How Unsplash Went From a Tumblr Page To Fully-Fledged Platform
How Unsplash Went From a Tumblr Page To Fully-Fledged Platform

And how we can apply it to our projects.

Photo by Rubén García on Unsplash

You’ve heard of Unsplash, no doubt. The thumbnail of this very article is integrated straight into this post from the service. I searched it within the text editor and picked one I liked. Boom, my article now has a header.

It wasn’t always this way. I couldn’t always type away and select an extremely high-quality photo straight from my text editor to be used completely royalty-free. It took a lot of work in the right places, over a lot of time.

But before putting in all that work to turn this into what it is today, it had to start somewhere. And starting is where most founders screw up. Starting has the most amount of friction. And taking that first step to publish a piece of work might take a year, several developers, and a lot of anxiety.

Unsplash, however, published its first version in 3 hours with $38. There was no umming and ahhing over the design. There was no unnecessary complexity. The first version was so basic that a teenager posting edgy content on the internet used the same technology — it was on Tumblr.

The Original Unsplash on Tumblr | GIF adapted from Source

This is the story of how Unsplash started and how you can use the same principles to launch practically any idea that comes to mind.
['Sah Kilic']
['Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Technology', 'Advice']