How work on third-party projects saved our startup

The text “How side projects saved our startup” was written by Michael Crew, a startup founder, and published on the Crew blog. Its first part is devoted to a specific story related to the Unsplash project (at Habré it was recently mentioned in the popular recording “300 amazing free services” ), and the second to Cho’s general reflections about the benefits of third-party projects. Here the first is translated. The illustration above is, of course, taken with Unsplash :)

We had no money.
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We changed the business model, and the remaining money was enough for three months, for which we needed to change the situation. If we could not, then our business would be finished.

Marketing budget? Do not tell my slippers. We barely had enough funds to support the work.

This was the situation a year and a half ago in Crew . We knew we should grow, but we didn’t know how to do it sufficiently.



Things like blogging work, but months pass before they have a big impact.

To make a great product, about which users will tell each other - this is by itself, but it also takes time.

Although we did this all, we needed to increase the “normal” growth rate if we wanted to survive.

At that time we were working on the home page of our site. Looking for a suitable photo, we noticed that all the options were either bad, or expensive, or both.

Instead of using them, we hired a photographer and took a set of pictures at the coffee shop. We used only one, so we still have extras. We thought: "Probably, many people have the same problem, so we will publish them for free for everyone."

Having spent $ 19 on a topic for Tumblr and an hour of time, we got a Unsplash site with 10 of the best of our unused photos and a link to our main site.

Here is a screenshot of an earlier version of Unsplash:



We launched unsplash.com and hung a link to HackerNews, a site that links to the best resources found on the Internet, and allow members to vote for them. The HackerNews community is largely composed of designers, programmers, and entrepreneurs — an audience for which, we thought, Unsplash might be useful.

From what happened then I went nuts.

I did not expect that the link would have a greater effect than a few hundred visitors to the site. I went about my business until I received a letter from the photographer who took the pictures. He wrote:

“Dude, I'm glad you liked the pictures! I do not know what you have done with them, but now on the site with my portfolio I break through to the people! ”

I went back to HackerNews to see what was going on.

Unsplash was the number one site there.

Here is a screenshot of the original recording:



People were bursting with Unsplash.

20,000 visitors.

After 10 minutes there were 50,000 visitors.

Then we saw a big peak of traffic from the main Crew site. We got a lot of customers. And a lot of love. Much more than we ever received from any advertising campaign or blog entry. Here is a screenshot of the first tweets after launching Unsplash.



All this was the result of the creation of which it took less than half a day.

It looked like magic. How could this happen? We have interested more people in a few hours than in the whole previous year. We did Unsplash to give people something valuable. We thought that if several hundred people found it useful, it would be a victory. But we did not expect this level.

That day, we not only felt the benefits of value creation, but also understood a big change in how marketing should be today to be noticed: the best marketing is when you don’t know what marketing is.