How I Spent 4 Years and $50,000 Building a Competitor to ThemeForest

Hey there, fellow indie hackers! I'm here to share a tale that's pretty close to my heart. It's about a journey—a long, sometimes brutal, but ultimately rewarding trek through the wilds of the digital product landscape. This story is for you, the product creators, the dreamers, and the doers, who fill places like this with your ambition and innovations.

From idea to first steps

I've got quite the experience with digital products. Back in 2017, I created an Instagram mockup that got downloaded over 100,000 times.

Then, in 2018, I got the idea: create a product for ThemeForest. I spent 7 months trying to get my product up on ThemeForest. At that time, ThemeForest had this rep: make anything, and it'll sell, and you can live off that money. I opted to make a hotel booking template. All 7 months, I faced hard rejections and soft rejections. Anyone who's tried knows what I'm talking about.

7 months of hard rejections

But after 7 months, I finally got it listed there and then got 0 sales for the next half a year. Maybe my product wasn't great, or perhaps I just published it in the wrong niche. I started looking into this and realized I wasn't the only one trying to get their product out there, facing rejections over and over, and then, when they finally do get listed, there are no sales. People's products were piling up along with their frustration. At that moment, I realized here's the gold mine—to gather together with those like me, those who weren't let into the club, and make our own club.

Complete freedom for creators there is a gold mine

With that thought, I came up with a platform offering complete freedom: post whatever you want, sell whatever you want, no restrictions. Fast forward, I'll say that some moderation will still be needed, like post-moderation, for example. I don't know how they solve this problem on Gumroad, but when we gave people the opportunity to publish products without moderation, we faced copyright infringement and credit card fraud.

If anyone is interested in how such platforms get defrauded, ask in the comments, I'd be happy to talk about it.

The birth of code.market

I snagged the domain code.market, which cost me more than $1,000 and its renewal costs $1,200. From this domain, I started building the concept:
any coder can sell their product with us without any restrictions.

Right away, I came up with a slogan:

If code was written, it can be sold.

Along with this, I immediately identified several main killer features that seemed to turn the game around:

1. Integration with GitHub, so you don't have to upload zip files every time you want to update, just connect GitHub and commit there to update the product.
2. No complicated moderation.

At that time, it seemed to me that these killer features were enough to make the platform mega successful.

The platform's up and running, but it's empty

With this idea, I started developing the product. The first version of the marketplace I made on WordPress in a couple of months, and by January 2019, there was already a working marketplace, but it didn't have a single product.

This is a classic that anyone who creates a marketplace faces: the chicken and egg problem. To get traffic and sales, you need products, and to get products, you need traffic and sales.

I couldn't think of anything smarter than making products myself, but before I started, I needed to decide on a niche. I understood that entering the WordPress niche in 2019 made no sense, it was completely saturated. Something fresh and gaining popularity was needed. I'm pretty good with technology, and at that time, cross-platform mobile development was on the rise. I made 6 templates on React Native, all classics: calculator, hotel, to-do, messenger, store, and restaurant. But as you've already guessed, 0 traffic 0 sales.

Next was an attempt to become the project of the day on Product Hunt, but Product Hunt is not really suitable for such projects, because if there is no immediate offer that converts traffic into buyers, there will only be a spike in traffic and nothing more.

Okay, Google, let's dive into audience.

The next step was to study our audience. The audience was mobile developers, because no entrepreneur or creator without knowledge in mobile development will be able to launch, let alone publish in production, a React Native application. There you have to do a million steps, and without a developer, it's not possible. And I began to study how developers buy, how they make decisions.

There are several reasons for buying such products:

1. To learn how to do the same – about 50%
2. Really to create and launch some project – about 20%
3. And a bunch of other reasons
   

After research, it turned out that before buying a product, our audience googles a lot, from 100 to 300 times. If they find a free product with us, of course, they download it immediately and without hesitation.

The simplest way to boost the platform is to collect free products on it and parasitize on this traffic, but!

There's a huge difference between the audience that searches and downloads for free, and those who buy even for 1 dollar. It's incredibly difficult to convert someone who just downloaded a free mobile app template into someone who will pay for its license.

The trick that scored us our first traffic.

My plan was to bootstrap the project without rise investments. There was nowhere to retreat; the problem of the lack of assortment had to be solved, and I realized that Themeforest could become our friends. I joined their affiliate program and started collecting products to us in the mobile development niche: flutter, ios, android, React native. With such a simple tactic, we collected 6,000 thousand products on the marketplace. And the platform came to life, it began to look solid. Google traffic pulled from SEO.

