The indie market for Blender creators
We built Blender Market to create intrinsic incentives for developers to maintain their Blender add-ons with each new release of Blender while also enabling them to generate a revenue streams with their skills.
Blender Market is continuing to grow at about 120% per year and this is leading us to tackle lots of interesting problems, but it also means we're short staffed! It's time to hire another developer.
If you're a Rails developer with 2+ years of experience and interested in joining a 100% remote, small, focused team with a lot of autonomy then apply here: https://forms.gle/V3BzcjnrTUE5EGGW7
As of today Blender Market has doubled the 2019 gross revenue. The Blender community is growing at an alarming pace and that's showing in the growth of Blender Market.
We have now processed over $4,083,500.00 USD in 2020, with the bulk of this going straight into creators pockets.
Our interview with Indie Hackers from few weeks ago was just published to the blog. It's a long read but shares a lot of details on how we bootstrapped Blender Market and how we got the first major creators to buy in: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-i-used-influencers-to-market-my-offshoot-product-46a6a66d14
August saw yet another record for Blender Market gross revenue with $529,593.94 USD. Of that $261,386.34 was processed through Stripe and the rest being handled by PayPal.
Creators earned $433,620.83 while Affiliates earned $15,021.78. This provided an operating margin of roughly 15%.
We have managed to keep expenses mostly flat, but the growing customer base continues to increase the infrastructure cost of AWS.
Thanks to the great growth and staying diligent on expenses Blender Market has finally reached profitability. Three of the last four months have had a small profit. At the current pace Blender Market is projected to stay consistently profitable.
It's only taken six years of steadfastness!
We hosted our seasonal Spring sale last week, which pushed us past $372,000.00 in gross revenue for the month of April, making it our highest grossing month ever! The previous top month, November 2019, was $311,000.00.
In five short days the sale brought in $176,446.67 in gross revenue and earned $134,233.31 for Creators.
The full results are here: https://blendermarket.com/posts/spring-sale-2020-results
After a few months of work we launched a new Creator Affiliates system for Blender Market! This enables any Creator to add affiliates for their products for help marketing in exchange for a small cut of the earnings.
An affiliate can be added for Creator's single product or their whole library with a customizable revenue split.
Anyone with a Blender Market account can be added as an affiliate simply by having the Creator enter their email and assigning a rate and products.
If all goes well this system will help incentivize Creators to collaborate with influencers within the Blender community to spread the word and help promote their products.
February 2020 was our 3rd highest grossing month to date! Last month was beat only by November and December 2019, which hold the record due to Cyber Weekend sale boosts. February has no such sale campaign and thus is encouraging for the continued growth and health of the marketplace.
On $216,647.65 USD of gross revenue we paid out $180,799.42 USD in commissions to 441 Creators and $4,514.51 in donations to the Blender Development Fund.
Each year we run a Creator opt-in sale for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Without fail, it's always been our busiest sales weekend of the year.
This year grossed a whopping $198,979.98 (so close to 200!) over just four days, with $161,930.17 being paid out to Creators. A total of 6,772 products were sold.
Full results are here: https://blendermarket.com/posts/2019-cyber-weekend-sale-results
Back in 2014 we took a literal approach to our branding of Blender Market upon launch. As the first marketplace dedicated solely to Blender our key focus was to (figuratively) bring people through the front door to the market. We worked hard to create a community marketplace that brought Blender creators and users everywhere together to buy and sell in one place. Our logo reflected this in the literal storefront design.
Fast-forward five years and Blender Market is an established marketplace with a strong community of creators and customers. We feel it is time to add a new coat of paint, refreshing the logo design to carry us forward, collectively, for the years to come.
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Read the full blog post here: https://blendermarket.com/posts/blender-market-has-a-new-look
Each year Blender Market continues to grow a steady pace. In 2018 our gross revenue rose 150% compared to 2017, surpassing one million for the first time!
Growth at a glance:
In 2019 we aim to continue this growth while also focusing on three goals: empowering Creators, hiring a full-time developer, and updating the Blender Market branding.
We built Blender Market to create intrinsic incentives for developers to maintain their Blender add-ons with each new release of Blender while also enabling them to generate a revenue streams with their skills.