Introducing Mavenseed: Your Platform for Selling Digital Content

For more than a decade, CG Cookie has been teaching digital artists.

We've produced thousands, nay, tens of thousands of training videos and from day 1, we grappled with the same problem that many content creators face today: "Where should we host our stuff without giving up control?" 

Getting started with WordPress

In the beginning of CG Cookie, a simple WordPress blog was all we needed but it didn't take long to outgrow this format. 

After struggling with off-the-shelf solutions for a few years, we started to spend more time adapting WordPress to fit our ever more  more complex needs: think user databases, payment systems, member-only videos, and a dynamic community forum. It was a lot for WordPress to handle without more customization.

But even the best custom-made WordPress plugins only took us so far. As CG Cookie grew, we felt the limits of what our site could do.

That's when the Bearded Avenger came to rescue! Getting the foot in the door with his now-legendary cover letter, Nick Haskins was our first full-time developer, ready to push WordPress to its limits. 

Creating a New Training Platform

Nick reworked the site from the ground up, launching CG Cookie in 2015 as a brand new training platform. With a mostly custom architecture underneath, the system was, still powered by WordPress. Unfortunately the story began to repeat itself: we started pushing the limits of our platform. Again. 

Turns out, we had built so much custom code that instead of utilizing the strength of WordPress, we were just trying to build around it. WordPress is almost single-handily responsible, so far as web software goes, for enabling us to get this far but we had finally outgrown it.

The time to go full custom had come. And everybody told us, "Don't build your own CMS!"

So we did we do? We went ahead and built our own CMS.

Riding with Ruby on Rails

After 9 months of intense work, CG Cookie completed the migration to its first own system. Utilizing Ruby on Rails, we built everything the way we needed and we launched CG Cookie SIX in July, 2017. The move of user accounts, payment records, and of course our thousands of pieces of content over to the new system took longer than we care to remember. This migration was fondly (and not so fondly) referred to as The Migration from Hell. One tiny mistake in the code and the data of thousands of users could have been wiped! Luckily, all the prep work paid off and we came out on the other side unscathed. 

When finished, CG Cookie SIX was the first time we were full custom, running on a platform completely in our our grasp. In the years since we have continued to develop and improve our systems, learning ways to do it better with every new iteration.

Ultimately all of this work, and the work of the Blender Market (which is also custom Ruby on Rails) have been leading to todays announcement.

Mavenseed is a Content Platform Other Creators can use

After nearly a decade of experience and development the CG Cookie platform has grown into something worth sharing. Keeping it to ourselves seemed like a missed opportunity, especially when other creators keep asking us whether the CMS can be used for their own sites. We have always had to say no, that is until now.

Starting today, the answer is  yes!

We're excited to announce Mavenseed, a platform for selling your digital content. We're opening up our CMS and giving you the keys; the system is ready for you to pour your own content into and start your very own business. Mavenseed can power training sites, add-on stores, creative artists, and much more. 

For all the Blender artists selling video tutorials, for coders writing the next Blender add-on or even businesses who want to use video training for their employees, Mavenseed is your platform for offering your content to the world.

If you're a creator and you want to build a business around your creations Mavenseed this is your solution.

To all of you creators that are building a business around digital content, Mavenseed is for you. 

Join Mavenseed for free today at https://mavenseed.com 

Mavenseed is built by the same team that brought you CG Cookie and Blender Market. Our focus is on creating sustainable businesses that put people first and create a positive impact on our communities.