So here is the story. I saw about 3 years ago myself as a designer in progress. I was doing a lot of designs for Sitepoint (now 99designs). I won my first contest, my first try. Wow, I said, I have something in here, I should participate in more. Which I did and I won more contests as well. It was a nice way to make money, but I was doing it for the feeling of winning between other 50 people. After I found that some people (contest holders) were paying huge amount of money to shitty things. That was very frustrating so I left out from there.

I also was doing a few client work as well thanks for my reputation on there. I was happy, but I found myself charging pennies for my work, so I needed a new way to make money.

I got a few offer to designs templates, and I said, what is that? what am I earning from that? It was like a scam to me. Several designs pretty cheap and the right to resell them? That sucks, not for me.

Since I was (and I’m still) learning new techniques to create stunning websites I went into PSD Tuts, it was great, all the things I wanted to learn from great designers was in there, I was following that blog several times everyday.

And one day, the same group of that blog launched ThemeForest. It was great! What a great idea, just what I needed to create my passive income and do all the designs I wanted without having annoying clients making me pointless modifications and making me to waste time.

So I did a CMS theme in less than 40 minutes. I was thinking in that CMS layout for years, it was great. So, let’s create a hit and sell this into this great website. And it was, it was a hit, got several sales in short time. Like 10 per day.

In total until today I made 512 sales in two years with just 2 items to offer. That’s awesome, the gratification if priceless…… Well, that’s not true in real world, there always a price. I made $7877 US Dollars worth with those sales.

That’s a pretty nice amount of money don’t you think? Don’t want to ruin the party, but in my pocket only went $2939.24. How is that even possible? It was very frustrating. They are earning a lot of money (more than me) with my work, my creation! I can’t allow that.

I was handling that with no problem until I see this. It was my CMS theme improved. I just went crazy, mad, sad, all the emotions together. Anybody can take my creation, make it better and sell it (I admit it, it was much much better), right on the same place.

That same day I started doing the UI for my own marketplace of designs. I was going to increase the earnings of designers and change the policy of the website across designers. I spent all of the time doing the design, CSS, Javascript, PHP, everything by hand. Having no incomes at all, no investment at all, I found my self borrowing money to my brother.

I was trying to get some client work to have money to live but I couldn’t do it, I was all day coding my marketplace, it was very stupid. I wasn’t even good enough coder to making it myself. I needed someone else.

I putted the project on hold until I found the right person to partner with. I went into a few guys to finish to code I had in Code Igniter. It wasn’t well at all, those coders were worse than me. I need someone better.

After long time, I saw a guy that liked my UI design of the marketplace posted on Dribbble, great site, I’m still a addicted to it. He was a Ruby Coder, a pretty well known one. I want him.

I had no idea about Ruby at that time but I offered to partner with me and he said ok. Let’s do it.

So here we are, I launched DesignsVault with the help of Josh. And working everyday on it to make it a good place to designers and to offer great quality stuff to the buyers.

I’m happy, but there is still a lot of work to do, and we can’t do it ourselves.

Join us.