Ravelry
👤 Casey (Cassidy) & Jessica Forbes (Self-taught Casey built Ravelry in 2006 for wife Jessica; community chipped in about $71K to keep them <em>small and independent</em>.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
Casey Forbes self-taught Rails to build a project tracker for his knitter wife Jessica — no VC, about 4-5 team, 11M+ members
Will it work? · our read
First in niche. No secret trick here: early timing, relentless community trust, and the discipline to stay tiny and take a small cut. Execution and patience won, not a clever hack.
01How the money moves
Crafters catalog projects, patterns & yarn — free
→
Designers sell PDF patterns; fiber shops advertise to the community
→
Ravelry keeps about 3.5% of pattern sales + self-served member ads
02The numbers
11M+
registered members (2023)
EST
$28M
designer pattern sales, 2020 (GMV)
STATED
4-5
person team
STATED
$28M is designer sales volume, not Ravelry's revenue; Ravelry keeps only about 3.5%. Member count 11M is third-party (2023); Ravelry's own About page states 'over 9 million.' Ravelry blog: How Ravelry Makes Money
Private and profitable since about 2008 on member-run ads plus a 3.5% cut of pattern sales; Ravelry has never disclosed its own revenue. The widely-cited $28M is designer pattern-sales GMV (2020), not Ravelry's take.
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Ravelry: About (first-party)Ravelry blog: How Ravelry Makes Money (first-party)Signal v. Noise: Ravelry funded by its own community, 2008Wikipedia: Ravelry (cites the 2021 New Yorker piece for the $28M pattern-sales figure)
Ravelry has never disclosed its own revenue, so not independently confirmed: the often-quoted $28M is 2020 designer pattern-sales GMV reported by The New Yorker, of which Ravelry keeps only about 3.5% — treat it as EST, not company revenue. Member count 11M is a third-party 2023 stat; Ravelry's own About page says 'over 9 million.' Team size (about 4-5) and the ad/pattern-fee model are first-party. The 2019 political ban and 2020 redesign backlash are widely documented but summarized here. We never score you.