How To Really Disrupt the Big Guys -- With Free with Unsplash CEO Mikael Cho

and my Wi-Fi goes out or something like that, we will totally— one of us will be able to carry on. And same with one of you guys. If Wi-Fi goes out, just try to jump back on, um, and we can figure it out from there. But at this point, if any of us drop off, like, it won't be— it won't be the end. Okay, awesome. All right, it's 1 PM now. Kenzie, I'm gonna hit broadcast, and then you can count off to 10. Thank you. Counting in my head. Hello everybody and welcome to our fireside. I am so excited to welcome you here today. I hope everybody has gotten some great content out of this event and had a great time virtually. I know it's not the, the, what we're used to, but this is the new normal. I am Kinsey Grant. I am the host of Morning Brew Business Casual podcast, and I'm so excited today to interview Mikael Cho. Mikael is the founder and CEO of Unsplash. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation together.

Yeah, same here. I'm really excited.

So as you can see from this slide, we are talking about how to really disrupt the big guys, which of course is a huge question and one that we, I'm sure, could talk about for hours, but we're going to try to keep this to about 50 minutes. Have some fun, get some great insight, and hopefully get some great questions from you guys. So if you do have questions, feel free to pop them in here. We will try to address them as well as we can throughout the conversation. But you know, I'm really excited to have this conversation to begin with. I think that there is a lot to be learned from any founder CEO story, especially something like Unsplash, which has been a really, really incredible company to watch for a while now. Mikael, start from the early days here. How did Unsplash start and what inspired you to start the company in the first place?

Yeah, so Unsplash wasn't supposed to be a company. So it really just started as we were building something else, different product, different company, and we were struggling to grow. And one of the challenges that we found was just trying to make a website using images. We couldn't find good images, everything was complicated. And so we did a photo shoot for that site. We had all these leftovers and we thought, hey, this, this could be really useful for people. It might actually be a potential growth source also. So let's put these up. We'll make them totally free. You can do whatever you want with them, super easy to use. So we ended up making a Tumblr blog in an afternoon on like a $19 Tumblr theme, threw up 10 of these images on public Dropbox links, which you're not technically supposed to do, to. And then we put it on Hacker News and I didn't think anything of it. We actually put it on Hacker News on purpose because I'm like, it's probably not going to do very well. Let's let it sit over here. I'm not going to share it anywhere else. It went number 1 within a couple hours. And then there was like 30,000 downloads on those 10 images. So the original version of the site, like, pretty much just looked like this. We had these images.

That's incredible.

That's my co-founder, both of my co-founders sitting in front of computers. And yeah, then we saw sort of this flood of just people coming through saying that this was really useful.

So what kind of website were you trying to build when this idea happened?

So we were building a marketplace for talent, design talent. So just connecting people who wanted to build websites or mobile apps with great designers.

It's interesting that the almost side project is now the big project.

Yeah, yeah, we had to make some decisions. So, you know, if you fast forward to sort of where we're at now, Unsplash actually does more image downloads than Shutterstock, Getty, and Adobe Stock combined. Wow. So we were on that trajectory pretty fast, like it took off, and we had to make some decisions. So we ended up selling the previous company to Dribbble the design community, and we continued on with Unsplash. We made that decision a couple years ago.

So day to day, what exactly does Unsplash do? If you had to boil it down to a couple sentences or words, what is, what is the mission?

Yeah, so Unsplash is high-resolution images that you can use for anything.

There we go. That makes a whole lot of sense. What, when you think about starting a business, especially a business that you hope to be profitable at some point in the lifetime, be a successful business pursuit, to do something. Oftentimes these businesses are solving for big pain points. So you said that you ran into some trouble, but what, you know, beyond that experience, what kind of pain points do you see Unsplash solving for that maybe the competition hasn't been?

One of the big things was complexity around licensing. So to people who are in the industry, who, or who've been like a professional media buyer or designer, you might understand those differences of those licenses, but what's happening now with all the creative tools that are available, it's becoming like everybody can create, so it's for the masses, and that licensing world is just not understood. I didn't even understand it. I'm like, can I put this on a site? What if like more than 500 people see it? Am I going to get in trouble? Do I have to take it down? What size do I need? You know, I didn't know any of those, like the ideal answer for all those questions. And I think what we did— wanted to do with Unsplash was just cut through the noise. How could we make just the simplest version where you didn't even have to come up with answers for those questions? We just answered them for you, right?

Cutting through the noise is a huge moat and competitive advantage, especially for companies in the early days. What other lessons did the early days of starting Unsplash teach you?

