Six years ago in my grandmother’s loft, I built out a little idea I had… to let people name & share colors and for others to rate and review those colors. That little idea quickly evolved into 5 color palettes and the beginning of the COLOURlovers community. Since then millions of colors have been named, more than 1.5 million palettes have been created and we’re 500,000+ members strong… and a 5x Webby Nominee for Best Community!
Twelve months later Chris aka Pureform started rewriting all my code for COLOURlovers (I won’t say it was poorly written before… but he probably would) and making it a much more scalable and feature rich site. And now all of the awesome things that keep this community creating and sharing have been built with his fingers.
And a little more than a year ago I sat down with a friend in the color world, Aaron of ColorSchemer, and we decided that it made a lot of sense for us to merge our projects and work on things full time. It is in this past year that we’ve had the luxury to focus on COLOURlovers and what it could ultimately be.
The Big Vision
And as we worked on improving the site and developing our business strategy, we had an epiphany. We realized that we didn’t need to create a business model that extracted value from the actions of our members (ie, Color Trending & Market Research)… we could build a business adding value to the actions of our members by continuing to create software and services they wanted and to build a way for them to earn a living doing what they love. We realized our mission…. To make good design simple and to empower creativity.
With this vision for the future of COLOURlovers in our hearts and minds we started having conversations with investors who had been successful building their own amazing services and communities. People like the founders of WordPress, Flickr, Vimeo, Reddit, Groupon & Yahoo!… and VC funds that have invested in the biggest and best sites on the internet. If you’d like to read more about our funding it’s been covered here.
Investing in the COLOURlovers Community
Before the big number whisks you off to a world where we’re all rich, fat & happy… What we did was take on an investment because we believe in the future potential in what we’re building and what you’re participating in. The founding team of COLOURlovers is still working for well below market salaries… but now we have awesome perks like health insurance! :)
We’re going to use the investment to grow the COLOURlovers team so that we can do a better job maintaining the features we have as well as building and launching new awesome things we have sketched out. The most important thing about having the money is helping us make better long term decisions for the good of our community. Before our funding, we spent a considerable amount of time just making sure were doing things to make enough money to keep our servers online. (And in the earlier days there were times where we were late on bills and both my business and personal accounts were overdrawn) Stressing about short term resources isn’t helpful in building long term visions.
*Also, don’t worry that we sold out our interest in COLOURlovers to investors who will now take over and change the site… Our investors are awesome people who believe in what we’re doing and they wouldn’t want to change anything about what we’re doing… and the controlling interest of COLOURlovers is still with us the founders.*
The Growing COLOURlovers Team
If you haven’t noticed yet, we updated the COLOURlovers About Us page with our two new family members: Molly & Brian. And we’ll be adding more names to that page in the coming months as we hire the rest of the awesome team that will help us execute on our big vision.
If you fit any of the open positions we have… it’d be awesome to promote from within!
Open Positions at COLOURlovers
+ Biz Dev / Ad Sales / Partnerships
+ Majestic Unicorn (Web Developer with Design Skills)
+ WordPress Theme Developer / Designer
Header Pattern Template by Gwenwhyfair, Pattern Colors by southpaws
