It’s no mystery why I tend to feature a lot of “freelancer to wildly successful entrepreneur stories on Unemployable. It’s simply the way most of us progress to the point where we get recognition.
Aaron Epstein is known as the guy who led Creative Market to acquisition by Autodesk in only 14 months. It was a substantial amount of cash, in case you’re wondering.
But like most “overnight successes, Aaron has been working toward this since he was a freelance web designer in college. He then moved into software, creating a “dream business with money arriving while he slept – but it soon left him bored.
Tune in to hear why unemployable types have a restless ambition that drives them to the next thing. And so often the “next thing transcends your wildest expectations.
The Show Notes
- Autodesk Buys Creative Market To Square Up To Adobe With A Marketplace For Designers And Makers
- Creative Market
- Free Profit Pillars Course
Transcript
The Entrepreneurial Evolution Behind the Success of Creative Market
Aaron Epstein: Hey, I’m Aaron Epstein. I help independent creators find their passion and make a living doing what they love, and I am unemployable.
Voiceover: Welcome to Unemployable, the show for people who can get a job, they’re just not inclined to take one — and that’s putting it gently. In addition to this podcast, thousands of freelancers and entrepreneurs get actionable advice and other valuable resources from the weekly Unemployable email newsletter. Join us by registering for our Free Profit Pillars Course, or choose to sign up for the newsletter only at no charge. Simply head over to Unemployable.com, and take your business and lifestyle to the next level. That’s Unemployable.com.
Brian Clark: Hey, welcome to the show. This is Unemployable and I am Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital.
Today I’ve got another exceptionally cool story for you, could be viewed as an “overnight success, which is what tends to get press. But, of course, we know the story is deeper than that. And it usually goes back to some time when someone decided to start out freelancing as a way to begin their own unemployable journey.
It’s no mystery why I tend to focus on these type of stories, because it’s so often how people get started, and yet when you run into someone and you run across them and they’ve had these incredible successes, you tend to think, “That’s not attainable for me. But of course you’ve got to hear the backstory.
Aaron Epstein is a guy who is known primarily for starting up, with some other people, a design marketplace called Creative Market. 14 months later, it’s purchased for a significant amount of money by the giant company Autodesk.
That’s a great story, but you don’t really hear the story about how Aaron used to skip spring break and work on his business while he was still in college, while he was freelancing. And then the software that he founded.
Literally, in his own words, he will tell you that he had the dream business that we all hear about, yet he started to get bored. He ended up doing a merger with some other entrepreneurs in the color and design space. That is what eventually, down the road, I think a decade later, led to that “overnight 14-month acquisition success. It’s a great story.
It’s encouraging that you hear more and more that people start one place, they end up somewhere else. That’s what we’re all doing one way or another.
Let’s just go ahead and say hi to Aaron.
Aaron, good to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Aaron Epstein: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I have to ask how old or how young a man are you?
Aaron Epstein: I just turned 34 years old a couple months ago.
What Is Your Background?
Brian Clark: That’s not too bad. I love talking to people, because I got a relatively late start by going to law school, which I don’t regret. I regret practicing law four years.
It’s just kind of amazing, because that was obviously the early days of the web and you were right there as a very young person. I love that people get started earlier more and more these days, which I think is an incredible opportunity, especially with how fluid the economic situation of the world is these days.
Take us back a little bit, because I know you actually started your first business in college. But it sounds like you started figuring out how to build websites at an even younger age than that.
Aaron Epstein: Actually even before that, I remember being eight years old in the neighborhood and the snow would fall and I’d start knocking on neighbors’ doors and charging them five bucks to shovel their driveways. I’d do the same thing raking leaves. Those are the joys of being entrepreneurial and growing up in the Northeast. I grew up in the DC area.
I remember being probably about 13 years old in 1994. The web was just coming around. I remember image tags were just introduced around that time, so super early days. I would come home from school when I was in ninth grade and start learning html and I could change colors of backgrounds and things like that.
What really drew me to it was I couldn’t make a car as good as Toyota or as good as Ford. But at that time, because website design and development was so new, I was learning it along with everybody else. It didn’t really matter what age I was or how much experience I had or needing a team of people, I could make a website as good as Coca-Cola’s website or any other big professional company at the time.
That was what really motivated me to get started — this sense that I could actually create something, an entire finished product, just myself, learning and making all the parts, and I could do it as well as anyone in the world at the time.