Uh, so I think the biggest was you focus on the shortest path to that, you know, the value that you just said. What do you offer? You offer high resolutions that you can use, high-resolution images that you can use for anything. What is the shortest path to get to that? And I think a lot of times that gets diluted by a whole bunch of, whether it's like people who are telling you different things, whether it's like, oh, we have to think about the business model, we have to think about how this is going to scale, we have to think about the technical challenges. But really, what we've— I think the biggest thing that we learned from starting on Splash was just flip that. Instead of starting with thinking about all those things, you just say, this is the ideal thing that we wish would exist. Now work backwards. How do we just try to keep that intact, even though, yes, we might have to answer all these questions, but how do we keep, keep that piece intact? So I, I have this sort of thinking of how we, we've we thought about on Unsplash, you have all these different steps that people need to do. And this was like sort of the previous versions that existed. You had, if you were looking for an image, you would have to search, you'd have to sign up, you'd have to subscribe, you'd have to download, you have to even figure out how to pay, all of those steps before you could actually get the image. And so what we did is we said, let's just, you can just search and get the image. And it's as simple as that. And by just removing each of those steps, It's almost like an order of magnitude more attention and interest and stickiness you can capture from people. And so that's sort of this piece where you sort of start with this ideal in your head. And I think a lot of people start here. They sort of say, this thing should exist, it should be like this. But then as you start to make, you might have teammates, people you're bouncing things off of, and they tell you about all these limitations. And then the thing that actually gets shipped is like a kernel of that original thing that you actually wanted to exist. Right.

One really interesting thing that I picked up, many, but I think one thing that really caught my ear here is the concept of scalability in the early days. How did you think about scalability? It's not exactly the typical founder story. A lot of people are thinking, how can I make this as big as possible as soon as possible? Was that what you thought, or how did you consider scalability in, in the early days of the product?

One of the biggest lessons I learned, not only just with Unsplash, but from having the previous company and then also going to Unsplash after that and sort of being able to apply some of the lessons, because that was our first company, uh, we started this company pretty much my entire working career has been that company and then Unsplash. And one thing I learned was the importance of sequencing. So you feel when you're in a startup, like it's like you can do whatever you want. You can make all these things, you can try all these things, you can run ads over here, you can do this crazy idea to try to get people to use your product, you can make all these different features. And I think one thing, a mistake that I made in the first company was thinking that we could do a lot of those things at once. And even if you think you have the team, like, let's scale the team, we can do that, we have capital, we raise funding, and you start to do all these things, but you quickly realize that they're maybe not getting to the spot. It's maybe 10 times or 100 times harder in each of those things to get it to the level that you want. So when we launched Unsplash, it was like, let's make the tiniest thing and we will sit on that for a while and really think through, like, how can we make that better and better if it's already gravitating to people.

Right. Focus is so important.

Yeah, it's that ability to constrain and sequence. So yes, you can do those things. I think what happens in a lot of companies, especially if you raise capital, you feel you have this short timeframe where you have to do all of this stuff within an 18-24 month period. What I've learned is you will always execute better if you can sequence those things. You'll get to those things and you'll earn the right almost to make those things. By executing really well on something first and then push out that next thing after.

To get to something down the road, you don't have to do it all day one. You might be eager to, but you don't— certainly don't have to, right? What do you think, you know, before we, we hop into the business model side of things, Just one more question on the early days. How do you think that you took this from just idea to actually product? What was the biggest factor in that shift for you?

Yeah, so the idea was that simple sort of notion of let's take— how do we get these images to people as easy as possible? So I'm not a programmer, I'm not a developer. And so that constraint, in a way, it sort of helps. And we were talking about scalability. I didn't really have the option to build something scalable, 'cause I didn't know how. And so I need something that already exists, sort of out of the box that I could use. That was Tumblr in that case. And I just found, I knew that there was this theme where it showed images really well, and in the way that would make Unsplash look very different, compared to all the other alternatives. I think that was another just interesting insight. It seems like not a big deal, but when people land on new sites, you're immediately fighting inertia all the time. So when you're a new thing, people are just already entrenched in doing something else. And so when they look at your new thing, if you look, even if you're like totally different, once people get in the box and they sign up and all these things, But if you look on the surface, kinda like that other thing, it's just almost not enough. You're gonna lose a whole bunch of people who just think it's like, "Oh, that's another one of those things." So with Unsplash, that's why like 10 images, we were competing against sites that had 60 million or 100 million, and they'd show them all in like little blocks. And one thing we did with design was, let's communicate the opposite of what we're doing. Through how we designed the product. So by taking those 10 images, they were huge, they were like the size of your screen, and you just scroll and there was one image, one image, one image, one image all the way down. It just made the site look totally different. And I think people— and then they resonated even more, like, oh, I get it right away, and now I can just click this image. It was almost like too good to be true kind of thing, right?

