Dribbble

Jeremy Gon bought his Dribbble invite on eBay. That was the kind of community Dribbble was in its early years — scarce enough that access had secondary market value, cool enough that a future deal-maker at a major holding company was paying up to get in. Years later, that same Jeremy Gon would be the person structuring the deal to acquire it.

What Dribbble Is

Dribbble is a portfolio hosting and community platform for designers — one of two dominant players in the space alongside Adobe’s Behance. As Sam Parr described: “Behance and Dribbble are like the two companies where designers can host their portfolio and talk to one another.”

The platform launched as invite-only, which created the scarcity that made it desirable. Designers who were in could invite other designers. Access was a signal of membership in a creative community, not just a utility. By the time andrew-wilkinson’s team at Tiny acquired it, Dribbble had millions of active users and was a top 10,000 website globally.

The Acquisition

Dribbble was the first deal Tiny ever did — the anchor investment that launched what became a $500 million holding company. Jeremy Gon, Tiny’s first employee, described the origin: Andrew Wilkinson, Chris (Tiny’s co-founder), and Gon were all users and fans of the platform. Wilkinson had been emailing the co-founders for a long time expressing interest. When they finally got a serious conversation going, it became the concrete first step in building the holding company.

As Gon told Sam and Shaan: “It was like, Dribbble is really cool, we would love to be the right owners for that, Andrew knew the co-founders, and maybe we could buy it — and that would be the starting-off point. Very real, very concrete, versus ‘we’re going to build a holding company of technology businesses.’”

The deal closed with roughly four to five million dollars of equity — real money for three guys who had never bought a company before. Gon described the diligence process: they looked things up online, downloaded LOI templates from LegalDepot, and learned the mechanics as they went. The benefit of inexperience was speed and friendliness — they moved fast, kept things low-drama, and the founders of Dribbble cared about who was going to own their community.

The Returns

Sam asked directly: “That turned out to be an amazing investment — probably like a 50x on your money, right?”

Gon’s answer: “More than that. More than 50x.”

The mechanics were visible in Tiny’s public company filings. By 2021, Dribbble was generating $34 million in creative platform revenue with strong margins. That single asset, alongside Metalab (the agency), was carrying the entire Tiny portfolio. As Sam noted when looking at the financials: “When you look at where the bulk of the revenue and EBITDA comes from, it’s really two companies. Metalab and Dribbble are carrying this portfolio of 30 companies on their backs.”

The $63 million from Metalab and $34 million from Dribbble accounted for roughly $100 million in revenue, producing $50 million in EBITDA across the combined company — with an $800 million market cap at peak. Less than $10 million of total equity had ever been invested in the entire enterprise.

Day-One Levers

The investment worked partly because Tiny could see immediate improvement opportunities before closing. Gon described the diligence: “There were some immediate day-one levers — a big part of the business was advertising and we could find better advertising providers right away, so there were levers you could pull on day one that were going to improve the business.”

This is the pattern that Andrew Wilkinson has described repeatedly on MFM: buy something good, improve the obvious things quickly, and let compounding do the rest. You don’t need a complex operational transformation thesis. You need a handful of concrete things you can fix in the first 90 days.

The Model It Represents

The Dribbble deal is the cleanest example of the Tiny playbook: a profitable agency (Metalab) generating cash that buys a community platform (Dribbble) that then generates its own cash to fund more acquisitions. No venture capital. No debt. No complex structures.

Shaan Puri’s summary: “He started Metalab as a teenager at a coffee shop. Dribbble he bought and grew. The whole rest of the portfolio adds flavor and optionality, but the core engine was an agency he started without outside capital. That’s a really interesting model. Not a venture-backed roll-up — just a scrappy agency that throws off enough cash to buy things, and the things you buy throw off enough cash to buy more things.”

See also: andrew-wilkinson, tiny, metalab, holding-companies, acquisition-entrepreneurship