[Bonus episode] Dribbble’s controversial pivot from an online design community to a lead-gen marketplace

Please note: The transcript is automated, meaning that there will be mistakes.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Welcome to Two Sided, the marketplace podcast brought to you by Sharedribe. Hello, and welcome. I am Stuart, CMO at Hare Tribe, and I am your host. Surprise, surprise, a special bonus episode of Two Sided. And in this episode, we'll dig into Dribbble and their bold pivot from an online show and tell design community into a lead generation marketplace.

And all of that without destroying the network. I do this together with Dribbble CEO, Konstantin Anastasakis, who turned out to be a listener of the show, and he reached out because he thought this might be an interesting experience to share with you, our listeners. And, honestly, I I couldn't agree more. By the way, bonus episode. I'm saying that simply because season four of two sided has not taken any shape or form.

But when Constantine reached out, I saw this opportunity was just too valuable to let it pass, and I didn't wanna wait until we're gonna release in a new season because chances are it would be significantly outdated. Anyway, let's get back to the important part, Dribbble. So if you don't know Dribbble, by the way, three b's, d r I b b b l e, Dribbble started as a curated invite only social platform where designers share visual work to get inspired, get feedback, and get discovered. And over time, it grew into the one of the biggest visual and digital designer communities and portfolio sites on the web. And it is this niche community aspect that makes Dribbble and this shift actually such an interesting case.

Lots of things could have gone wrong, and actually some of them did in a way. But that's all I want to say about that. You'll hear everything in the actual interview. I just wanna say that if you're building a marketplace for professionals, creators, or any niche with high community aspects built on trust, then this conversation could be immensely valuable. It's essentially a compact playbook on how to sequence monetization, measuring what matters, designing for the real power users of your marketplace.

For example, in this episode, you'll learn the actual pivot timeline and the rationale behind Dribbble's shift to a marketplace or marketplace like model, why focusing every product and policy choice on delivering high intent leads really changed the math for them, and how the measured metrics internally, retention, orders, GMVs, told a very different story than the backlash that was visible on social media. So if you want concrete out of the trenches lessons on turning attention into reliable revenue without breaking your community, this is a fantastic episode. Do let me know if you enjoyed this bonus episode. You can email me at sjoerd@sharedrop.com just like Konstantin did, or you can drop a comment in your podcast player or reach out to me on LinkedIn, whatever. I would really like to hear what you all thought.

But now finally, here is my interview with Konstantin Anastasakis of Dribbble. Hi, Constantine. Welcome to the show.

Constantine Anastasakis: Hi. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. I'm really happy. Actually, you reached out. I was gonna say really happy you took your time, but actually, you you reached out. It was really, really cool.

You know, this show isn't super popular, so, like, it's a very niche. So this this doesn't happen a lot. Of course, you we had a lot of not so super great outreach, but this is super interesting. So really glad you could make the time. Really cool things going on at Dribbble.

But before we go into all of that, could you tell us a little bit just so that the audience has a bit of a context about what you did, before you ended up as the CEO of Dribbble?

Constantine Anastasakis: Oh, sure. So I've actually spent most of my career with online marketplaces. First with Fiverr, which is also a marketplace for services. Then Pond5, which is a stock media marketplace that was acquired by Shutterstock a couple years back. Then between Pond5 and Dribbble, I I worked at at an online mortgage lender for for a year.

Really, marketplaces are my love, and so I was very eager when the Dribbble opportunity presented itself. I was very eager to to to jump back into that type of business or what I thought could become that type of business.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: So that specifically in the opportunity that you saw you saw in Dribbble, I guess?

Constantine Anastasakis: Yeah. With Dribbble, for years before I arrived, Dribbble had flirted with the idea of becoming a marketplace and at different points had acquired companies that were themselves marketplaces. A marketplace for services called Crew, that was a few years back. A stock media marketplace called Creative Market. So Dribbble had for a long time thought about the marketplace business model.

And frankly, when when I actually first started speaking to Dribbble's former CEO and the board about about this role, I actually went into that that very first conversation thinking that Triple already was a marketplace for services. In my defense, that's actually something that I've heard from a lot of folks, you know, when I talk to them about what we've been up to over the last year. Yeah. A lot of them have that same reaction. Like, I thought you guys were already doing that.