It's a breath of fresh air, certainly. But I imagine it was a little intimidating that you were up against these giant incumbents.

I think we were fortunate in not trying to start a company actually too soon. We didn't think of it as a company. I think that was one of the strongest things. I think even without that, we may have made more mistakes. If we would have tried to make it be a company very early, we may have rushed things. We may have you'd done different things that would've not led to the same result. By slowing it down, it's sort of that same philosophy of sequencing, accidentally. Now, if I was running a company on purpose at the beginning, I would actually do those same steps, but I would do them on purpose. Right. When we started Unsplash, it was an accident. Let's leave it, let's make sure, you know, that people aspire to be a part of this, to submit images. That kept the quality bar really high. We only did 10 images every 10 days. That was an accidental feature because we just didn't have time. We were working on another company, but it turned out that those sorts of things were what I think really made people gravitate to Unsplash.

I think it really speaks volumes too for the concept of not putting the cart before the horse. When you really think about, you know, is this product a product that people are going to want to use? Think of it as a product, not as a company that could buy XYZ in 10 years. This is The most important thing should be the product, not the reputation or the company or what have you. So, Michiel, a lot of this sounds really, really good. How do you make money?

Yeah. So the way that we've put that off for a while, and that was a strategy sort of once we saw the image downloads really taking off, and we needed to really think about what is the business value that's gonna come from this? Where is the industry going is where we looked at things, not how can we extract, you know, what's there today. So that was the first sort of framework for how we thought about that. And I think this fits into a model of disruptive thinking as well. And again, it comes down to like rushing. If you want to be disruptive, sometimes you need to delay some of the things that you're going to do, or you need to think about it differently. Can't just take from it and then— because that sort of caps it at what it potentially could be. So when we looked at all the potential business models, we wanted something that would align with the mission, which would allow to keep the images freely usable. We wanted to keep that super simple, that's intact with that original mission. And at the same time, it needed to be something that could sustain, you know, where we see the potential growth of this being. Unsplash is about to be a top 200 site in terms of a destination. And we have a whole bunch of integration partners, which is the same amount of traffic on all of that, that's equal to unsplash.com. So when we see where that all is all going, we thought that there was an advertising model that could work with this. And there's a lot of people like, advertising models never work, you've got the duopoly. For us, we understood that, we looked at the nuances that we had in the product that we have, and we said, why, why are people saying that? And I think it just comes down more to everyone is sort of building these ad products to compete on the audience, and how do we track better, and how do we maybe track like Google or Facebook, and that's how you sort of compete. On Unsplash, we just said, we're not going to do that. We're going to use what Unsplash does uniquely, which is get you mass distribution in places that you can't even advertise. So when people go and use these images and they get spread around the internet, we actually work with brands who put some of these images into Unsplash. So we'll work with like a Boxed Water or Harley-Davidson. They have images, when you search motorcycles, you'll see Harley-Davidson images come on the top. And if you find those useful as a creator, you might go and take those and put those in front of your audience by choice. And that's sitting in a really good spot of real estate on the internet that you can't typically advertise on. We saw that organically happening with images, and we thought we could do that for any brand.

Okay. It makes a lot of sense. It's just the duopoly you're referring to has been a headache for any company with ad-based revenue. Yeah. Is it, you know, do you think that you have effectively taken on this duopoly, or is it just a different tack to making money than you know, they might take up?

Yes, so I think we'll end up working, solving different jobs. So where Google and Facebook sit is in sort of a different part of the funnel. You know, Google already knows you've made a search and you're on the path to something. Unsplash is more like, we're going to make someone aware who wasn't previously aware at all.

Okay.

So this person who's writing a post on, you know, where to travel next, next year, they're gonna choose from 10 images that they might use. And now they might choose this branded image that's on Unsplash because they think it's useful for what they're creating. You've now elevated your brand in front of that audience who's something related, they're thinking about travel. Now they're actually thinking about your specific destination, whereas previously they may not have, even considered your destination.

What are the metrics on that? How do you track effectiveness?

So the big focus for us is brand lift. So we look at how do we affect things from— are there new people who are becoming aware of what you're doing? Does that affect purchase intent? Does that affect consideration? A big piece that we also look at is what we call is a visual mindshare. So how are we affecting the mental space that people have that they're dedicating to your brand. We all have sort of this, it's sitting inside of us, like we have these brands that have sort of imprinted on us, like a feeling. Like Nike, you feel a certain way about Nike, you resonate with certain things, and those usually end up being things that you buy. So these products, it's a similar thing, they're sort of subtly trying to be useful, and at the same time, they're creating this ability for you to feel something about them in a way that's related to something that they— an attribute of the brand that they want you to feel. So the way that we look back on that is by how much of the visual mindshare are you changing as a brand by putting your visuals on Unsplash and spreading them across the internet?