Brian Clark: That’s interesting on a couple of levels. Number one, I just saw someone complaining on Facebook that no one bothers to knock on their door to shovel snow to earn money anymore, which is a missed opportunity, because trust me, here in Colorado, you’d get my money.
What Motivated You in College?
Brian Clark: Let’s fast forward to when you got to college. It was interesting to me hearing some of the things you’ve said in the past about how you decided to start a business doing web design. While other college students are partying, you would work over spring break, they’d be off in Mexico. What motivated you?
Aaron Epstein: Yeah, so it’s kind of continuing off that same thing where I had these skills that I had developed over a couple of years when I was in high school — self-taught designer, self-taught developer. And I got to college my freshman year, my roommate and I, who was also into the same things, we decided to start a web design company.
Being entrepreneurial from a young age, I saw that this was something that all businesses were looking to get websites. This was 1999 and it was still kind of a new thing for a lot of people. I had those skills and we could make some money as college students, which was pretty awesome.
We started this web design company and I found that in every client interaction we had, when we were creating their websites, it was all kind of the same. They would typically be some offline business and they’d have a logo that typically had one color in it. We had to come up with the color scheme that would go with their logo, come up with harmonious colors and accents and everything like that.
So I’d do this guess and check thing in Photoshop where I’d click around in the color swatches until I found something that looked good together. But I thought to myself, “There must be a better way to do this. I looked around online for a tool where I could just give it a color and it would tell me what colors go well with that color. And I couldn’t actually find anything like that at the time.
I did some research on the color theory behind it, and I actually came up with this tool called ColorSchemer. It’s basically exactly the tool that I was looking for. You give it a color, it says, “Here are the complimentary colors and triads and split compliments, and all these different color theory things. And it would help you build the color palette.
I spent my spring break that freshman year building this product, just because I saw the end goal. I saw the vision and I was making it for myself. That just drove me to everyday when I got up, I wanted to keep working on that to get closer and closer to my goal each day of launching that product. Mainly for myself, but I found out when I put it out online, thousands of other people actually had the same problems that I did and found that tool really valuable.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I do want to talk about ColorSchemer, because that’s an interesting leap. And I also get we’re very motivated by, “We build it for ourselves, we sell it to people. That’s how we’ve been able to bootstrap ourselves all these years.
How Did You Move from Clients to Products?
Brian Clark: Going back to client work, did you enjoy it? Did working with clients bug you? Was it a conscious decision to move to products or was it just a natural evolution?
Aaron Epstein: I learned pretty quickly that I did not like the client work for a number of reasons.
One quick example is we had a client that was a wood furniture kind of company, so we made this wood theme for their site and it looked really nice, especially for the time. Then the client looked at it and they said, “This looks great, but can you make the wood blue? because their corporate color was blue. And we thought that was the craziest idea, like, “Who’s ever seen blue wood? This makes no sense. We did it for the client, because ultimately you’ve got to make the client happy. They’re paying you to help create their vision.
But that whole rat race of trying to find clients, doing the work for them rather than for yourself, trying to get paid afterwards and meanwhile, trying to keep the pipeline filled with new clients so that you can keep working the next week was just something where the only way to make more money in that situation is to either work more hours or charge a higher rate. At some point, you’re going to reach a pricing ceiling on your rate or you can’t charge anymore. And then that leaves the only other option — to work more hours.
So I was coming from a place where I wanted to find a way to make passive income, to not have the hours that I was working directly linked to the amount of money that I was making, which inherently has a ceiling because there’s only so many hours in a week. And that’s kind of what led me down this path of ColorSchemer.
I saw the opportunities there, and that’s what made it so attractive to me. Once I started selling the ColorSchemer software, I was making money while I was sleeping. I could choose the hours that I wanted to work. All I really had to do on a day-to-day basis was handle customer support emails and make sure people got fast, helpful replies. But other than that, I broke out of the mold of charging for the hour and I was able to make money while I was sleeping, which was just incredible for me.
Brian Clark: Yeah, amen to that. I mean, I paid my dues both in the law firm and with my own initial service businesses. I worked my ass off for clients, because I wasn’t going to accept anything else, but I was not happy. It’s just one of those things. You’re right, the only way to grow involved some very tricky questions of, “What’s this going to do to my life?
How Did You Decide to Create Software?
Brian Clark: So, ColorSchemer, you built it because you wanted it yourself. I get that. But it’s a leap to go from html building websites to creating software. How did you get that done?
