Joel Flory is the co-founder and CEO of VSCO.
Flory turned his passion for travel and seeing the world through photographs into a career as a professional photographer. After more than 10 years of running his own business, he and his co-founder Greg Lutze set out to build something that would fill in the many gaps they saw in the industry. Visual Supply Company was then born in 2011.
The company has evolved from a series of photography workshops, to a film emulation plugin for photoshop and illustrator, and then made the jump to mobile as a simple photo editing app in 2013, before becoming the product it is today.
VSCO is now used by more than 45 million active users worldwide.
While they were initially bootstrapped for the first three years of business, they’ve since raised over 70 million dollars to continue to build their platform and creative community.
Flory joins us to share his story, what it’s been like building VSCO, why their community is incredibly important to the entire company, how they’ve grown over the years, how they approached raising money, what’s next for the platform, and much more!
Hack To Start is a weekly podcast focused on interesting people and the innovative ways they achieve success hosted by @FrancoVarriano and @TylerCopeland.