99designs wasn't built in 16 months. This is nicely spun (maybe the result of the PR company 99designs hired earlier this year?) but still rather misleading.

I'm a former SitePoint employee, and have been around their forums since 2003 and as a moderator 2004-2008. 99designs was spun off from the SitePoint Marketplace 16 months ago, where it existed as the SitePoint Contests property (essentially the same thing but branded under their Marketplace). The first contests were actually held on the forums, and if memory serves, that happened in about 2002 (before I got there, could have even been 2001).

Eventually the Contests and Marketplace sections of their ultra popular web developer forums grew big enough to be spun off into dedicated sections of the site (still part of the SP organization, though), so SP developed and acquired technology to create those new areas. That was in 2006 (see: http://www.sitepoint.com/about/media/release?id=39 ).

I was involved early on in developing rules and moderating the Marketplace and Contests area. Once the Contests area got big enough, it was spun off as 99designs, and has grown like a weed since. (This time it was actually spun off as a new business entity.)

So really, more accurately, 99designs has built a successful business over the past 6 or 7 years (or if you want to go by the date it was spun out of the forums, over the past 3 years).

All that said, SitePoint is a really classy organization, full of great people. Matt Mickiewicz is a really nice guy, and what they've built is very impressive. I wish them continued success.

Hi Josh,

You're definitely right.

In the interview I talk about how the idea begun in the SitePoint Forums, then we started charging people to start a thread in the "Design Contest" section in vBulletin, then we spun it off as its own separate section of sitepoint.com with some basic software built around and only after we had proved that it was a sustainable business did we re-architect the software, improve the usability & interface, and then spin-it off as its own separate business in February 2008.

Thanks Catone. I linked to your comment here and clarified the post. I really want to get the stories on my site right, so this is very helpful.

It facilitated $5 million in design work... that's not really a $5+ million dollar business is it? (I could have misread, but the article's headline seems misleading to me.)

Great point guys. I changed the title on my site to "a $5+ million marketplace."

Well they take 10% of that or half a million dollars. That is not counting the $39.00 listing fee. That is not counting the upgrade fees. Sounds better than most startups.

Nice catch! Very misleading title. I thought they had $5mm in sales until I read your comment and looked more closely.

I think Warner does this a lot with his articles -- he's full of hyperbole. A proper editor would not have put that in the title.

From their site:

"there is a listing fee of $39 plus 10% of the prize being offered."

"$5,212,395 awarded"

"$108,100 up for grabs in 302 open contests"

  estimate on number of contests awarded = 5212395 / (108100/302) = 14561
  Total listing fees = 14561 * $39 = $567,914
  Total 10% profit is $521,240

That'd put total revenue since starting at $1,089,154 as far as I can see. Which is still awesome, but not really what is suggested by the article title.

They've run almost 23,000 contests instead of 14,561 according to their homepage. That's over $900K in listing fees alone.

Also, they charge for upgrades - bold, highlight, fast-tracked, etc. and charge designers to withdraw money.

We're still forced to guess - They didn't always charge listing fees. They started at $0, then moved to $20, then $29. There's no way for us to ascertain how many projects were done at each level.

>> "They've run almost 23,000 contests instead of 14,561 according to their homepage."

I figured not every contest would end with a successful award - hence using the other data as an estimate. Maybe it's somewhere in between, idk.

I would think that this isn't a big deal if this guy is the co-founder of sitepoint, which is substantially bigger than 99designs.

According to Wikipedia, sitepoint was founded in 1997, so it's had an eleven year head start.