A Quick-Hitting Podcast “Slingshot”
Slingshots are short stories of side projects that led somewhere unexpected. Our show’s premise is simple: We want more people to trust their intuition. Slingshots are quick-hitting examples of people who do so.
Mikael Cho is the co-founder and CEO of Crew, a marketplace that helps you find designers and developers for your website or app. And at one point in the business’s history, he says they were running straight towards a brick wall. They had three months of cash left in the bank, few customers converting and even fewer investors willing to take a meeting.
So, being a creative entrepreneur, what did Mikael do? Did he search for some mundane, well-wrought tactics on how to convert new business? (I mean, probably. Wouldn’t you? I mean your entire company is about to go under…)
But along with all those things, Mikael did one seemingly small thing: He published 10 stock photos that they just happened to already own onto a site for anyone to use.
He called this site Unsplash, and nobody on his team thought the project would do anything for the business. Today, the site generates 1 billion photo views every month, driving more paying customers than any marketing initiative in the company’s history. Apple uses Unsplash photos on its iPad pages. TIME Magazine generates fewer views for its cover photos than Unsplash’s top-ranked photos each month. The project is, on no uncertain terms, a massive success.
And yet Mikael didn’t aim for massive success. In fact, it was Unsplash that helped him realize what a side project is truly great for, whether you’re trying to find meaningful as a creator … or trying to save a startup.
Hear the full story below or wherever you get your podcasts.
PS: If you’re on our weekly email, you’ll also get bonus content from last week’s episode featuring the VP of creative at Dollar Shave Club. (Subscribe on the Unthinkable home page).
LINKS TO KNOW:
Mikael’s company: crew.co
Mikael’s Twitter: twitter.com/mikaelcho
Jay’s Twitter: twitter.com/jayacunzo
Jay’s Snapchat: snapchat.com/add/jayacunzo
ABOUT THE SHOW:
Stories About Breaking from Conventional Wisdom & Following Your Intuition
- Our mission is to make it easier and more successful for our community to act on their creative intuition.
- We are creators who are craft-driven and bothered by suck.
- We want fulfillment from creating work we love, but we also want that work to generate real business results.
- And to do the Unthinkable is to make the leap from what conventional wisdom says you’re “supposed to do” to instead follow what your intuition is urging you to create.
- Subscribe here (weekly email with our experiments + bonus content) or wherever you get your podcasts (new stories each Monday morning).
