Podcast – Founders Talk – Mikael Cho (Unsplash)
You can start a business as a side project and still make it big. Creativity does get crumpled under the stress of making it count. Especially when you leave everything and focus on the business.
Unsplas's Mikael had excess photos after a photo shoot and they were wondering what to do with it. They wanted to create a site which they couldn't find after a lot of searching on the web.
Conviction in your story of business is important while trying to convince the VC of your value proposition. This is true especially when there is no straightforward business model to make money.
Identifying VCs who will sync with your value system is important. But really do you have a choice when you need money? Should you be waiting to find the right VC? I guess yes. Especially when you have a good product in your hand.
Unsplash is planning to use Blockchain technology. They want to figure out how a photo that is downloaded on the site is used by the user. Where does it end up going? Who all access it? Through blockchain ledger technology they want to have an audit trail of sorts. They want to connect all the players involved and build a paying ecosystem.
Growth @Unsplash was never the problem. They were growing by leaps and bounds. Getting thousands of photos contributed by the professional photographers. They are trying to figure out a way to monetise. Currently, they have APIs which enable other applications to use the rich database of unsplash.
Stock Image sites like Getty and Shutterstock have pay per use model. Unsplash database is larger than both Getty and Shutterstock put together! As of now the contributors to Unsplash don't get paid.
Some of them do get referrals because of the visibility of their portfolio.