Is that harder to quantify than something like, say, you know, CPMs or page views even?

Yeah, so we do it on CPMs. We do charge on CPMs. But yeah, it's different than a cost per click, right? It's like, here's the cost, here's what's gonna come in, and here's the sale that's gonna come out on the other side.

Right.

And is that like a plus? That's essentially what you're looking for in that. But really what we're doing is shifting the masses who may not have even ever clicked in the first place. So we're gonna widen that potential group of people who may one day go and search for your thing. And I think in marketing and advertising, there's been this thing where people, advertisers think people are like cattle. Like we just, we go through this funnel, right? We see this thing, we click this thing, we go through that and we make a purchase and there's like a percentage of that. But that's really not how we work, right? If you think about how you maybe see something over here, you saw something on Instagram, you see a website, you ask a friend, and there's sort of all those little interactions happen. And then it leads eventually to like a purchase.

Right.

I think what Unsplash creates is many more of those interactions and they're trusted interactions because those visuals are being shown by people. They're choosing to use that visual that has a brand in it and put it in front of their audience. Versus all the major advertising platforms are interruptive. It's in the way of something that you're trying to do. So you actually usually don't feel very good about those kinds of advertisements.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned over my couple of years working in the startup world is that people like people. People are less likely to like a brand than they are to say, you know, I trust this writer or this, whoever is taking a photo or an image from Unsplash and using it. They trust a person more than they might a faceless brand. Mikael, would you ever consider another kind of revenue stream? What would it take for you to consider, say, selling more traditional forms of advertising on Unsplash.com?

Yeah, there are other things that we've considered. We do have another kind of advertisement that's on Unsplash that is more direct, and those are folks who do want to connect with the creative audience directly that's on Unsplash.com. So we work with someone like a Squarespace, where if after you download the image, it's like, hey, you're gonna go create something with this next, Squarespace is an option if you're building a website. So put it in those places where it's still useful, it's not just like a banner ad in front of your face, but still it allows us to keep those, the images free. And I really, the number one thing is we want to align with that mission so that we can keep expanding the market and keep making sure that it's clear how to use Unsplash. Products get diluted. It's the same thing. At the beginning, you have those choices that you're making, those trade-offs to try not to dilute this ideal product. And then as you go along in the journey, it's the same thing. It's like, how do you not dilute this product? You see it happen all the time, especially with advertising. Once advertising is introduced, you see that sort of ideal product really get chipped away at.

Do you think that the images will always be free?

Our hope is to keep them always free. There might be, you know, subsets, certain things where it makes sense to offer something, but our view is the future is free, and making that open and useful is what we want to keep.

So with that in mind, how do you think about the difference between, let's say, enterprise and more individual kinds of users of Unsplash?

Yeah, so we do have both. A huge chunk have never used a stock photo site before, and then there's folks who have come from total stock photo backgrounds. Interesting things that we've learned with licensing, stock photos have always been billed as super safe. That's sort of what they compete with us against as well. But if you really boil down the terms and you look at them, an Unsplash image is as safe as an image that you might go and get from Getty. So that's how we— if you really look at that and understand licensing, licensing has really just been sort of this gray area. And there's these cases where people have been scared off from using images, but it's always existed in a gray area. No one's really fought back on the other way. Licensing has always been pushed in the direction of how do we create more protections. And Unsplash, what we're trying to do is how do we just make sure that people can create with these, not get in any issues, and we'll try to build some pieces in there that protect people who are creating.

Okay, here's a great question from our Q&A here. How much do you look at what your competitors are doing and planning, and how do you decide what to let go of if it doesn't distract you?

So we keep an eye, you know, my first company, I had a different philosophy on that. I wasn't like really watching it at all, and part of that came from some of the things that I had learned. You know, people were like, don't pay attention, you know, build on your own track. I've learned with Unsplash, once you are really affecting an industry, it does matter to what other people are doing. You need to understand those things. Now, to me, that's a data point. It doesn't necessarily affect how we think about the product trajectory. We have our views of it. There's a data point that might come in where we think about it as a strategy, but it's never like, they built this feature, we got to build this feature.

Right.

We don't think about that. It's like, they built that feature, why did they build that feature? And we're building this way, why are we doing that? So there's a lot of those questions before there's any sort of reactive behavior when it comes to competitors.

What's the investor interest for something like that, for a business model of that nature?

Of the— for—

let's say yours versus maybe if you care to make any assumptions about some of the more incumbent big guys that we're talking about.

