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The Market pulls the product out of you, Mikael Cho CEO at Unplash - The Startup CEO SHOW

3 Oct 2024 · 1 min

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Mikael Cho, CEO of Unsplash, shares how early user demand shaped the product. After posting 10 photos, they saw 30,000 downloads in hours and the site's subscriber count doubled the next week. That pull from the market told them what to build.

Questions this video answers

About 30,000 downloads across 10 images in a couple hours.

The number of subscribers doubled the next week.

Chapters

My co founder working on a laptop and his hands and these pictures and I went away and then I get these texts from photographer we worked with because we gave him credit to his portfolio and he said, I don't know where you put those photos but there's more traffic on my portfolio site than I've seen in my entire life. It's happening like right now. So his server is getting this like huge thing. Like what's happening? 30,000 downloads on 10 images is what was happening in a couple hours. And we did the opposite of what you're supposed to do for building a company around Unsplash for that entire year because we were focused on this other company. But I think it speaks to when you have a product and you found something that people really, really, really like, you can't stop it. It's like the market just pulls the product out of you. So I would come back the next week, we had double the subscribers.