What is VSCO?
VSCO is a mobile photo-sharing application (formerly known as VSCO cam) that is available on both iOS and Android.
Journey of VSCO to a $500M company
The VSCO founders Joel Flory and Greg Lutze via Conscious Magazine
Joel Flory and Greg Lutze were the founders of the Visual Supply Company or VSCO. It was founded in March of 2011.
Website launch
VSCO launched its first site in November. It had a photoshop tool and filters, making it easy for professional editors or photographers to use as it cost less time.
It started as a platform for editing and sharing photos. Now, it has become a popular application among the younger generation.
Like Instagram, the VSCO can be used to edit photos. You have the freedom to share your photos on the VSCO app or save them for other social media platforms.
However, the social media interaction is quite different in the two. In Instagram, the scale used to measure the popularity of a photo/post is the number of likes and comments it got. Unlike Instagram, this dynamics are limited in the VSCO application.
Mobile application for Android and iPhone
Joel Flory and Greg Lutze also launched a mobile application in April 2012 to promote photo editing features.
But after it became a massive hit with 1 million downloads, they chose to focus on the mobile application instead of the desktop ones.
The annual subscription of VSCO
VSCO requires a subscription fee of $19.99 to enable its photo-editing tools, filters, and tutorials for learning photo editing.
However, the people who doesn’t want to pay the subscription fee may also use essential features such as basic filters, tools, and feed in the VSCO.
Growth of VSCO
Since its launch in 2012, the mobile application of VSCO has gained much success. In 2019, the app accumulated more than 150 million downloads on both Android and iPhone devices.
By the end of 2019, VSCO had gained 2 million active paying users; this number increased to 4 million by 2020. As a result, it earned $80 million in annual revenue in 2020.
The revenue from their mobile application was enough for both founders to keep VSCO away from a potential problem for the first three years.
Joey was quite hesitant about including outside investors in the platform.
In 2014, Vas Natarajan a partner an American capital venture firm Accel met with Flory at a bar for a quick discussion about the app. Soon after, Accel led VSCO a series of generous amounts of $40 million.
After an influx of capital Flory and Lutze expanded their business by doubling from 50 to 100 employees and upgrading to a 24,000-square-foot headquarters in Oakland.
They also made a headquarter in New York. It contained all the photo editing tools for non-commercial usage.
The company also started two other businesses, Moving Sciences, a visual technology-based company. The second one is the Artifact Uprising, used for downloading and creating images for photo albums. These two businesses required a total revenue of almost $35 million in 2015.
The company expanded its headquarter in Oakland with 50% more employees than in 2018, along with another headquarter built in Chicago providing job opportunities for many aspiring photo editors and photographers.
VSCO reached 100 million users in 2020. They also formed a partnership with Snap, the company that made Snapchat. Together, they’ve launched Analog, a Snapchat lens for VSCO.
Future of VSCO
Both Joel Flory and Greg Lutze are firm on the opinion that they have no plan to sell the company.
“Business is growing in a way that we’ve never seen before and what it’s doing is opening all of these new areas of opportunity. We’re focused on not only how you create content and how you edit content, but ultimately, how you tell a story with that content.”
– Joel Flory
