client provided, but includes a lot of the salient information that we know based on, again, the many, many, many, many hundreds of thousands of conversations that we've seen between clients and designers. We know we can supplement what the client has provided themselves in response to some of our prompts and the information they brought in. We supplement with that, create this brief. Then we say, based on this brief across our nearly million designers who have all sorts of different specializations and styles and everything, These are the designers that we recommend you work with. Now, it's one of the reasons that Instant Match is so important to us is, and there's several, one is how do we add the most value to the client? We're not a bulletin board, we're not a yard sale. The way we can add the most value is not by giving you just a place to peruse, but by actually taking everything we know about the sellers in our marketplace and the other buyers in our marketplace and handing you the best, your best chance of getting the outcome that you're looking for at the price point you want and all of that. So for us, like Instant Match was, you know, it was a way, it is a way to make it easier for a client to make contact with a relevant designer. One of the things that is so critical for us is there's a magic number that we've found, which is if a client contacts 3 or more designers, then they're almost certain to get a response from at least one very quickly. If they contact one or two, and until recently, until really, you know, maybe it was June, July, the median number of designers that a client would contact was one because they would have to go and search and browse and it's overwhelming. They're like, all right, here's my one and let me see what they say. 65% of clients were just doing that. And many weren't getting a response or they were getting a response, but it was hours or days later. If they contact 3 or more, they're gonna get a response and it's gonna come quickly. And so a lot of the work we've been doing, including Instant Match, is a way of saying very quickly, here are not 1, not 2, but 3, 4, 5, 6 different designers that are really good fits for what you're doing and contact them right now. And then of course, the designers that we're recommending are all of those things. They're also very responsive and provide and get great ratings and so on and so forth.

Now it's really interesting to see, you know, what's possible now with AI, right? With all the recent advancements and how, you know, how as a marketplace you're able to kind of do the work for the users in this case, like get to a better match and, you know, service engagement. So I saw Kenton raise his hand and a few others sent me questions. So maybe if we can, we can make it a kind of quickfire question here. Do you want to jump on here, Kenton? We'll try to get in one last question.

You mentioned about designers referring their clients to Dribbble. So augmenting the lead gen that Dribbble's providing, do you find that they're concerned about introducing their competition? So one of the things we, we, we, we heard from designers when we introduced our you know, we introduced a recommendations feature. One of the things we heard was exactly that, like this client reached out to me and you are now telling them to check out these other designers that they might work with instead. And that's so, and our response in that particular case was it works both ways. Like, you know, you're gonna, like every marketplace on the planet, we're trying to show the the customer other options that they might be interested in. But you're also gonna be one of those options. And so while we might be recommending somewhere else, you'll also benefit from that same feature. So short answer to your question is yes, there is, I think, a reticence to to bring clients and put other designers in front of them. I think it's our job and it's a, we don't always do a great job of this, but it's our responsibility to communicate to the designer why it's really important that they do bring their clients to Dribbble, that It'll improve their search rankings. That'll lead to more clients finding them. And we've, some designers have understood this and have really, really jumped on it. And we have a number of examples of agencies in particular who bring their, who have their their existing clients transact on Dribbble as a way of boosting their rankings and getting a lot more leads. And I'm very glad that they figured that out because again, we have not done a very good job of articulating that. But with everything, we try to frame it in terms of will this lead, will this action that we're asking you, the designer, to take, Will it generate more leads for you or fewer leads? And we've tried to just frame everything in terms of that and, you know, it's like if you do this, it's gonna result in more leads. If you don't do this, it'll result in fewer leads. And that's actually something, you know, this is a whole other can of worms to discuss right now, but like on the disintermediation front, We started off by saying transact on Dribbble and you'll rank higher. We didn't say, so there was just the carrot. There was no stick of if you don't transact on Dribbble, there are gonna be penalties. That's how we started off. It was just the carrots. And then where we've moved over the last year is Is sort of adding in the other dimension of if you don't do this, if you don't take this particular action, or if you do something that's negative to the platform, like meeting a client and then circumventing our fees, we will penalize you in search rankings, we'll constrict the lead flow you're receiving. And in some cases, we'll even suspend the user, which I posted about a little bit on the, um, uh, really a couple months ago I posted a little bit about that.

I think we might have to have a, a follow-up group chat on this. So, uh, there's so much to kind of pack into here, you know, with, uh, you know, your experience at Fiverr and kind of transitioning, you know, the business now with Dribbble. And, uh, yes, not, not, not every day that we get to hear about, you know, transitioning an established business. A lot of times it's, you know, going from 0 to 1, and this is, uh, super interesting to learn more about. So we appreciate, you know, taking the time to join us here today for the group chat. This is awesome. And then last but not least, time for a quick plug here. I know you share some update posts in the community, but where can we all follow along?

We typically, anytime we have news, we typically put it out on our social channels. So on X and on our blog. And like I mentioned to you before we started the group chat today, I haven't written a new blog post this month, but I will write one in October and I'll make sure to also post it On everyday marketplaces so that, you know, bring it right to you. And by the way, for, you know, I'm thrilled that folks joined and it was a lot of fun to talk about all this. Please feel free to reach out to me on through everything marketplaces or through LinkedIn or wherever. And my email is just constantine@dribbble. So please feel free, anyone, to reach out at any point, and I'd love to talk more about all this stuff.