Yeah.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. Yeah. You can actually tell because not everyone of course, like, if you worked in design with design, you know what Dribbble is, but maybe you could tell we could go a little bit into what Dribbble actually was, like, before it had the marketplace angle before we go into into the shift.

Constantine Anastasakis: Totally. Totally. So Dribbble was founded in in in 2009 by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornet. We're two great guys that I've I've had the opportunity to spend some time with. They started Dribbble as a invite only community.

It was what they described as a show and tell for designers. Yeah. So imagine that it's this, you know, private space where professional designers could share what they were working on in its unfinished state. It was very much about a work in progress, as opposed to a portfolio website where you're showing your finished work. Mhmm.

Drupal was really meant to be your work in progress, and you would get feedback as a designer from your peers. So this is interesting. Can you explain what you were thinking about here? How did you go about this? And you were really meant to show each iteration of the work.

And so in in that earliest version of dribble, which is now sixteen years ago, it really was this it really was a very tight knit community.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Mhmm.

Constantine Anastasakis: Over time, Dribbble changed to become at some point over the the subsequent years, it opened up to no longer be invite only. And so now, you know, everyone could could join the the platform, which led to very rapid growth in in Drupal's user base and Yeah. And and website traffic. During that period, and I think this this is very relevant context to everything that we've worked on over the past eighteen months that I've been with the company Mhmm. During that period where Drupal starts, where the user base starts expanding rapidly and you have way more designers coming to the platform, uploading tons of examples of their of their work Mhmm.

It starts to morph into a place where designers would land clients. Yeah. And and the some of that original, you know, some of the work in progress starts to be replaced by that polished, finished work that demonstrates the designers' capabilities and draws new clients to them. And during that time, because again, Dribbble wasn't actually facilitating those transactions Yeah. Or trying to monetize the the the lead that the designer was receiving.

Now Dribbble pursued a number of different monetization activities Mhmm. During during that time Yeah. Including introducing advertising. So you had a lot of brands that want to put their products in front of designers Mhmm. Advertising on Dribbble, which is still the case.

A job board where employers, recruiters could post jobs for for designers Yeah. And different subscription products. The the main subscription being, which we still have today, is a subscription that gives designers a higher ranking in search results Yeah. Advanced profile features, things like that.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. We used actually Eteritro because I I knew I think I mentioned this when we had our chat also that Yeah. At Eteritro, we've actually hired, I think, two two designers through

Constantine Anastasakis: Mhmm.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Through Dribbble. I'm not sure. Like, the first one was hired already 02/2014, maybe even before I joined the company. But also recently, we found a new one through Dribbble, actually. I think I paid some, I don't know, recruitment fee or I don't remember what was the what was the the plan I was on so I could actually contact the people.

But but yeah. But and I was also thinking that actually this is in a way it's funny that it's not intentional, like, and that you end up being a marketplace or move forward because in a way, this is a very clear example of this, one of these categories of, like, the cold start problem that, like, get one one side first. Right? Like, the the the supply side, like, through like, basically, get get the designers first somehow. And it's it's quite funny that, yeah, it's such a clear example, but somehow this transition just hadn't happened yet, like, to a marketplace.

Constantine Anastasakis: I think we had orbited the marketplace model for Yeah. For many years. And and I think some of the the products touched on it without directly inserting the platform into the transaction the way that the way that we have lately. But the product that that you're referring to was a subscription product that recruiters, hiring managers would pay for that allowed them to search through designer profiles and send messages to designers. And it's very interesting because that product, which we've since, this was actually one of the very first things we did last May '24, was we unpaywalled those features in anticipation of moving to a marketplace because you can't paywall search and messaging Yeah.

On a platform if you're if if you intend to bringing the two sides Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And so it's interesting because that that product though was an early attempt at monetizing the lead flow that Dribbble was bringing to designers Yeah.

Except the way that we were monetizing that lead flow was by charging this upfront fee to the demand side. And one of the consequences of that was actually a inadvertently throttled lead flow because there was now this there was now an upfront cost to reach out to a designer. And so if you look at it on a line graph, for example, you can see exactly, you'd be able to pinpoint exactly when those features were paywalled.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Okay.

