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Here’s a summary of Envato’s story. There are two hundred and fifty people who work there, and every month Envato notches up 35 million visits.

Success mantra –

• “To succeed in business you need to be unreasonable with yourself.”

On growth – 

• “We worked very hard for this period to expand and add to the small fire we had started. Marketing, campaigns, product improvements, community building, and promotion were the fuel we put into our fire. We went through a long phase of constantly trying new things, measuring, and adding to the momentum we’d gathered.”

On sniffing the future/potential –

• “On day one we made our first sale, and within a few months there was a thousand dollars a week of transactions running through our marketplace. It was pretty amazing, but certainly not big enough for the size of our team. Still, we knew we were on to something.”

On ETL(Estimated Time To Lauch) –

• “It took six months to get from conception to launch. We hired a talented freelance developer who I already knew. Together we built a complete marketplace modelled on ones we’d seen. In retrospect, it was a bit over-baked, with features we didn’t really need and complexity we could have avoided. But it didn’t really matter. We got the core business model right, and there was less competition back in 2006, so six months to launch wasn’t too bad.”

On spending your precious youths –

• “But perhaps most important was that we put in the hours. There’s no escaping that starting a business requires a lot of time, energy and constant commitment. It’s important not to go totally overboard, but you should be expecting to work a lot of hours.”

On borrowing money –

• “We used our savings and credit cards to start the business. That means we were very frugal and careful about where and how we spent. It’s stressful when you sweat every dollar. But you can make money go surprisingly far that way!”

On legal stuff –

• “The first time I visited a lawyer, I was super nervous – I put on my best clothes and was stressed out all morning before the meeting. We didn’t have very much money so I kept double checking that I was having “a free consultation, right?” (It was indeed free, but once they started working for us, it was very not-free!) We needed titles for ourselves, so I became the “CEO”, but it felt pretty silly to call myself that!”