Ok, guys, so I was brainstorming with my AI friends about mistakes done by Envato over time and it came up with this list…
- Race to the bottom pricing. Once categories became overcrowded, competing on quality alone stopped being enough, and price became the easiest weapon. That hurts everyone in the long run.
- Broken support economics. Selling software as a one-time purchase while buyers expect years of updates, fixes, compatibility patches, and hands-on support is simply not sustainable.
- Discovery becoming algorithm warfare. Instead of the best products naturally rising, success started depending too much on ranking mechanics, momentum, thumbnails, timing, and gaming visibility.
- Marketplace dependency. Many authors built entire businesses around Envato traffic, only to realize they didn’t actually own the customer relationship, audience, or future stability of their income.
- Quality dilution. As the marketplace scaled, curation became weaker. More products should mean more choice, but eventually it became harder for buyers to separate quality from noise.
- Review system frustrations. Bad reviews were often left because of hosting problems, user misunderstandings, support delays, or unrelated frustrations, yet they directly impacted seller income.
- Elements changing the game. Subscription access made sense for buyers, but for many authors it fundamentally changed product value perception and sales behavior.
- Sellers feeling less like partners over time. Early on, it felt community-driven. Later, many authors felt more like inventory inside a machine.
- New sellers having almost no chance. Once top sellers dominated visibility, breaking in became much harder, even with genuinely strong products.
- Commoditization. Great work started getting treated as interchangeable. Premium products became “just another plugin” or “just another theme.”
- Policy risk. A single platform decision, commission adjustment, ranking tweak, or ecosystem shift could massively impact someone’s livelihood overnight.
- Lack of customer ownership. Thousands of sales, but little direct access to your buyers, making it hard to build a real long-term independent business.
Just to be sure I am understood correctly, this is not an anti-Envato post, I just want to analyze and understand what they did right and what they did wrong (or proved to be wrong, over time).
But WPBay is still early. Which means we have a chance to recognize the mistakes we might tend to do, which were done before us, by others.
So… What do you think were Envato’s biggest mistakes (from their beginning to where they are now)?
And more importantly… how do we make absolutely sure WPBay does not slowly become the same thing?