Aaron Epstein: I was into making websites in high school and JavaScript was still a very new thing. I’d become familiar with programming outside of just html and things like that, but true programming like JavaScript. Then I taught myself Visual Basic. I was a PC user at the time and that was one of the easiest ways to learn how to do development on a desktop.
Also, when I was in high school, there was a computer science class that I took where we did C++. So I learned a lot of the basics around programming and how to do different things, things that weren’t necessarily how to do things in C++, but how to do things just in programming in general that I could apply to any language.
That actually turned out to be really useful as forming a basis for me, because I would go on to learn so many different languages and use them for different versions of the ColorSchemer software that I had made to JavaScript and PHP on the web. I would do Visual Basic and then Delphi, Pascal on PC. I did a Mac version with REALBasic and then with Objective-C. Eventually I made an iPhone app with Objective-C.
So, here, I was able to quickly learn all these different languages, just getting myself up to speed and teaching myself, because I had this basic foundation around how programming works.
How Did Automation Lead to Boredom?
Brian Clark: Excellent. Unfortunately for me, I never made it past html, but luckily there are other ways to get in the software business and I feel fortunate for that.
Now, you mentioned ColorSchemer allowed you to make money while you’re sleeping. It’s the Internet dream, all that. And you basically handled support, but everything was automated and it sounds perfect.
I saw a quote, actually it was your interview with our friend Andrew over at Mixergy. You basically phrased it like this, “Everything was automated. I was making money while I was asleep. I was completely bored.
Look, I get you, I get where you’re coming from. But I bet there are people out there right now going, “Are you crazy? What is wrong with that?
Tell us a little bit about that and then let’s segue into what you did next.
Aaron Epstein: Yeah, it seemed really great and it was great. I was able to buy a townhouse for my wife and I outside the DC area. Even before that in college, I was making 1,400 bucks a month as a college kid selling this software and never had to hit up my parents for money. So that was great.
Then I graduated, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to see what I can do with this. And I was able to build this bigger business that was very much a lifestyle business, which I loved at the time. I started this in ‘99, launched the first version of the software in 2000, and did it by myself doing everything essentially through 2009.
Part of it is a function of at some point I felt like I wasn’t growing anymore. I left college, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to see what I can do with this thing, because I think there’s some potential here. And I was able to do some really cool stuff with it and build this business and make some money, especially as a solo person.
But after a while, I just felt kind of stagnant. I was looking to the future and saying to myself, “Okay, what am I going to do? Am I just going to keep putting out new versions of color software for the rest of my life? I always felt like that wasn’t really my calling.
It was funny, one time somebody knocked off ColorSchemer software and I went to talk to these lawyers and I was like, “Well, this isn’t the thing that’s going to put my kids through college. It’s the thing that I’m doing until I can figure out what that bigger idea, that bigger business that I want to build is. They turned it around to me and they said, “Well, what if it is the thing that can put your kids through college?
It was interesting, because I was looking at it in those terms. I wanted to find that next big business opportunity. And while ColorSchemer directly wasn’t that thing that was going to put my kids through college, it was the jumping off point that I used to build the thing that’s going to put my kids through college.
What happened was I was building this ColorSchemer software. In 2007, I connected with the founders of this website called COLOURlovers. It’s a creative design community where people can create and share color palettes and patterns and shapes, so it’s this website built around color. Then it had over a million members and I had this successful software.
We got together in 2007, and we were talking about doing a partnership where I’m like, “Look guys, I’m just interested in selling software, so you promote my software, I’ll promote your community. They wanted me to pull down this community that I was starting to build around my software too. And I was like, “I can’t really do that. We left and were like, “Okay, let’s just try to do this partnership where we just promote each other.
About a week later, Darius, one of the cofounders of COLOURlovers, emails me and he says, “Hey, been talking to some investors and we really think that we should have our own color software tool rather than just partnering, so it’s not going to work out. Ultimately, neither of us wanted to budge there to make the terms work and we went our own separate ways.
Fast forward two years. Darius went to work at Microsoft and their LiveLabs incubator for almost a year, and meanwhile his cofounder on COLOURlovers Chris kept the site running and everything like that. So Darius was leaving Microsoft and was going to focus on COLOURlovers full time and he reached back out and said, “Hey, are you still doing ColorSchemer?
At that time, it was 2009, I had been looking around for new opportunities at that point to do something bigger. I wanted to learn personally, I wanted to grow personally. I also wanted to do something with a team, challenge myself. Instantly, I thought, “This is the opportunity that I’ve been looking for.