Yeah. Advertising is tough. So our business model is not like one that people find sexy these days. But what we look at is all these industries are evolving at different paces. And since we can specifically look at creative industries, so you have like music, you have audio books, video, entertainment, photos. Photos have progressed so much because the cameras have gotten so good. A lot of us have a couple images, at least on our phones, that could make it now onto Unsplash, high resolution. Back when we started Unsplash, you need to have a professional camera to even hit the minimum resolution. So there's been a huge evolution in that sense. And so we've just looked at like, we have to build this. If you're going to exists in the future of imagery, this is going to be the way, right? And we just have to do it.

So when we talk about the early days versus now, it obviously brings to mind growth. Growth has been a huge part of this story. What do you think has been most important to Unsplash's growth?

That simplicity. So removing those steps Removing as many as you can, even down to single words. I remember on that first version of Unsplash, under the image, what words do we put there? You know, it was just, we've just put the photographer's name and download. That's what we ended up at. I was even playing with like free download. I was playing all these little things that all those little decisions, just to get it to like the smallest, smallest thing possible, removing all of those steps. How to download. I wanted it even where you could download and then you could drag the image off and just use that one very, very easily if you didn't even want the high-res version, but it was subtle. We didn't put any words there. All those sort of little decisions, just to make it super, super simple, the single license, single high resolution, because you sort of think about how someone might use a visual. They're probably gonna, if you give them the high res, they'll chop it up how they need to. They can make it small, they can do those sorts of things. If you offer even 3 sizes or 2 sizes, now you introduce a question. So someone says, wait, do I need 700 by 400? What is 700 by 400? Does it fit with Twitter? Does it fit with this? All these questions. So we just removed all that and then you didn't have that. And to me, that insight is the core of what made Unsplash take off at the beginning. I think that's the core that I've seen in a lot of other products as well, removing all that decision making.

Yeah, it's— I think a lot of it boils down to just removing friction for people. Making it easier to use a product should always be front of mind.

Yeah.

So what is your relationship like with the, the people who have helped the, the product grow, the people who are actually putting content on the site and on the— using the product to get their images out there? How do you maintain those relationships and why are they important?

Well, I've been amazed from day one. I wasn't sure that people were gonna submit images at all. That's one of the reasons why we did 10 images every 10 days. I was like, at least we could go probably shoot 10 if we needed to. The first week we had exactly like 10 good images. And what I found was when you work with the internet, This is a lesson I've learned from Unsplash. It's almost like the wind is in your sails. Like, you're trying to do something good for the internet, people recognize that, and they want to contribute to it. So we didn't even have stats or anything, profiles, and people were still giving images for the first 3, 4 years. And I think it's because you're trying to do something good and people can see that. Like, we're giving images, they understand the mission, we're talking with all the community. We would go on— anytime we would travel anywhere. I would go home to visit my family in Wisconsin. I'm in Montreal now. And we would just meet people. We would try to go through our Mailchimp and be like, who's in Milwaukee? And we'll go meet them. And we did that in every city that we would just randomly go to. And I think those things now we're still doing in a different sort of way, but we are always talking with the people who are contributing the images, because without the images, Unsplash is just a whole bunch of empty boxes of code.

Right. So I think the big lesson to take away here is that you can never overvalue how important it is to have these relationships with the people who are empowering you to create a product. And it's a sort of symbiotic relationship. And it seems like you've really taken advantage of that and tried to keep those creators in mind and keep them front of mind as you develop the product. A lot of the conversation we've had about the early days of Unsplash is that some of it was accidental success. And I always think that luckiest people also work the hardest, but that you had a lot of, you know, these, let's say, 10 images in a day or 10 days and these little kind of niche choices that were made in the early days of creating the business. What have been the biggest changes as you've grown either strategically or in terms of day-to-day operations? How have you seen the business really evolve?