I understood that to stand in the user's path, we needed to pump SEO, especially low-frequency, here a powerful categorization of products helped us. Each product had 3-4 attributes that corresponded to some theme, for example, Flutter e-commerce technology and category. We began to create URLs in the catalog that would respond to the query "Flutter E-commerce app template." And this bore fruit: Google began to raise us, and we got the first traffic. Over time, we got an average position in Google - 20. This is both good and not very good.

Who understand SEO, tell me in the comments how realistic it is for such a platform to make an average position of 10 and above and if it is realistic, what needs to be done?

The first traffic comes.

Next problem appeared: it was very difficult to earn on this traffic because it left us for Envato through affiliate links, and what happens next with the user, is not clear. Envato has quite strict restrictions for publishers, 30% commission from each sale, you will only receive if you brought to Envato a new user who was never registered there. And since they have more than 18 million users, this is very difficult. I think many of you have bought something there at least once. We did not receive commissions for such users, although we sent 20-30 people a day and earned 0. This was incredibly frustrating.

I understood that we needed products that were directly listed with us, I started writing to authors so that they would list with us. But all the authors I wrote to said they didn't want to list because then they would lose their exclusive authorship on Envato. Along with these refusals, I was waiting for the first success. By the way, how would you act to attract authors to the platform?

First success

But along with the failure with the authors, I was waiting for the first success. I remembered my mockup, which was distributed for free. And I listed it for $9. Then I redirected all links from all my social networks, Behance, the site where it was posted, to code.market, and in the first month, I sold for $1,000. In the first year of sales, I earned my first $10,000 on it.

For me, this was a real success:

1. I realized that the platform is not dead, it can sell if you list the right product and do marketing for it.
2. I had free money to develop code.market.

All the money earned I invested back so that the platform could develop

Nothing happened for three years.

In 2020, COVID-19 was raging in full swing, and my development business went downhill. I had to go to work for hire. At the end of 2020, I went to a very well-known and large IT company, where I spent the next 3 years as a product-lead. There I launched several amazing products. One with a billion GMV, the second with profitability by EBITDA. I realized that I can create products that change the market and bring huge profits. It was an incredible experience in hiring. But all these 3 years I did not deal with code.market, it just lay there and lived its own life.

Back to the business

In January 2023, I decided to see what was going on there at all and saw that over 3 years, while I was not engaged in the project, we paid authors more than $40,000. My experience in hiring and this result inspired me very much. I realized that the project is needed and it can become big.

That experience and knowledge I gained working on such a project are invaluable, I learned about: Marketing, User experience, Markets, Strategy, Design, Enhanced my development knowledge

No hiring experience can provide so much cool knowledge and expertise in such a short time.

So, I decided to quit and focus on code.market, but slightly changing the concept: if before we had only mobile app templates on the platform, now we decided to start selling any digital products.

In essence, announcing the concept from creators to creators. We made a platform where any individual contributor can test their hypothesis by creating a product, no need to register a company, just have a product, list it, collect the first sales and audience.

Fivefold growth

In 2020 we had 6,000 products, and by 2023 it became more than 50,000. For the same 2023, we grew 5 times according to the schedule. We still redirect some of the traffic to Envato, but! Now it's not 30 people a day but 300-500.

In addition, we gave the opportunity to import their products from another platforms to us. So that creators could increase their revenue by selling with us too.

In addition to import, we have many great ideas for 2024.

1. We have no restrictions on what products can be published, except for explicitly prohibited ones and copyright infringement (we monitor this)
2. Creators asking for crypto withdraw and we made it. Any Creator will be able to withdraw their funds through USDT without restrictions.
3. We plan to develop the social component of the platform so that we as creators can exchange experiences
4. Give every creator access to their audience so they can interact with it.
5. We give still best commission rate for creators at the market

I know what you're thinking, why do this if there's already Envato and Gumroad.

Because I love it.

I have ambition to create a global product for creators all over the world. It inspires me even more when there are such powerful and respected competitors by me. I'm very curious about what we can offer creators to win the battle for their attention. And now I'm not alone, I have a team that is passionate about this idea.

By the way, if you create digital products and are looking to sell them, feel free to reach out to me directly via DM at X.com and I'll give you special commission rate.