We got together over a weekend and it was just like snapping my fingers. Everything came together, because it was something we all really wanted to do and saw as the next step in our careers.
What Roles Did Vision and Personality Play?
Brian Clark: It’s interesting that story, because this company, my company, Rainmaker Digital was formed by merging together five companies, most of which I was already involved in from launching them as startups off of Copyblogger. Everyone’s fascinated by that, like, “How do you pull that off? A lot of people suspect it’s a legal background, which doesn’t hurt, but that wasn’t it. It was shared vision and compatibility of personality.
Did you find that to be the case as well?
Aaron Epstein: 100%. It was actually kind of funny. We got together. Darius (my other cofounder and then Chris is the third cofounder) and I got together to hammer out the terms and everything. Here’s a guy who’s born literally a month apart from me. We both kind of stumbled into these color businesses, but from different directions. We found out we were so similar personality-wise.
There was one time when we were doing YCombinator in San Francisco, shortly afterwards, my wife was living in New York City. Darius went to go do some fundraising out in New York and stayed with my wife and they went out to dinner. Afterwards she said, “That was really weird. It was like talking to you but with a different head and body.
So here we were, these guys that stumbled into this color thing. Just by sheer coincidence, it turned out we were incredibly compatible. And years of working together since then, between the three of us (me and Darius and Chris), I can’t really think of any time where we had a significant disagreement, let alone a fight about things. And that compatibility and trust is just super important.
Brian Clark: Yes, it is. Absolutely. It’s more gut check than anything else.
What Was the Evolution to Creative Market?
Brian Clark: Of course you are, I guess, currently well known for the fantastic Creative Market platform, which is exceptional.
What was the evolution and the transition from COLOURlovers to Creative Market? Were there limitations that you faced in that business that you needed to grow beyond?
Aaron Epstein: Definitely. When we merged up, we did YCombinator shortly after that, a couple months after we merged up. We were in this unique position where we had these businesses that were making a couple of hundred grand a year, which was fine for three guys working on it. But we were trying to figure out: what’s the big scalable business here?
With ColorSchemer, we were selling software. With COLOURlovers, we were selling ads on the site, and we tried all these other different money making opportunities.
We would partner with Martha Stewart Living and her paint line and match color palettes on COLOURlovers to the closest Martha Stewart paint colors, and you could buy them through Home Depot. We ran the gamut of trying to figure out, “How do we monetize this community in a scalable way? And we couldn’t find anything that worked.
People talk a lot about pivoting their businesses. It’s actually really easy to pivot when things are not working well at all, because you know it’s not working. Or else you’re really successful and you know you don’t need to pivot.
The hardest part is when you’re in that in-between area where you’re making money, but you’re not sure if this can be a big scalable thing or not. To make that decision to say, “You know what, we’re not focusing on this thing that’s bringing in a couple of hundred grand a year, and we’re going to start from scratch and do this other new thing, which is what we ended up doing with Creative Market.
Brian Clark: So are those the same guys that were involved in COLOURlovers?
Aaron Epstein: Yep. Basically what happened is during our time at YCombinator, and even for probably a year afterwards, we had two visions for what we could turn the COLOURlovers community into.
The first was we could make this a color data company. If you’re familiar with Pantone, they have a couple experts that get in a room and they say, “The color of the year will be fuchsia. Then they put out these trend reports that everybody gets. And then it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because they said, “Oh, this is the color of the year, and everybody goes in, designs their fashion and things like that according to what they put out.
We thought, “We have all these people interacting around colors and color palettes and things like that. We could tie demographics to that and actually give real-time color trend reports based on different industries and everything.
So that was one opportunity. The other was to build a marketplace around the content that we had on COLOURlovers.
The light bulb moment for us was at the end of 2010. MetLife reached out to us, because they were doing a Thanksgiving Day wrap display around the first two stories of their building across from Bryant Park in New York City. They wanted to use a pattern that a member had created on COLOURlovers and they wanted to pay $250 for it.
We thought, “Well, this is interesting, because here’s somebody who’s just playing around having fun, being creative on the site, and they could actually make $250, because this business finds it really valuable. That’s when the light bulb went off for us and we said, “This marketplace opportunity is really the big one. If we can build this in a scalable way so that anybody who’s creating content can have these opportunities, we could build a really big business off of it.
That’s actually what led us to build a marketplace. Then we realized it’s actually much bigger even than the content people are making and producing on COLOURlovers. There are fonts in Photoshop files and stock photos and 3D models and website themes. And so we realized, “This is actually much bigger than COLOURlovers. It needs to be its own thing.