Constantine Anastasakis: And you can pinpoint when we unpaywalled them. Okay. Because, again, lead flow is throttled, and then it opens back up again. Yeah. And that was actually very you know, I I I have the benefit of

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Hindsight. Hindsight and

Constantine Anastasakis: can can can look at that. It it was actually very, very revealing for us because that was about the time, you know, know, I I joined in in 2024. And we could see that very clearly. We had enough distance from when those features were paywalled. Yeah.

We could see exactly what I just described, precipitous decline in lead flow. And so between that and between a lot of what I was hearing directly from users, a lot of the folks who reached out when I when I first joined the company, a lot of the folks that reached out were talking to me about leads. Yeah. I was imagining that the community, you know, I was imagining that that that a lot of the feedback I would receive from designers would be about social networking features or things like that. Hub feature somehow.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was almost exclusively about leads. I used to get this many leads and now I don't. And and which and so, you know, those two, that sort of anecdotal evidence and then our actual factual data we had led us to to conclude something that I've only come to feel more and more strongly about eighteen months later, is that ultimately it's all about lead flow. Yeah.

And if we are bringing high intent qualified leads to the service providers on our platform, everything works. It lifts all boats. Yeah. And if we aren't, nothing works. Yeah.

And and I think that there's actually I think there's actually something, and again, this is this is, you know, pretty niche dribble thinking now. But I think that there was a and, again, with the benefit of hindsight, I say this. I think that there was a there was a a misconception that we held that was designers were here primarily, and this is over the last, call it, five years, let's say. Because, again, in that in the in the invite only tight knit early dribble days, I don't think that what I'm about to say applies. Mhmm.

But I think that there was a a misconception that designers were here for the the community part of it, the meeting their peers, talking shop with their peers, getting feedback, giving feedback, and that they were here primarily for that. And as a happy accident, they would also land the occasional client. Yeah. Whereas what I believe and what we as an organization have point of view that we have is that the reverse is true. Yeah.

That it's designers are here to land clients. And if they are landing clients on Triple, they will invest time in sharing their work and engaging in the community. But the community engagement only comes if they are seeing an actual, financial return on the time that they're spending on the platform. Through that lens, I think a lot of what we've done since makes makes sense.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. Yeah. It's also funny because, like, what you said earlier about, like like, I was going to mention it because you said, like, if you bring in high quality leads, you know, then everything will go. But, of course, you can only bring in high quality leads if you have high quality design on the other end. Right?

So this is very much sort of like a like an interaction between both sides as with most marketplace. I mean, like, quality of the supply generates quality demand and the other way around. So, yeah, that's interesting because I think that this is interesting. I can relate to that with also that, like, I think over time, like, a a company changes quite a bit, and not everybody might notice this even internally. Like, a lot of people come in have come in probably over over at different times at Dribbble, and and there are people who are, like, old school who are still in their mind have something like, no.

No. No. We're we're a design community. We're here for like and and that works across all levels whether that is like your you know, like, what product features you think are important, how you position it in marketing and and advertising and stuff. So I relate.

We have gone through similar things at Charitable, which is really, really cool. What do you think created the opportunity to make this just because you're you're saying that, like, the company has been orbiting around this model. There was maybe, you know, well, you touched already, like, maybe people were holding back because they had a different premise that this was primarily a design thing. What changed that that you felt or that the company is now ready or was now ready to make this shift?

Constantine Anastasakis: There are a couple of things. I think one is the evidence that this business depends primarily on the quantity and quality of leads. Mhmm. That that evidence really was stronger than ever, in part because we saw what happened when we When

Sjoerd Handgraaf: you paywalled the thing.

Constantine Anastasakis: When we paywalled. When lead flow was throttled, all other parts of the business in time were impacted by that.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: You mean things like like time spent on platform, new designs uploaded, those kind of things?

Constantine Anastasakis: For instance, you know, I mentioned our our pro subscription, which is it gives designers a higher search ranking, at least at the time. We've now added a lot more to it. But at the time, it was higher search rankings and advanced profile features, which are important if you are getting leads. If you're getting leads, it's a very worthwhile investment to rank higher in search. If you are not getting leads, then the ROI is not there for the individual designer.

