FilterGrade
👤 Mike and Matt Moloney (Two brothers who built a photo-editing blog first; that audience (blog + 195K YouTube views/mo) is what powers the marketplace.)🌐 sitemoloneycreativeagency.comLinkedIn
A marketplace where creators sell Lightroom presets, LUTs and templates to photographers and video editors, since 2013.
Will it work? · our read
Distribution wins. They didn't invent presets — they built the audience first (blog + YouTube), so sellers come to them and they keep half. But traffic leans on Google, and presets now sell anywhere.
01How the money moves
Creators upload presets, LUTs and templates
→
Photographers and editors browse and buy
→
FilterGrade keeps about 50% of each sale
02The numbers
$30K
/mo · self-reported
Starter Story
200K+
customers · all-time
founder
about 2K
active sellers
founder
Then traffic fell hard — organic Google search dropped and presets got easy to sell anywhere. An honest, documented decline, not a straight-up story. starterstory.com
Revenue about $30K/mo (Mike Moloney, Starter Story self-reported) — first-party but not audited, and unclear if gross or net of the 50% seller split. No VC known.
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· Founder & story — filtergrade.com/about· Revenue ($30K/mo), about 2K sellers & the traffic decline — Starter Story update (founder interview)· 200K+ customers & acquisition channels — indieniche.substack.com· 50/50 seller split — filtergrade.com/sell (their seller terms)· Founder — LinkedIn (Mike Moloney) & moloneycreativeagency.com
Revenue (about $30K/mo) is founder-stated in a Starter Story interview — first-party but self-reported, and it's unclear if it's gross or net of the 50% split. Sellers (about 2,000), 200K+ customers and the traffic decline are also his own words. The 50/50 take is from FilterGrade's seller page (fact). CENTS, moat and "how it dies" are our read. No VC known. We never score you.