That’s when we registered creativemarket.com and when we decided we’re going to focus 100% of our attention on launching Creative Market and just put COLOURlovers on autopilot.
How Important Was Your Established Audience in Launching Creative Market?
Brian Clark: Interesting. Obviously, we’re big on content marketing and audience, which could be another way of saying community. It depends on how you execute on it.
The thing that’s fascinating to me, you say you put COLOURlovers on hold, but you guys weren’t unknown starting a marketplace in the design space. You had all these people who already knew who you are. How big was that to getting Creative Market off the ground?
Aaron Epstein: I think it was good for a couple of ways.
In one instance, whenever we tried to market anything to the COLOURlovers community, they never bought anything. And it’s because they just liked to come there and play around. It made me realize, especially now looking back on my experience building Creative Market, there are very different kinds of users out there. Some are willing to spend a lot of money, some are just there to play and interact with their friends. Different business models work very differently depending on the different types of users that you have that are your audience.
So, for us, we realized we could port some of these people over to Creative Market. But one of the other big things is that we had spent a number of years in the design industry, so we had made connections with content creators and we were potential customers of Creative Market ourselves. We really understood the space a lot.
Before we launched, we put out this teaser page on Creative Market to get people to sign up. One of the things that we said on there was “From the Creators of COLOURlovers, because putting out a teaser page and asking for emails is kind of a dime a dozen. But so many people were familiar with COLOURlovers that by putting the name on there, it actually gave it a lot of credibility and legitimacy in a lot of people’s eyes that like, “Okay, I really like this other product that they’ve made, so I bet this one’s going to be good too.
Brian Clark: Yeah, building on where you had been before. Interesting.
To your point, I’m seeing more and more people getting over that, “Gee, I don’t want to look like I’m selling something. But then you attract the wrong people and then you’re in a fix. But everything from AppSumo to Product Hunt to Creative Market, these are places to buy things. “Please, Buyers, come.
Aaron Epstein: Yep, I’ve actually seen it a lot. I would consider Creative Market 75% marketplace and 25% community. And that works really well for us. Community is what makes us unique and it gets people to stick around and everything like that.
I’ve seen other places that start as 100% community, and I would count COLOURlovers as one of those. When you try to transition, whether it’s a marketplace or building some other type of business where you’re trying to sell to the people that are there to be part of the 100% community, a lot of times they’re not receptive to that, because it’s not why they’re there in the first place.
It’s tricky actually to start with something community and then try to layer the business on top of it.
Brian Clark: Yeah, I agree with that. Especially if that’s not the unwritten deal that you had with your audience. You know what I’m saying?
Why Did Talk of Acquisition Happen So Quickly?
Brian Clark: So you started up, 15 months later, people are already knocking on the door talking acquisition. Why do you think that was?
Aaron Epstein: I’d say when we were starting COLOURlovers, we always had these visions of what it would be like to build a business and sell it and make a lot of money and all those dreams that people have when they’re building businesses. And we had some acquisition offers during COLOURlovers days and nothing super interesting.
I always felt like even if we turned those down and we kept going, even if we failed, we’d still learn so much and gain so much experience that it would be totally worth it. And so we kept going.
Then what I found is we actually built a really great product that had real month over month growth every single month in Creative Market. It showed me that when you actually build a product, you make something that people want, that people are excited about, the numbers and the growth tell the story. And it’s not only visible to you on the inside, but it’s visible to people on the outside.
Really all you need to do if you have that dream, like we did back in the day, of building something that would become valuable to another company and be a potential acquisition, is just build a great product and the rest will take care of itself.
These other companies, acquiring companies, they’re always on the lookout, keeping an eye on their space, seeing who’s doing things differently, who can be a potential threat to their business or who could potentially complement their business. As long as you build a really great product, the rest will take care of itself.
Why Did You Sell?
Brian Clark: Okay. That’s got to be incredibly validating at the same time. Basically, a year into it and people are like, “This is either a danger to me or it’s a strategic complement to my business, therefore, let’s try to buy this from these guys. You did ultimately sell. How come?
Aaron Epstein: It was a really difficult decision. It’s difficult on a company level, it’s difficult between all of us founders, it’s difficult factoring in investors. It’s difficult on a personal level. Each of us founders had a different viewpoint and it wasn’t something that we took lightly to make that decision. There are a lot of different factors that go into it.