Yeah, this is scaling up the library. So as that has grown, uh, it took us 7 years to get to a million images, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that was purposeful. Like, we have tons more submissions, but we kept curating everything. So we actually have people who review our— we have teammates who review these images, uh, and then we give feedback even to as people are submitting if something doesn't get searchable. We went from 1 million to 2 million within a year. So it's really started to ramp up again. And sort of figuring out how to make search good. So we've entered these new territories all the time where there's just huge incumbents. So I think the first territories where you have all the stock photo sites, and now you're like building search, which is Google. And you're building an ad product, which is Facebook and Google. So yeah, you're doing all these things. But the product is leading you there, the usage is leading us there. It's not like we're just— we have to build it because the demand is there. People are searching and they need these visuals. So that's exciting to see where people are using a different search engine, right? They're using us instead of Google. And so, but the bar is just incredibly high, right? We all have used Google all the time, but that's the bar for any kind of search product. And so for us, that's been a big thing working through that, because with Unsplash in the beginning, there was maybe only hundreds of images. You could easily just scroll through and find everything. But now over 2 million, and you have search there. Once you even put a search field, it needs to be really, really good. So having that ability to do that, it's actually harder to build a good search with a smaller library than a bigger library. So working through a lot of that, And then as you grow as well, so after the first couple years, like first couple years is all word of mouth, and then sort of how do you sort of scale that as you're getting really, really big, figuring out a channel that works long term for us, that ended up being SEO. So we weren't sure about that for a while. We didn't want to do any SEO tricks. We didn't want to do anything weird that might just make the site not usable or as good. And we figured out some trade-off ways to be able to do that, but that took us some time. And then SEO really took over for the last 3 years as our main growth channel.

So when we're having this conversation about disruption and hearing your answer to that question, I can't help but wonder, what would you classify your risk tolerance as?

It's funny, it's a good question. At the beginning, I think when the stakes, you don't have much, your risk is really high. You do whatever. We'll make this Tumblr blog and we'll see if it works.

See what happens.

Yeah, throwing all these things. And then as you have something that's useful, it gets harder, mentally harder to think that same way. To take those risks, because you don't want to screw up a bit, right? Right. So we actually have to push ourselves to think that way sometimes. But what's helpful is still thinking through this philosophy of when we start, we start with how to lower the bar. So we'll try not to even create any technical product at all. We'll try to build it into the site without building anything. How do you sort of think about the easiest potential version of doing this? And then if it works over in that way, it's probably going to work if you make it much better, if you make something custom and some features around it. So we've taken that same philosophy and we apply that to new things that we think could be big, but we start them very small.

Was there a certain point at which, during the lifetime of the company, you realized that you couldn't just kind of throw things at the wall and see what stuck, that you realized, wow, this is big, we have to think a little differently about how we do new things or try new things.

Yeah, when we moved it off of Tumblr, and I think within that first year we did have an outage for like a day or something, people were like dependent on Unsplash, and it was like we were going crazy, like trying to fix everything. And that's when you You realize there's sort of a level of you need to stay up, and staying up in itself, it's difficult, right? Staying and making sure that it's good when you're growing and you're still trying to build your team, all these sorts of things are happening at the same exact time. So I think there's those moments that happen early on, and now we've sort of gotten used to it a bit more. But yeah, that we have a team now that just make sure of that, that all the time that it's reliable. Uh, and we've actually mapped that, like, when we think about how to not screw up, rather than like, what does success look like? It's like, how to not screw up, make sure you don't go down. You need to be reliable.

So what, what share of your team would you say is dedicated to making sure you don't go down?

So we're a pretty small team in general. We're 24 people. 13 of them are product. And there's a chunk of that product team as part— they do some other things as well, but there's a chunk of that team, like 4 people, who are really focused on the reliability. Okay.

So as we kind of wrap up this part of the conversation about growth, what do you think is better, slow and steady growth or sort of hockey stick growth?

I think it's the decisions. It's more about the decisions. They could create either of those, because we've had both. In the beginning, we had tons of hockey stick. We have hockey stick moments now, even. But we're not afraid of them, and we're not distracted by them either. It's sort of the output of the strategy that you're doing. So I wouldn't say necessarily like one of those is better, but there's definitely better strategies, underlying strategies, and they can lead to either one of those, but it's really focusing more on that strategy. You want to try to create the hockey sticks as much as you can from the strategy if you're trying to go for growth, but also slow and steady growth, it compounds all the time. It just keeps going and going. And we've had both moments. If you look at most internet companies, they have these moments all the time, but they're really focused on that underlying strategy.

So if you could go back in time and start the company again, would you do anything differently? Or what lessons do you wish you had learned, that you have learned since the founding, that you didn't have back then?

Yeah. Do a lot of similar things, but would have spun it out sooner as its own company so we could start to focus on it more. Done SEO earlier. Yeah, I think those are, those are a couple of main ones, but a lot of the other things I think we got right though. Yes. In the first couple of years, some of those were accidental. But I would say that the year 2 to year 5 and year and beyond, We've been much more systematic of creating those instead of getting lucky.

Sure. So now that I've forced you to look back and get a little reflective here, let's think about what comes next. So what do you think the future of Unsplash looks like?

