Collis Ta’eed is one of the three business people who have inspired me to create the Logic Depths family of sites and the sites that he and the Envato team have under their name have been a major help to developing myself my websites and everything that I know, I personally can not thank them enough for their help throughout my life. I took some time the other week to email Collis Ta’eed and ask for an interview with him. He said that he would love to and so I got to it, made the questions and took questions from other people that have asked me about my personal sites and stuck them in their to get his opinion and thoughts.

1. Can you describe Envato and what exactly the Envato goals are?

Envato is a startup that I founded back in 2006 along with three other people - my brother, best friend and my wife! We’re all from creative or technical backgrounds and wanted to build a company together that let us create great products in our area.

Our goal is to build what we call a Creative Ecosystem, that is to say a suite of sites and services that cater to all manner of creatives - from designers to programmers to animators to freelancers.

2. You have the Tuts Plus sites under your name do you plan to come out with any other “tut” sites?

The TUTS sites have been really growing recently. They initially began with just PSDTUTS which was a bit of an accident - I put up some old Photoshop tutorials and they became so popular we turned it into a blog. Since then as you know we’ve launched NETTUTS, VECTORTUTS and most recently AUDIOTUTS. We have plenty more in the lineup to come, but for the moment it’s important to consolidate.

When you’re building a brand, the last thing you want to do is to let the overall quality slip in a quest to extend the line. We’re always concerned that we keep up our reputation for great content because that’s where our strength lies.

3. Do you currently have any other websites that you will be releasing shortly?

Our big release at the moment is ThemeForest (themeforest.net) which is a marketplace for people to buy and sell website templates and themes for CMS products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. The site has been in a small private beta for a few weeks and we’ll be launching it next week! After that there’s going to be lots of marketing work for me to do!

One site that is coming out shortly after, which has been in development forever, is a site to house our growing stable of books. Early this year we released a book by myself and my lovely wife Cyan called How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer. With the next book in the series - How to Be a Rockstar Wordpress Designer - almost complete, it’s time to get a website to house them. You can look out for this soon!

4. If you had the option to change one thing about a choice you made for Envato in the past what would it be and why?

There’s been a few times when we’ve launched products a little prematurely - mostly because I’ve gotten overexcited! The best example was NETTUTS. One Friday a few months ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop pondering the success of PSDTUTS and suddenly thought “Wouldn’t it be great to have a site about web development?”. By the following Tuesday the site was launched and I quickly realised that I’d just created a huge workload for myself with not much planning.

It took us a while to get writers and an editor in place and today the site is going brilliantly, but we did suffer a bit from the lack of planning. While sometimes it’s good to just jump in, there is definitely merit in a spot of planning!

5. Envato is in charge of the biggest freelance blog out there are there any major changes or additions that you guys are planning?

Absolutely! We firmly believe in continually improving our sites and products and FreelanceSwitch is long overdue for some improvements. The main plan is to improve and add to the freelance job services part of the site. While there are some improvements to make to the blog, I think on the whole the articles are going strong. The job board has been growing a lot recently and we’re now looking to add value for the current subscribers by creating extra features for them. We’re also looking to create a generous affiliate system so that other sites can carry the job board and benefit from the income.

In the long run, we’ve been looking at ideas for an escrow service for freelancers to make transacting with clients and business overseas safer and easier. This is more of a long-term plan, but I think would make a great compliment to the job board.

6. We see people at young ages trying to start online businesses everyday, what are your thoughts on this and how young do you think is too young to start a business.

I think it’s never a case of being too young, so long as you’re not risking much money. Once you add investments into the mix then it’s important to not be too risky. But if it’s just time and maybe some small savings that you’re investing then I think it’s a great experience for anyone regardless of age. Business teaches you a lot about work and life and for many is a source of great excitement.

Personally I love being in business and in hindsight think I was always headed this way. The first bit of business I was involved in was when I was 11 when I started baking morning tea cakes and selling them around my dad’s office complex. It went really well except I became lax and missed a lot of days, and then one day a competitor moved in! A good lesson for later in life, that’s for sure.

7. When you first started Envato and it was just in the planning stages what information did you look up to get it started?

Certainly we researched a lot into finding an accountant and a lawyer - two very important people to see - and also a lot into competition. It’s vital to know who else is in the same business as you are because the last thing you want to do is spend a lot of time and effort and then find someone’s been there and done that!

8. What is the last business decision that you made that had a direct impact upon your customers? And why did you choose to do this?

I think pretty much everything we do has a direct impact on our customers.  There are two reasons we do things - to help our users/members or to make the operation more efficient.  An example would be we are about to roll out VECTORTUTS Plus - a premium program for readers of vectortuts.com.  We’re doing this to both help users who want to get more out of the site and to make the operation more efficient by increasing revenue from the site - which in turn helps the users because we can afford more writers!

Fast Balls (Short Answers):

Favorite Website? (That you do not own)
TechCrunch - http://www.techcrunch.com

Most Used Tool? (Online/Offline)
Photoshop and my notebooks

What Inspires You To Create These Websites?
I generally create things that I wish already existed. Solving your own problem is a great way to start a business.

Do You Have Any Other Hobbies/Interests You Have?
Right now I’m really enjoying travelling, currently I’m in Canada and heading to the US soon!

8. If you could speak to the entire business manager community what would you tell them? Anything you do that has true passion behind it, is bound to be more succesful than something done for profit alone.

10. If you could ask any business manager any question what would you ask them? How do you find balance between work and life?

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