E1008: VSCO CEO & Co-founder Joel Flory is building a photo-sharing platform free of ads, likes & comments to empower creators, shares insights on appealing to Gen Z, expanding their global reach & the magic of subscriptions

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2019

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

1:08 Jason intros Joel Flory
2:12 What is VSCO? How is it different than Instagram, Facebook & other photo-sharing apps?
4:33 How does VSCO grow at hyper speed without follower counts, likes, etc.?
8:28 What is VSCO's scale so far?
12:23 How does VSCO get people (mostly Gen-Z) to pay for a social network? How do they view pricing?
18:09 How VSCO uses themselves as a tool for other social networks
19:52 What is a VSCO Girl? How have they capitalized on the Gen-Z meme phenomenon?
21:31 Joel's thoughts on e-commerce
27:19 Joel is a long-time TWiST fan!
30:00 Mistakes Joel learned from in his 9-year journey at VSCO
32:26 Has iPhone photography ruined the photography industry?
36:53 How does VSCO deal with inappropriate content? How does their feed algorithm work?
43:59 Jason goes through VSCO's funding history and asks why Joel didn't sell VSCO for a massive profit
46:06 Is the greatest art created by those who don't care about what others think?
47:41 Collapse of the photography industry & sense of belonging at VSCO
51:44 Advantage of having HQ in Oakland
54:59 VSCO global expansion
57:17 Magic of subscriptions
1:05:01 The 3 truth's of VSCO

Transcript

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0:00.0	This Week in Start-Up's is brought to you by NetSuite by Oracle, the business management software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy-to-use cloud platform.
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0:50.2	Sign up at brex.com slash twist and get card fees wave for life by entering the code twist during sign up
0:57.0	upcoming launch events apply for the next launch accelerator cohort
1:01.6	applications are due Friday, December 13th. Learn more and apply at
1:06.3	launch accelerator.co. Hey everybody, welcome to this week in startups. I'm your
1:10.9	host Jason Kellicanus and this is the show where we interview founders about their startups and how they want to change the world.
1:18.0	And there are two lies, two, one two lies that they have been telling in Silicon Valley for the last decade.
1:24.0	One is you cannot compete against Facebook, and two, people will not pay for a social network.
1:31.0	These two things have been proven false by my next guest who has one of the hottest
1:35.7	social photography community apps in the world today.
1:40.5	That app is called Visco. it's spelled like disco but with the via no eye V.
1:46.4	VSCO you can go to VSCO.com or you can search for VSCO in your app store and download it right now and find out what all the buzz is about.
1:56.0	And that founder is Joel Flury, welcome to the pod.
1:59.0	Thank you for having me.
	...

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