To us, there's still a lot of visual usage that isn't necessarily coming from Unsplash yet. We feel that anything that's useful, that's a visual, you should be able to find it on Unsplash. I think we're really good at a certain kind of visual. If you go on the site right now, it's kind of the awe-inspiring lifestyle kind of image. And that fulfills a certain kind of emotion, but there's thousands of emotions. And there's gonna be different kinds of media units too. And sort of going through these different paces, like photography is in this spot now. What's a moving visual, which is essentially video as well, where does that go? So there's these interesting things that happen, but what we really focus on is the relationship with the creators. So the people who are submitting these images, some people will just dismiss it as like, "Oh, you're a photographer." They're just, they're visual storytellers, and they're storytellers at the core. And so a storyteller is typically good in different formats, right? They'll be good at images, but they'll also be good at moving images. And so most of these creators, we see it too, they'll go and create videos, create other things as well. And so to us, if, as long as you have that relationship with the creator, however the industry evolves, you'll always have the core relationship. And that's what we think of Unsplash really as, it's more of a creative community than just a photography community.

So when you do look to the future, with taking into account the competition and the industry at large. How do you think that your business model insulates you from some of the risks that might crop up for, say, the competition?

Yes, it's just going to keep going in this sort of accelerated direction. The cameras are going to keep getting better, which is going to make it easier and easier for people to take great images. People are going to be creating more. So it's just happening more and more. Every year we've seen that there's more and more tools that are being useful. Apple's entire new slogan, for example, is "Everyone can create." So all of that is moving in that direction, and licensing is moving in the other direction. It's sort of locking down these visuals, which are core building— a visual is a core building block to create with. Now, the original ways that we told stories was like writing things on the wall, drawing pictures, and showing people. That is now being done at scale on the internet. And by putting licensing, you're putting blocks. And the internet doesn't like blocks. It wants things to be open and free. So I think we're moving with those tailwinds, and licensing is sort of moving the other direction. There's going to be a subset of people who will still probably need licensing, that sort of thing. But it's going to be a very, very small percentage.

How do you envision your clientele changing in future years?

I think there's going to be a huge expansion from the individual creator side. So we've got a ton of people in businesses who are using Unsplash, but over 70% of the people who are downloading images have never used a stock photo site before. That's a lot.

One of these questions from the Q&A that I think is interesting kind of ties into what we're talking about right now. Is there a certain genre of images that you found is the most popular that maybe was unexpected or you had no inkling that it would be huge?

The drone stuff blows my mind. Some of the things that people are able to get with that. I know it's almost become, we see them all the time now. It's having less of that impact. But just even everyday shots of things that we see, like when you, like, if you travel and you see Statue of Liberty, your first inclination is, "Hey, I should take a photo of this." But I see the images that are on Unsplash of that, and I'm almost like, "I think I'll just go look at the image on Unsplash, 'cause I don't think I can even do that." I don't know how some of the photographers make this stuff.

That sounds like a pretty COVID-safe business model.

Yeah, living through the virtual versions of this. So seeing that kind of quality, we have celebrities now on Unsplash, which is another level that I wasn't sure where that was going to go, because celebrities are often the most protected when it comes to copyright. And we have celebrities now who are saying, hey, if I do the opposite, I can actually get 100 times, 1,000 times more people seeing what I'm doing, the mission, the thing that I'm trying to move forward.

In that way, is it almost, in some variation, a little bit of a social platform?

There is elements of, of that in the site, but we see Unsplash more as a distribution.

Okay, okay.

So we don't make camera tools, uh, we're not really a social network, but we are a distribution company. So if you looked at the average, just an example, the average image views that you'll get on an Unsplash image per month, it's about 19.6x what you'd get on Instagram. And so no other image platform, no other platform can really come close to the kind of distribution that Unsplash can offer an image. It's because we've— when you remove that license, you create this ability for people to use these visuals and they end up everywhere. Right.

So as we sort of wrap up in these last several minutes here, I have one, one big question that I think has certainly been informed by the conversation that we've been having. What does disruption mean to you?

It's not creating the next little iteration. I think a lot of things could be so much— even the ideas that people have, I know that they're better than the product that ends up coming out. I think that you can push it even further and you're tied down. I know we didn't really touch on some of the stuff in the middle here of this, even this visual, but I'll give you an example. I put technical limitations and regulatory limitations in quotes, because most people don't put the quotes there. They just think that those are limitations and you can't do anything about those. Regulatory limitations that we had a regulatory limitation, you would think that all images need to be licensed, but they don't. You could think about that completely differently. What if you made the images yourself and you made up a new license? That was like, people are like, "What are you talking about, make a new license? You can't just make a license." We did, and it changed how things are. So I think these— actually, these 4 things specifically, if you're able to challenge them and remove one and you build that into your product, you might have a completely disruptive product. I think the big one that we took out in this one was the regulatory limitation. It didn't really exist. It was like a human construct that was created. but we could make a new construct. So disruption to me means you're going to challenge some underlying fundamental thing of everything that exists, not just build a better feature and keep that same underlying infrastructure that's there.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think pushing ourselves to think differently about what we might perceive as, like you said, quote unquote limitations, is so important, especially as, you know, we face a lot of these possible limitations that are particular and specific to this exact moment in history. Certainly, I'll just go ahead and say it, unprecedented time to be alive. And, you know, it's, I think, also could possibly be a time for innovation and for really thinking with an eye to the future, which is fantastic and sounds a lot like what you guys have been doing. So I just want to run through and make sure that we can hit some of these Q&A questions really quickly. I imagine there will be a ton. That was a great conversation, Mikael. You have so much insight on starting a company, growing a company, and really thinking about how we can create difference from the incumbents and how they have set the stage for anybody who's looking to be a new market entrant. So let's just run through. I'm going to look here really quickly. Um, all right. How did you achieve visibility for your site in the early days?

