Joel Flory was a wedding photographer and Greg Lutze had an eye for web design. These two men joined together at first to start building websites. Their simple idea lead to the release of their first website in November 2011 to desktops. After the website brought in more than a quarter million dollars in the first 48 hrs, they dropped the website making business and turned their attention to the app we know as VSCO.
The evolution of VSCO is very interesting for a number of reasons. VSCO was initially intended to be a website where you could access tools to edit photos. This idea emerged because of the skills Lutze had with web design and Flory’s photography job. I think that there is a very important lesson to learn about timing when we look at VSCO. If this app had been released earlier or later than it was then we could be without VSCO. VSCO was released at about the same time as Instagram and other social media platforms. These other platforms paired well with VSCO and contributed to its grow, but VSCO has separated itself from the rest. As an entrepreneur, one of the hardest things to account for is timing. In the case of Flory and Lutze, they managed to get lucky with the timing of their app. However, it is still an important factor to take into account.
The story of these co-founders is also encouraging to young entrepreneurs and college students. Flory went to Cal Poly university as an electrical engineer, but quickly switched to information technology. In addition he decided to take time off his sophomore year. Looking back at his journey, Flory gives this piece of advice, “The rules aren’t exactly clear, and each year you start to learn a little more about how to be successful. Don’t take failure as the closing of a door — rather, a new skill you need to learn.”
The creators of VSCO and their story should be taken as an encouragement to young entrepreneurs. You do not need to have everything figured out to be successful, you just have to be motivated. In addition, I think that this story teaches us to be open to iterations in ideas that might not have been expected.
VSCO founder’s unique perspective: How alum Joel Flory’s side hustle took off
e with an idea for a product. You come up with an idea for an app. That’s the story of how Snapchat was founded. Evan Spiegel was a product design major at Stanford University when he and his friends Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown came up with the idea for Picaboo, an app that shared messages and videos that would disappear shortly after they were sent. It distinguished itself from other messaging apps, because, unlike them, the pictures would be deleted within a short time frame after they were sent. The creators of Snapchat observed that people didn’t need these pictures saved forever, and how sometimes people preferred to show others a picture for a little while.