And so we saw a ripple effect throughout the entire business that also did also impacted how how much content was being uploaded by designers to the sites, which impacts website traffic. There was a definite ripple effect that I would attribute specifically to to the introduction of those paywalls. And then the reverse is true. When we unpaywalled those features, you saw a positive, impact throughout throughout the business. But to answer your question, there was one more evidence, both quantitative and qualitative because we were hearing this loud and clear from our users.

There was more evidence. And then I think a lot of it is actually comes to comes back to what we started with, which was my background. You know, I'm obviously very biased towards a marketplace business model. I sort of intuitively gravitated towards that type of business. I think internally, as I mentioned, there had already been a lot of discussion around the possibility before I arrived, the possibility of in fact, I I remember when I was when I was speaking with the former CEO, Zach, who brought me into the search and is the reason that I'm at Dribbble, he showed me a version of a marketplace strategy that they were intending to explore in in 2024.

It it looked quite different from from what what we ended up doing. Mhmm. But it was, you know, conceptually the same idea of bringing the two sides together. So I think that you had internally, there was already an understanding and an acceptance of the idea that we should take a more active role in bringing together both sides of the of the transaction. Yeah.

Then you had me and my bias towards a marketplace model. And I I will say, though, that what I thought eighteen months ago, what I thought our marketplace would look like is very different from where we are now. And and, you know, I think I I started as much more of a purist because I knew from Fiverr and Pond5 Yeah. Which were platforms that from day one, they started as marketplaces. And so you bring the two sides together, they transact, and you take a revenue share from one or both sides of that transaction.

Yeah. And that's what you focus on. And so when I when I came to Dripple, if you look at the earliest version of our of our strategy, it's solely focused on transaction fee revenue. How do we increase transaction activity and take transaction fees on those successful transactions? And it's interesting, you know, because those other platforms that I had been at, the sellers in those marketplaces were were individuals.

Mhmm. They were hobbyists. This was their side hustle. This was whereas on on Dribbble, and this is something that I I did not appreciate coming into the role, On Dribbble, many of the quote unquote sellers or the designers on our platform are not individuals. They might be agencies with hundreds of employees.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Oh, right.

Constantine Anastasakis: Yeah. I wasn't

Sjoerd Handgraaf: aware of that either, yeah. Okay.

Constantine Anastasakis: So it's actually one of the very first conversations I had with a with a a user after I joined Dribbble is an agency based in Poland Yeah. That has a 100 employees. Okay. They're they're many times bigger than Dribbble is, you know, in terms of the the size of the organization. And it was it was actually that was a very important conversation for me because, you know, I spoke to their their CEO who thought about Dribbble and described his company's activity on Dribbble Mhmm.

Strictly in terms of of leads, you know. And he described how they would how they had full time employees whose job it was to create and upload work to Dribbble. It was purely a lead source to them. And that was really eye opening for me because and this sort of goes back to the, you know, are folks here for the community and then landing clients? Or is it is it the reverse?

Are they doing the community stuff in order to land in order to land clients?

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. And also, how how are those groups represented? Right? Like, is this an eighty twenty story or is this like like a you know, meaning that, like Totally. Is 20% like that or is it 80% like that or somewhere in between and Totally.

Constantine Anastasakis: Totally. And and the reality is that many of our most active users Mhmm. Are are in fact agencies. Coming back to, like, how this kinda changed for us, when when I started out, I was like, okay. This marketplace will look like the other marketplace as I've worked at.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. Like peer to peer almost. Peer to peer. Yeah.

Constantine Anastasakis: Yeah. Exactly. And this also plays in later to the sort of the the topic of disremediation. But but when you when you speak to a an agency with hundreds of employees, they have their own workflows. They've they have many lead sources, and they have they have a sales process, managers and account executives.

They have very different needs and expectations than an individual person who is selling their services on Dribbble. And it's interesting because that actually, again, that conversation and I I remember the CEOs telling me, you know, we spend, x dollars a year on on Dribbble, and that was basically the sum of the pro subscriptions that they had for their for some of their employees. And he said, I would happily spend many times that.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: More. Yeah. If if I This is what you want to hear.

Constantine Anastasakis: Yeah. Totally. He said, I'd happily spend much more than that if if Dribbble was again a reliable lead source for me. Yeah. And again, very eye opening conversation.

