Living on the south-east coast of England, working American hours as a night owl, dabbling in his home studio, and exploring new and interesting ways of growing the marketplaces. Meet Shane Freer, who recently joined the Marketplace Growth Team.
Please tell us about your new job at Envato.
I’ve started working with the Marketplace Growth Team, helping to grow the marketplaces by discovering new item types, creating categories, filling those categories with quality content, and promoting them. I am based in England, so working remotely with the US team.
It’s great working from home and avoiding the rush hour has been a blessing! By nature I am a night owl so working with US time is perfect for me!
What were you doing previously?
I was a freelance designer before this and recently become an author on ThemeForest, selling my own themes and templates. I’d been watching all the successful and talented authors over the last few years create some amazing work, and I wanted to give it a go.
Before that I was the Creative Director at Live Nation/Ticketmaster for a number of years, working in ecommerce and running a team designing and building music festival websites.
Just briefly, tell us about what you’re hoping to achieve on the marketplaces.
I have been on the marketplaces for over four years now (mostly as a buyer) and seeing how active the marketplace and community has grown in that time is a great motivator to try and add value to what the Envato are doing.
I am constantly on the look out for an opportunity to help grow the marketplaces, whether it be a new platform to provide themes for, or a new application that has gained popularity, ensuring the authors have a space to sell products for new categories.
One of my core roles will be working closely with authors to understand what they want to build and sell on the marketplaces.
Describe your workspace.
Basically a trip to Ikea is needed! At the moment my desk is a bit small, since moving from a tiny London flat where everything had to be microsized to fit. Now I have a small desk sitting in the middle of a big white, empty room…
I have a Macbook Pro and screen, many drives, Motu828 audio interface, Fostex active speakers, Sennheiser mics, HD25 headphones and a MIDI keyboard.
What has your average day looked like so far?
So far every day has been very different from the next. One thing that I noticed is how many great ideas are constantly being thrown around about how to better the Envato marketplaces.
The day is filled with a lot of email, researching new business, problem solving and Skype calls. The tools used for our projects are Basecamp, Google Docs and DropBox.
This week I am looking after a launch of our latest most-wanted campaign. These are used to help seed content for new categories and a great way for authors to win cash and badges. (It’s really all about winning badges!)
What do you do when you’re not working?
Finding a balance of on/offline is always tricky. Sometimes I do have to force myself to turn off Twitter and get away from the office!
But being based in south-east coast of England there is a healthy outdoor life. So when I’m not working I can be found hanging out with my amazing kids and wife – going to the beach or the woods for walk and sometimes ending it with a good-ole English pub lunch somewhere in the South Downs countryside.
I am also a bit of a music dabbler, so transforming my office into a studio is always a great fun – making loops, playing guitar and generally making a lot of noise!
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