"Photography is not dead"

Joel Flory started his career as a commercial and wedding photographer in the 2000s. After visiting the website of his favorite band, Jimmy Eat World, he decided to contact its designer Greg Lutze. Lutze designed a website for Flory, and the two eventually kicked around a few business ideas before deciding to collaborate and build websites for other photographers. They immediately gained traction, and in 2011 the Visual Supply Company, or VSCO, was born.

In 2018, the app was gaining real traction by positioning itself as an app for the true craftspeople of photography. You could post all your photos to your account with no public like counts and no comments. In the early years, it was a clear contrast from Instagram. With 30M active users by 2018, the problem became “how do you monetize?”

In 2017, everything changed for the business when they launched VSCO Membership, a paid model for users to access the full preset/editing library. By 2018, it had 2M paying subscribers.

7 years after launching the company, the company had transformed the business to be a true hub for photos when it came to editing and storing their photos.

Fast forward 8 years, and today we see a company that still has its original platform, but has completely evolved into a hub for professional photographers to showcase their work, manage their workflows, find new clients, and more.

They call it “the modern operating system for photographers”.

This latest evolution is being shepherded (i can’t believe that’s how it’s spelled) under the leadership of CEO Eric Wittman. I asked Eric about what’s been happening at the company (subscribe to see more, it costs $0):