And and we we did in in time develop products that were really geared towards what we call our designer advertising products. Yeah. We developed a lineup of products geared towards that type of of seller, the agency that can't or won't transact on the platform because they have much more complex workflows, but are very willing to invest in the platform and very willing to help us monetize the leads that we are sending them. And so what what we enable these folks to do, including this, agency that I was referring to, they advertise, which includes different benefits. Among them, they are free to display their direct contact details and communicate and transact off platform.

If you don't want to advertise, then you stay on the platform and transact, and it's all completely free, but we apply transaction fees to the successful.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: What changed, Sikka? Because so so you on paywall the recruiter fee. What made you change? Because I I just want to get also a little bit to the reception of this among the community. So maybe we can sort of shortly touch on, like, what what changed for for the designers, basically, and then go into how this was received.

Constantine Anastasakis: Yeah. So the the the sequence of events was basically May, we we unpaywall search and messaging. Then in September, we introduced our first set of transactional features, which basically allowed a client to send a sort of structured project request and pay, and for a designer to deliver work and get paid. So very basic functionality that you would find in any marketplace for for for for services. At that point, we didn't require any clients or designers to transact on the platform.

We made these features available to them to be more convenient than having to transition the the conversation to another platform. That was our initial thinking. And and in fact, we initially, again, in that sort of that first version of our strategy, we did not anticipate taking the step of actually prohibiting users from taking transactions off platform. We believe that there would be Like enough value in what you provided. Yeah.

Exactly. To keep to keep folks on the on the platform. So so to answer your question, early September, we introduced these features, and folks started using them. Yep. And then in March, so about six months after we introduced that first set of features Mhmm.

We updated our terms of service to require clients and designers who meet on Dribbble to keep their transactions on Dribbble.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Okay.

Constantine Anastasakis: With the the exception of the the designer advertisers that I shared before who have who can who can take transactions off.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. Because because they they share the revenue in a different way.

Constantine Anastasakis: In a different way.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Constantine Anastasakis: And and that's really that's really in a in a nutshell. Like, our our thinking is we wanna focus everything we've got. We want to focus all of our resources on generating high intent qualified lead flow for designers. And we have to monetize every single one of those leads. That's our that's our our our thinking.

And it and it happens in one of those two ways. It's either you are a designer, it's free to join Dribbble, it's free to upload your work, it's free to advertise your services, it's free to receive leads. If you convert those leads, we apply a transaction fee. Or you advertise, you enable us to monetize the leads in a different way, and you can transact on or off the platform as you please. But that's that's really the thinking.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. And I already hinted at it, of course, but, like, we we discussed over the course that, you know, there's, you know, internally, there's people with maybe different perception of what Dribbble is. Historically, it's been different. So among the user base, they're not all agencies from Poland having 100 people. So there was some pushback that I I saw.

Constantine Anastasakis: Totally. So we announced the the update to the terms. And, you know, as a as an aside, throughout this whole process, from the day we unpaywalled those features through the lead up to introducing the transactional features in September, through the months leading up to the terms of service update, we've been extremely transparent publicly about the thinking behind each of those decisions, the results of those decisions. We've been extremely transparent about it. And in the lead up to our terms of service update, I had written extensively about disintermediation and the risks that it introduced to our clients, to our designers, and to us.

But of course, like, I'm, you know, I'm realistic. I don't think that our users are, like, pouring over my blog posts to understand the context for each decision. But we tried to be we tried to explain why we were making this decision. And so fast forward to March, we we update our our terms of service. I think that was on a Monday that we announced it, along with a statement from me explaining the decision.

From Monday through Wednesday, maybe, there was a just social media meltdown. You know? I I had folks reaching out to me from previous, you know, colleagues from previous, jobs or, you know, friends and quite reaching out to me who who had heard about it from, you know, a designer they work with or they heard about it from the and so it was it was, so for for for a few days, for maybe seventy two hours, there was a huge, mostly negative reaction on social media to the decision to prohibit, discrimination. And it's interesting because we saw almost no if if you weren't looking at X and, Reddit and other and other platforms, and you were only looking at our data, you would have not seen any indication of any sort of negative reaction No. About a month after we updated the terms, I I and I I shared a lot of this publicly, but a month after we updated the terms, we had retained 99.99% of the users that we had the morning of our announcements.

