I love Colourlovers and use it often because it fills a gap designers need and no one else has provided, but the quality of the content on CM insofar seems comparable to free offerings on deviantArt, Dribbble, Premium Pixels, Forrst, et al. Will there ever be a barrier-to-entry/quality-control aspect to this or is it truly free-for-all-even-the-crap like Etsy?
I also wonder if the better-looking assets are going to create a Twitter Bootstrap effect, where we see so many sites using the same UI packages, icons, etc. that it becomes sort of a joke and pushes people away from using the site to avoid the potential to look like other sites. Do you plan on implementing a TemplateMonster-like approach where you can pay a premium for exclusive rights to a design to ensure there won't be clones?
We don't plan to have a barrier to entry, because we want to build a platform that is accessible to everyone. The pressure is then on us to do a great job surfacing the best content for you, for whatever your need is.
And there will always be people looking for design shortcuts. Much of the web is not breakthrough design of new experiences, it's new faces on existing ideas. I hope we provide a short-cut for designers to get the template easily so they can spend their creative energies making it really unique.
Envato is great and does a lot of things well. We see a lot of opportunities in providing a service that is more affordable, more fair to the sellers & simpler to understand licensing. We're also building in easy integrations to allow our marketplace content to reach creatives where they work.
And we already have 75k people on our early access list... so that long ways isn't all that long. ;)
I also wonder if the better-looking assets are going to create a Twitter Bootstrap effect, where we see so many sites using the same UI packages, icons, etc. that it becomes sort of a joke and pushes people away from using the site to avoid the potential to look like other sites. Do you plan on implementing a TemplateMonster-like approach where you can pay a premium for exclusive rights to a design to ensure there won't be clones?