$2 Million Earned From Design Contests

That’s Anand Thangavel, an engineer-turned-designer on the DesignCrowd marketplace.

He signed up for DesignCrowd way back in 2011, and it took him about 5 years to earn his first $1 million and another 4 years to get to $2 million in total earnings 📈

Make no mistake though: Anand is exceptional.

I once looked at 598 recently finished contests on DesignCrowd and found that…

• The average prize money was $215 per contest.
• Per contest, there were an average of 149 designs submitted by 64 designers.

So it seems there’s a lot of competition and it’s quite hard to win any particular contest 😫

The secret to Anand’s success?

I hardly sleep. Though currently being in Indian Standard Time (IST), I keep myself responsive during PT, ET, BST, AEST timings.

In fact, these time zones were a compliment from a client who once wrote on a surprise, “Mate, I see you online on all the time zones. Are you human or bot?”

Related: CG marketplace FlippedNormals has now paid out $1,000,000 to creators