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PICJUMBO

PICJUMBO

www.picjumbo.com

PicJumbo also is the work of one person. Viktor Hanacek is 20-something photographer living in the Czech Republic. In 2013, he created PicJumbo, a stock photo website with free photos. Today, the site is used by millions of bloggers, designers and marketers all around the world. In addition to free images, Hanacek offers a premium membership for photos of higher quality.

His is the story of the young entrepreneur who learned to code and build websites at the age of 14. He earned $40 for his first gig, and decided his career lay in freelancing and owning his own bootstrap business. He began taking photographs, as well, and submitted them to stock photography websites for sale, but they were all rejected. In retrospect, he said he was glad because it forced him to work on his craft and improve.

He also decided to build his own website to sell photos (since nobody else would do it for him), and for a couple of days, he established it as a paid site. For $1.99, people could download images.

But nobody did.

So he added "FREE" to the DOWNLOAD IMAGE button, and started giving away his art. The first year, more than 700,000 images were downloaded, and he knew he had found his niche. He needed to monetize it, and soon he added a premium membership side of the site.

Like many photo websites, you can sign up to Hanacek's email list and receive free images each week, delivered to your inbox. You'll also receive other invitations, but that's the cost of doing business in the "permission marketing" world. You never know, his next email could be exactly the creative content you need for your work, or the awesome Christmas Collection he made with his adorable dog, Jessie. Check it out.