Uh, so yeah, we really only did put it on Hacker News at the start. So there was luck in that. That got us the first 30,000, but then within a year we went to 300,000. So that was not lucky. So to go from the 30,000 to 300,000 there was building into the product some reasons for that 30,000 people to come back and also refer people. So 10 every 10 days, yes, it was a simplicity factor on our side, but also it was meant to be a reason to come back.

Right.

You can get another 10 images, you can subscribe and make sure that you know about those 10 images and get them in your inbox even. So that factor alone, like a reason for people to come back, I think was really big. And then we did some other things where we looked for platforms where we could put these images out, where people would see them, and platforms that weren't already saturated. So one that was just starting at the time was Medium, the blogging platform, and they showed really high-res, high-quality visuals. And it was founded by, you know, the ex-founder of Twitter. So I'm like, there's a good chance something probably good is going to happen here. Let's figure out how to write good stuff. That gets seen by people, and we'll use Unsplash images. So we figured out, it was still early, we consistently wrote and we learned basically how to be featured. And it did come down, you have to write really good stuff, but how to share with people to get sort of the lift that you needed to be featured there. And then the Unsplash image was always there. So you kept seeing every week as Medium was just skyrocketing, all of those people were seeing Unsplash being used in these blog posts. There were those tactics that we thought about, and I think that in the early days, even when I think back to my previous company, it's trying to leverage another existing platform that's not already saturated and see how you can uniquely use that. Find one that's unique to what you have as a product. So we had these high-quality visuals, that's why we chose Medium.

Yeah, certainly something to be said for saturation. You know, a lot of, uh, social media platform ads might be super cheap, but I think saturation is an important part of the equation when you're thinking about lifetime value too. So one last question before I let you go here. This is from our Q&A. You're great at business model, human-centric, and long-term thinking. How have you arrived at this place? Is it natural for you, or have you cultivated this way of looking at the world around you?

It's been, yeah, a learning process. So as you go along, you're learning different things. I think differently now than I did a year ago, 6 months ago. Yeah, you just keep evolving all the time, solving different things, teams different sizes, different challenges. Day one, you're taking on stock photography companies, and now you're taking on the ad duopoly. Yeah, so you definitely change, and I've actually tried to document my Google search history to see how it's evolved over time.

Brave of you to do, Mikhail.

You can see these chunks where I know what I'm thinking, and I've gone back like years, sometimes like 6 years, and be like, wow, I'm just in a totally different mind space. Sometimes you're recruiting, and almost like you graduate sometimes too. You're like, that thinking has entered my model, and I don't need to read anything on it anymore. So that's been interesting to see. And I think even in my brain, I've sort of crystallized like a framework. And I know we touched on this a little bit, like customers don't care if what you made is scalable, they care if what you made is good. That has really been sort of ingrained in me since the beginning and then carried through. And we sort of always look at this piece, which is like, how are you going to make something that's going to really change behavior? And I know we covered a lot of this, but it's like being drastic with that removal of friction, starting from what you want to exist ideally and work backwards instead of working the other way and thinking about limitations, thinking about the business model with the future in mind instead of looking at what's presently there and how you can extract from it. And then just look at what you're unique at and outsource the rest. So what that means, like Unsplash first version, we outsourced pretty much everything, you know, the forms and everything, all that. What we didn't outsource was the way to put it together so that it would be the drastic removal of friction. That was it. Everything else was, was outsourced.

Yeah. All right. Well, that is a great way to, to end this conversation on disruption. It seems like 4 very simple steps to follow. Obviously a lot of factors play into this. It was fantastic to get your insight on all of this. Thank you so much, Mikhail, and thank you everybody for tuning in. I hope you all learned something. I certainly did.

Thanks so much, Kenzie. Thanks, everybody.