Product Exercise — Pexels 2.0
Hello all. Thank you for joining me for the Product Review of Pexels 2.0.
Pexels 2.0 provides high quality stock photos for free usage for everyone. That doesn’t seem a very unique idea. There are quite a few players in the market trying to solve the customer need but have struggled to do it for free. Shutter Stock is a leader in this area but it provides paid photos only.
What makes them successful?
The founders of Pexels 2.0 did three things very differently than the other free stock photo providers did which made them successful. They are -
- Hand-picked: They hand pick at least 10 photos every day to upload on the website. These photos are picked from free image sources, are high-quality and licensed under CCo. This provides immense value to their users (read designers) by saving them time to weed out the unnecessary photos.
- CC0 License: The photos being licensed make it easy for users to download and use without the hassle of any copyright infringement. You can read about CC0 here.
- Free: It’s currently the second version of the website and it still continues to be free to the users. Their only source of revenue are ad-based. Is this sustainable in the longer run? Its questionable, but they have managed to get a huge list of happy customers!
What did they get right?
The Google-like search functionality really helped users find high quality photos very easily.
I liked two things about their search feature. Firstly, it allowed users to search by color. This is extremely useful for designers who can find just the right shade of picture they are looking for. Secondly, they meta tagged their pictures quite meticulously, allowing search to be very accurate.
Also, the speed of the website was noticeably faster than the previous version which helped them attract huge number of visitors & page views.
Creating an extremely positive user experience is critical for your product in addition to the value provided. As mentioned above, when the website was fast, they got a lot more traction.
One aspect that they had not leveraged effectively up till last month was social media. They’re changing that by tweeting some of the photos, writing blogs and sharing thoughts on photography. That’s a great way to attract users.
How did they think of this idea?
Ingo & Bruno Joseph are web designers & developers who built this because they suffered the same problem when they needed good quality stock photos. I read an interesting quote in an article on Houzz by Alfred Lin, a successful venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital
“We like founders who build companies to solve problems in their own lives , even if they aren’t experts in the field. They unpack issues in a way that people in the industry have never unpacked them. They see things that everyone else misses.”
They listened to their customers about the problems with the first version to create a faster, much-improved version of Pexels. That’s another key to a successful product. Most of the times, the first version of the product fails. But if you can identify what caused the failure and fix it and release it again, there’s a good chance it’ll succeed.
That’s all for this review. Thank you for joining me today!