And if you if you narrow it down to just the, you know, the top 5,000, 1,000, 500 most popular accounts, you are still consistently over 99.5% of our of our user base. So for all of the all of the the chatter about

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Dribbble has killed itself.

Constantine Anastasakis: Right. And and I'm deleting my account, and I'm I'm canceling my my pro subscription. We actually saw pro subscription churn decrease in the in the days after. And in in part because one of the additional benefits that we've introduced for pro subscribers is that they don't pay transaction fees on the platform.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Okay.

Constantine Anastasakis: Which is it's it's less compelling when you don't have to stay on the platform. When you're when you're required to stay on the platform, all of a sudden, not paying fees is is quite a good is quite a good benefit. And and the way that I reconcile, by the way, the fact that and I should also say that during this period, we we basically see an immediate step function change to positive change to all of our transaction metrics. Yeah. So we see between March and May, the business triples.

The the amount of orders, the GMV, and then each stage of the conversion funnel improves. The the response rates Yeah. As in the the rate at which designers are responding to the request they're receiving. Yeah. The response time, the the the proposal, everything improves radically.

The way that I reconcile this is that I I believe that a lot of the reaction that we saw on social media, the way that I reconcile the negativity that we encountered there and the very positive impacts that we saw on the business is that I think a lot of those folks aren't actually Dribbble's users. You know, in 2025 are not Dribbble's users. They they they may have joined, and this is often the case, they may have joined in the the early days. And so when they think back about the invite only community that was so important in their early careers, and and they and they and then they see the the very sort of transactional approach that we're taking today. They it's it's very jarring for them, you know, and they're nostalgic for the dribble of of of 2010.

But the actual users who are growing the platform today are here for leads. And what we've done over the last year is commit ourselves fully to that, to we are going to bring you as many high intent qualified leads as we as we can. And so I think it's very positively received by the folks that we are actually Yeah. You know, that are actually growing the platform today.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. I think that's always, like, a real challenge with, same as, like, listening to feature request and feedback. I remember, like, some I don't know. It's already maybe five years ago, but, you know, this this superhuman email email company. So they they had the the founder, he had he had some hit blog piece, which is about how they found product market fit.

And and, basically, what they did is that they asked these, like, feature like, when people would do feature requests, they did user interviews, but then they waited, like, waited them with how they typified them as users. So there's people asking for features who think that, like, yeah, yeah, like, superhuman works for me, but then from the company's perspective, it's like, yeah, They're not our ideal customer, actually. So actually, we're going to pay less attention to this particular feature request because this is just not who we are building for, and and and the product that we have now is not the product that we want to have. So this is I think this is always a struggle. Same for same for Sharedripe.

Same for for most companies who who evolve. Right? Yeah. So maybe maybe we can look a bit. So we've discussed the past.

We discussed, like, the recent past slash slash present. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the future. So, like because you mentioned actually you worked at Fiverr. I hadn't actually even realized this even though we had a chat prior prior to preparing for this conversation. But in the marketplace world, there is this there are these sort of eras of, like, the marketplace model evolving and, you know, the first one being classified, the Craigslist.

And then you have the ones with the transaction, which is sort of marketplace one point o, and then you get services, and then you get all kinds of things on top. But, basically, what you introduced is still, like, marketplace one point o. Right? Like, you're not I mean, not to discredit the the achievement or or or the button. There is a lot more things you could, you know, you could expand on Totally.

If you look at other marketplaces. So so how do you see how do you see Dribbble going forward? Like, what what would you like to see Dribbble develop into?

Constantine Anastasakis: Everything that we've done over the last year has been sort of foundational work. Mhmm. We we frankly, you know, we could spend the next two years doing more foundational work because we are trying to you know, we are reinventing ourselves as a marketplace decades after oDesk and Elance and and even Fiverr and and a lot of these folks.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Respect for that Odesk reference. Think that's one that's long gone. Wait. So just for the people at home, that's what Upwork used to be called, Yeah. I

Constantine Anastasakis: Yeah. Exactly. So decades after those companies were founded, we knew going into this process that we weren't going to actually to attempt to replicate all of the functionality that the incumbents have. We did, however, need some of the basic infrastructure Yeah. Around buying and selling.

But to to answer your question, where I see this going is I see Dribbble being in the lead generation business. That's what I want to focus on. And I think that especially with how rapidly generative AI is eating the smaller design task, we have to operate. And we are internally at Dribbble operating already as though the the logo design or the landing page design project is is gone. You know?

And and we're we're really focused on how do we facilitate more complex transactions. And so there there are a couple aspects of that. One is and again, something that I did not know coming into the role that I learned from speaking to these agencies and others who use Dribbble as a lead source, I didn't realise, for instance, that so many of these companies use the design project as a way of meeting the clients, but ultimately what they're trying to do is sell them an end to end design and development and more solution. And so the design aspect of it is just how they first introduce themselves to a client. But in terms of the value that it represents to them, it's a small fraction.

It's the development side of it that's much more lucrative for them. And

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Sorry. What do you mean exactly with the development side? Like, are we talking about, for example, coding a website or

Constantine Anastasakis: Exactly. So So it's

Sjoerd Handgraaf: developing as a sort of software developer part a.

Constantine Anastasakis: Yes. Got it. Yeah. Exactly. So you'll have, for instance, you'll have a buyer, what we call a client.

A client on Drbul might send a request for UI design work. They'll reach out to a particular agency who will then say, absolutely. And we can also actually do the implementation work.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Build it for you. Yeah.

Constantine Anastasakis: Build it for you.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah.

Constantine Anastasakis: And so the and that might represent for them sixty, seventy, 80% of the the

Sjoerd Handgraaf: The project value.

Constantine Anastasakis: The project value. Many of our designers on on Drupal, not just the agencies, the individuals as well, especially when you have products like like Webflow and and and Wix and others, they offer both the the design and build services. And so Yeah. One thing that we are running towards is how do we make that more obvious to clients that Dribbble is a place where they not only find design, but also development services? And how do we make it obvious to the designers on the platform that they should be talking as well about their development capabilities?

Yeah. And the great thing about this, and actually one of the things that I love about marketplaces in general, is that the sellers in your marketplace will always surprise you with how they how they use your platform to make money.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. Totally.

Constantine Anastasakis: We've seen, with the various features that we've introduced, we've seen designers offering development services and advertising their development services. For example, we introduced a feature a few months ago that allows designers to advertise sort of predefined services, which has, you know, become table stakes, I think, for Yeah. Fiverr and Upwork and others.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Packages or whatever. Yeah.

Constantine Anastasakis: Exactly. Yeah. So without any direction from from Dribbble, many of the services that were created were development services. Yeah. Which I love to see.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People were also creating marketing services. Mhmm.

But I love to see the sellers in a marketplace use the features you give them to to explain to you what they actually what you should actually do to to help them earn more. So we're racing towards development and then beyond. You know, how do we start to bring designers, clients who have much larger budgets, who are thinking about the entire project? We also and this sort of goes hand in hand with how do we bring clients to Drible that represents much larger companies. So at the moment, most of the clients, most of the demand in our marketplace comes from you'll see a lot of startups and small businesses.

You'll see a lot of a lot of a lot of that. But then you'll also see, a sales force on Meta and Amazon, with much larger, much larger budgets looking for much more complex projects. We want to bring in those types of leads. We want to make more of a concerted effort to bring in those types of leads and to help the designers on Dribbble sell not just design, but also design adjacent services. I don't believe we'll ever offer I mean, ChatGPT and other products have made this type of work obsolete, but we won't be offering, you know, data entry services.

No. But we will absolutely push into development and product management and beyond.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yeah. So basically like digital product development, sort of end to end digital product development. That is interesting, especially I wanna touch on that last part that you said before before we start rounding off because that's what I was thinking, like, during the course of this conversation, like, coming again back to sort of the basics that, like, the path that Dribbble has followed is, like, you have built up this one side one side of the market, like, the highest quality. You know? Like, investors and and marketplace experts say that, like and this is also something that share tried that we're trying to hammer in again and again even though we are making a product that builds marketplaces that the product of your marketplace is liquidity.

Right? The product of your marketplace is not the technical platform that you're offering. It's about the strength of the network and your ability to to to bring it together. And so to me, it's actually kind of logical that if you look at you know, if you would draw, I don't know, like a like a quality x axis that you have the top quality designers. Like, at least this is also my personal experience that when we were looking for a designer, where do you find good freelance designer?

Well, unfortunately, no disrespect, but not on Fiverr and and also likely not on Upwork. I feel that that is in a different sort of echelon of the, like, quality, size, price range. And so you have already the top quality, you know, let's say, bespoke supply side. So it only makes sense that you to me, at least, like, that you start focusing on, let's bring in more of the, you know, top dollar demand side because, apparently, you know, they are a natural match.

Constantine Anastasakis: So I I do believe that, again, that, you know, the the we need to focus on the demand side Mhmm. And and that makes the whole machine work. But you're you're you're absolutely right that we you know, our our jumping off points was this platform that had some of the best designers on the planet on the platform already. Yeah. Which which makes in in one sense, you know and and I I I think about this, like, for for all of the the negativity or the friction that we encountered by making this pivot.

Mhmm. I think that it is a a price that you'd be willing to pay given the breadth and depth, the caliber of design talent that you have on your on your platform. Actually, you know, one of the interesting things this this took me a while to again, as someone who who loves marketplaces, this one took a while to to kind of sink in. I had spoken to as we sort of began this journey last year, I spoke to a number of of designers who were even before we updated our terms, just when we had first introduced the transactional features, a number of designers who were just very sceptical or critical those features. And at that point, I couldn't understand because I said, you know, these are optional features.

Like, why would and over time, I realized that what they were reacting to was the idea of a marketplace itself that they did not want to participate in them. Even though they wanted leads, they wanted clients, and they wanted Dribbble to be a source of clients, they didn't want Dribbble to be explicitly outwardly a marketplace, and they themselves didn't want to be sellers in a marketplace. It was, in a sense, it was almost beneath them to be in the sort of the mosh pit, you know, of of IFO and reviews and ratings and how do I rank. They didn't wanna be in that. And and that took a while for me to to to understand and to appreciate.

But it's a it's it's an example. You know, we we've we've internally, you know, we think about it like, the way that a luxury brand might not wanna be on Amazon. No. Exactly. Yeah.

Diminishes their brand in a in a in a a sense.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: And I can see that also, like, I've also my own experience with designers that there are people who designers who really see themselves as a and I'm exaggerating, but, like, sort of as artists. Like, they're, like they're they're they're not like, they're they're unique suppliers. And so they want to be chosen for their uniqueness. And, of course, the association with the marketplace model and Amazon is, of course, that it potentially and in many places, you know, like, look at Uber or whatever, it goes it it turns to, like, race to the bottom. Who who's able to provide this

Constantine Anastasakis: Totally.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: At the cheapest price? And and if you're not careful, then that is also the step like, the starting point for buyers. Right? They are just just looking out for that. Hey.

I just wanna thank you for your time. This is really, really great conversation. I think we covered over everything that we want to cover, where you would see Dribbble in the future, quality as your most competitive edge, you know, full fledged product digital product development marketplace eventually. Super cool about the background and and and that you openly share, you know, the struggles with implementing this. And I hope that this is, this episode will be a great valuable lesson for other people in Dribbble's position or people just looking into, let's say, the services marketplace angle.

I think this will be be of a this will be a fantastic episode just, like, quickly reminding this back in my head before I stop start the stop button. So thanks a lot for your time. Thanks a lot

Constantine Anastasakis: for I appreciate it.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Sharing all of this with us. And maybe you can quickly still advertise Dribbble. Where can people find Dribbble in case they haven't heard about them, and where can they find you?

Constantine Anastasakis: Yeah. Absolutely. So first off, I appreciate you having me, and and anyone who listens to this and wants to talk more is very welcome to reach out. Dribbble is, the leading platform to, discover designers, their work, their services that they offer. Dribbble.com.

It's with three b's though, and that's the that might trip people up. But, again, as you said, I I I think we could we could keep this going for for hours, and I hope we talk about it more in the in the in the future, but this was great.

Sjoerd Handgraaf: Yes. Thanks for your time, and take care. Thank you for listening to Two Sided, the marketplace podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you really liked it, please give us a rating or a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.

If you got inspired to build your own marketplace, go visit www.sharetribe.com. It's the fastest way to build a successful online marketplace business.