Thank you for not closing the site. It's an awful feeling to invest time into a community and product only to see it get shut down when they're acquired.
It blows me away that a website built around a niche community as (apparently) narrow as colour palettes can be profitable, never mind profitable enough to be acquisitive. Congrats to both parties, but boy would I love to see how the numbers stack up!
It was built around color palettes... but is much more than that now. We have... professional desktop color & vector image editing software. Themeleon is a twitter profile tool linked right from Twitter.com. A creative community with 2M visitors per month and ad revenue on those pageviews.
It's enough to keep the doors open and the company growing... but CreativeMarket.com will be where the meat of our revenue will come from.
At a CPM of $1 and 10 impressions per visitor that only comes out to $10,000/month. Even if I'm off by 10x on the impressions per visitor it's still not a huge amount of money.
My guess is that Forrst wasn't growing as much as it used to or stopped growing all-together and people started getting nervous. (I noticed fewer activity by its users).
Looking at the alexa numbers, its popularity peaked in the middle of 2011. Pageviews took a huge dive since then, which is extremely alarming. Obviously Alexa isn't 100% accurate, but it gives a decent estimation on where the site is trending.
I hope COLOURlovers gets a rebrand. The company is doing interesting things, but that name is displeasing to my taste. Written Coulourlovers (as in the title, but incorrect according to their trademark) is much more pleasing to the eye. Even the corporation name, CHROMAom Inc has this nauseating letter casing. le sigh.
Do you guys on either side of it want to get into the terms of acquisition a bit more, just for curiosity's sake?
I suspect that it is not a spectacular return for the seed investors. Forrst guys get jobs and some nominal signing bonuses as they're likely running low on funds, having closed a $204K seed a year ago. See compete:
It makes a lot more sense for COLOURlovers to acquire the team and the community to strengthen themselves, being an ultra-huge design community. I'm happy that they are keeping Forrst around. CL is also hiring recently, so this gives them a staff boost of good designers/developers with startup mentalities.
I'm a little wary. Forrst caters to both designers and developers, so hopefully this acquisition doesn't effect the core product. Feedback is very easy to get on Forrst right now, which is one of it's biggest draws for me personally.
As a forrst user I noticed that all registration was closed. Is there plans to open that back up in the near future? How do you plan on handling the quality of forrst experience in the future?
Our plan is to not make any broad changes immediately. I think too often acquirers do that and fuck things up. Kyle & team are staying on and we'll work together to make Forrst a valuable place for designers & developers to share ideas, get feedback and learn from each other.
Although I haven't followed the Forrst tale very closely, I always got the feeling that Forrst would not be very susceptible to acquisition. Had that smokey kind of campfire flavor to it. As a Forrst lurker, I'm glad I'll have the same familiar place to lurk.
Probably my two favourite sites coming together. Love the community and feedback you get at Forrst. Love how ColourLovers are helping people to be creative. Good luck Kyle and Darius!