On a personal level, I felt like I still had the energy to keep going. I worked 24/7, but at the same time, I would consider my founders superpower, which I think everybody has, to be the ability to work extended periods of time without burning out. So that wasn’t ever an issue for me.
At the same time, this is something that started with ColorSchemer and me in 1999. Here we were 15 years later with an opportunity to do something life-changing for me and my family and future kids and everything like that. So that was on a personal level for me.
On a company level, we felt like we had a deal that really valued in a lot of potential growth. We were growing quickly. Based on the deal that we got, you couldn’t justify that with any of the numbers that we had, so it was building in a ton of future growth potential there. I felt like that was positive.
I felt like it was really great for the team, the employees. They would be rewarded for all the effort that they had done in helping to build the product and the community and the business.
Then, ultimately with Autodesk, we just felt like they were a cultural match and that this was a really good home for the business where it would be able to continue to grow, to continue to serve the same community that we were really trying to create new opportunities for.
It was a really difficult decision, but ultimately, we decided to join Autodesk.
Brian Clark: You hit on something that’s so important that I don’t think everyone understands, especially people who aren’t entrepreneurs, or at least making it on their own. They always say, “Well, 15 months, you left money on the table, you should have stuck it out. No, it’s not 15 months. It’s been what, since 99? 15 years? People don’t realize.
That’s why I love to talk about people’s journeys, because that’s the thing, it’s not this phase or that phase. Sometimes you’re kind of tired and sometimes you want that big payout, because it allows you to take a breath and then you keep going. It’s a different psychological space when you have that kind of equity event.
Aaron Epstein: Yep, we’re coming up on the two-year anniversary in a couple weeks of joining Autodesk. I hear so many acquisition horror stories from a lot of my friends joining different companies. They get shut down or moved around or they don’t have any resources or anything.
Our experience has been just completely opposite of that. It’s been really great. I have nothing but great things to say about Autodesk. We come in here and my boss (by the way, first time I’ve ever had a boss), he says to me, “Just keep growing. He’s given us the resources to do that, and we have kept growing.
It’s worked out really great for us as founders, for the team. As a founder, I can go out and hire people and I don’t have to worry about how many months that cuts our runway until we all run out of money and everybody’s got to go look for new jobs. You can’t put a price on that in a lot of ways.
There will come a time when I’m ready to go back out into the startup world. But for now, we have all the resources that we need to continue to grow and we’ve really done that over the last two years. I think that’s made it worthwhile for us, for the team, and for Autodesk.
I give this talk sometimes when I’m telling the same journey story. I put up a slide and it’s a picture of a beach and palm trees. And I say, “This is what a lot of people think that post-acquisition life looks like. In reality, the best thing that you can hope for is that you get to continue your vision with the same team, serving the same community, and building a really great product. Over the last two years, that’s exactly what we’ve been able to do.
Brian Clark: That’s an excellent point to end on. I couldn’t say it better myself.
We get so hung up maybe within the new mystique around entrepreneurship, about the benefits, the lifestyle, the glory, the status. Really, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you’re an entrepreneur, at least in my mind, it’s going to itch at you to do the next thing. I know it’s customary that… I know you probably had to be there for two years. It sounds like you actually like where you’re at.
Aaron Epstein: Yep. I enjoy it and most of the team is still here. There are still people from the startup days that if they weren’t enjoying it too, it’d be really easy for them to go somewhere else. So everybody’s, I think, been pretty happy overall.
There’s obviously a change when you go from a 14-person startup that’s acquired into a 7,500-person company. But we’ve really just tried to continue to operate how we did as an independent startup and it’s worked out really well for us.
Brian Clark: Excellent. Yeah, I know you’re not legally able to say what the acquisition price was, but I also know you don’t need the money, so your attitude is refreshing and healthy. Congratulations to you. I appreciate you coming on the show.
Aaron Epstein: Yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate you having me.
You asked, “Why sell? The nice thing about it is the money gives the freedom to be able to do what you want to do every day that makes you happy. The number one thing that I want for our whole team, and I try to make sure we have a culture that supports this and for myself personally, is when you go to bed on Sunday night, you’re not dreading like, “Oh no, tomorrow’s Monday. I’ve got to start the work week.
As long as people are having fun coming into work every day working on the product, and as long as I’m having fun, which I am, then it’s a great situation for everyone.
Brian Clark: Wise words. Okay, Everyone, thank you for tuning in. I hope you got a lot out of this. Very, very insightful and like I said, refreshing to hear a more accurate version of how this all goes down.
We will be back next week with more. Until then, keep going.