Five Minutes with Envato’s Chief Commercial Officer, Ben Chan
Reflections one year after the launch of Envato Elements, and what it takes to launch a new product
Ben Chan is the Chief Commercial Officer of Envato, a creative ecosystem and marketplace for creative assets and digital goods. Last year, we launched a new subscription service, Envato Elements. In celebration of the 1-year birthday of Elements, we asked Ben a few questions about how the service came to be.
Can you explain a little about the design and inception of Elements. What’s the story behind Envato Elements as a concept (and a product)? Why did a subscription-based model appeal?
We wanted to develop a product that gave customers a ton of value, while also increasing the earnings for our beloved author community. We saw other tech industries increasingly moving towards subscription models as a means of providing such value to its users; Netflix and Amazon are two prime examples here of how ‘best practice’ subscription models can work.
For those of us in the digital world, the subscription model is a beautiful mechanism, largely due to the relatively low marginal costs involved. Unlike selling a physical product like a t-shirt, digital companies don’t have a big cost of goods sold or inventory cost. Instead, digital companies have server and download costs, but these are typically small compared to many offline business models. The marginal revenue versus cost dynamic allows us to offer products profitably on an unlimited basis.
We think the Envato Elements subscription service is a great way to meet these goals by providing unlimited downloads for a fixed monthly price.
What was your expectation for launching Elements — and how was the reality different?
We knew that launching a new product was always going to pose some unique challenges.
For Envato, that challenge was to be able to build something that was attractive to both customers and authors; it needed to be a net positive addition to our ecosystem.
We expected it to be a tough challenge. There’s lots of great value propositions across the sector, but we thought we had a unique concept that leveraged one of our major strengths: our awesome community.
The launch itself was super exciting, and our first cohort of customers still remain our best! Since then it’s been a lot of hard work to integrate more category types and to improve our UX accordingly.
Recently, we introduced Photos into our library, which has been the culmination of a lot of effort from across the company over several months. During this iteration, we quickly realised we had lots of improvements to make, both technical and UX. For example, we worked hard to figure out how we could show balanced search results, instead of all results from one category type or one author.
We’re not done yet, as there’s lots more improvement and more categories to come.
What makes Elements stand out from other design products? What does it need to do to fulfil its ambitions and how do you know when a product is “finished”?
The big thing that makes Envato stand out is our author community. We have the most skilled, motivated and accomplished authors in the world who are designing and building great items that are sold on Envato Elements each and everyday. As a result, our customers have been able to create great projects, and our authors have been able to earn a sustainable living.
To fulfill our ambitions, we need to expand into more categories, gather more great content from our authors and increase earnings per author. We’re also working on improving our UX to allow for discovering through our ever-expanding library of great content.
I don’t think our product will ever be finished. There will always be ways we can improve, and if we were to ever stop improving the product then I think we’d no longer be delivering value for our customers and authors, which would not be a good result for our community.
Where do you draw inspiration and motivation from when designing and iterating new products like Elements?
Easy: Collis! Our founder and CEO is the most amazing entrepreneur I’ve come across, and I feel so fortunate to be able to work with him. His gut feel for product innovation and the market in which we operate is just inspirational to watch and to learn from.
We also learn from other players in the industry. There’s so much innovation in our space, and it helps all players get better and better, which is great for the customers and authors.
What’s the most unexpected thing that goes into product development that most people would not be aware of?
The amount of financial back end work that needs to happen is probably one of the more complex and ‘hidden’ aspects of launching a subscription product, especially when we had to undertake such a shift from our traditional payment mode from one-off carts to the subscription model that is now the hallmark of Envato Elements. I’m glad — and proud — to have the best people in the industry to work on that stuff.
Is there anything you feel Envato would do differently if the same opportunity arose again?
I’d probably throw more people at it from the start. It’s delivered strong early results, and our growth is tracking up. However, it takes a while for people — staff, customers and authors — to get oriented to a new system, no matter how well designed. Ultimately I also think we could’ve made the shift to a subscription offering even earlier. But at the end of the day that’s a good problem to have!
What advice would you give up and coming business leaders in the tech industry, especially when it comes to pitching and producing new products?
Product development is hard, whether it be on an existing product or a brand new product. Things take longer than you originally think. This is certainly not news , and many companies come across this, but it is hard!
It’s also important to get that fast feedback loop happening, on both sides of the product and user spectrum. Focus more on what you’ve been able to prove, and show the traction of the product.
When reflecting on key successes, how does Envato go about setting new goals and strategic objectives?
Every year we review how we’ve performed as compared to our targets and goals. We take the time to celebrate our successes, learn from our challenges and then we set new goals for the next 12 months. These goals will vary from priorities that are numbers or process focused to those revolving around our people.
In terms of strategy, we’re always working towards growth: of our customer base, our product offerings, and our community earnings. We look at our products in play, candidly assess them, and think about which opportunity areas we want to prioritise. Otherwise, there’s a risk of ‘standing still’, and we’re always aiming to drive constant growth and innovation.
Want more behind-the-scenes at Envato? Read reflections from Gaby Jalbert, a media specialist at Envato, about creating a new strategy for our stock photo marketplace:
