Two and a half years ago, I set out to teach people to code from scratch on their phones. As of today, 1.5 million people have downloaded Grasshopper. Even with 10 years of Product Management experience at Google, I was in uncharted territory building Grasshopper. Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way:

Build what you know

I arrived at learning to code by accident. I went to a public high school in California where computer class was learning to type. When I arrived at Stanford, I heard about “computer science”, but had no idea what it was. My freshman Resident Assistant recommended taking a class called “CS106A”. I took it on faith. I found out later that it was Stanford’s introductory Computer Science (CS) class.

As soon as I started the class, I loved computer science but got straight Bs. A lot of folks were surprised I was even taking the class since I was a “girl who liked to talk”. There were so many things I didn’t understand. I remember asking a member of my dorm staff for help one time, and them scoffing saying, “You don’t know Unix?! How can you not know Unix?”

There were so many barriers to feeling comfortable learning to code: jargon, the tools, people’s perception of what a coder looked like. All these obstacles made me feel like I didn’t belong. I ended up getting my degree in Computer Science. I landed a job at Google, but hundreds of times I doubted if I could do it.

Fast forward to about a decade of working at Google. I wanted to figure out what I could do to help with more diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. There’s a lot of amazing work out there. Based on my own experience, I wanted to change one thing: I wanted more people to feel like they could code. I wanted people to have an easier time than I did getting into the software industry.

I ended up pitching Google’s Area 120 on a gamified learn-to-code app, with minimal instruction and on mobile (so that more people could use it).

Surround yourself with great people

“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller

A bunch of great people who care about making coding education more accessible built Grasshopper. In the beginning, it was a few of us. Over the last two years, folks have joined and some have moved on. Through every iteration, people decisions were at the very heart of the app.

I’ve learned over the last 2 years that you can be smart, you can be lucky, and you can have folks with deep expertise on your team. That’s not enough. You need to surround yourself with folks who are going to be team players. Skills can be learned. At the end of the day, I was wrong a lot of the time. It was my teammates’ hard work and patience that allowed us to pivot to where Grasshopper is today.

The Grasshopper Team (top left, clockwise): Heather, Val, Laura (me), Frankie, Lucas, Elliott, Kris, Phil and Ben

Get something in front of users as quickly as possible

We started building Grasshopper in September 2016 and did our first user tests in October. We didn’t have anything built yet, we just had hand-drawn paper prototypes.

By November, we had our first prototype and sent 10 folks home with it over Thanksgiving (only 2 people used it).

At each iteration, we learned what worked, and what didn’t. We realized early on that coding puzzles were delightful. We had to make sure the games didn’t feel too kid-like (e.g. no turtle graphics). We learned where users wanted to click to add a new line in our code editor (and that our initial controls were confusing).

By June, we had a rough app that had 13 puzzles and we put it up on the Play Store. We bought some traffic. We kept a low profile and kept learning.

Our very first “fully functional” paper prototype

Good metrics help you say no

We weren’t sure what success would look like when we started Grasshopper. I knew metrics would help us but wasn’t sure which numbers mattered. I read a lot of blogs about growth. Then I started looking at the following metrics to gauge Grasshopper’s success: active users, onboarding success, week 1 retention, cost per acquisition, curriculum completion, and content creation per week.

That’s a lot of different metrics.

Having a lot of metrics made it hard to make decisions.

Did we want to build a feature to increase our daily active users? Or reduce the cost of acquisition? Did we want people to spend more time in the app or get through our lessons? What did it mean when one metric went up and another one went down? Which metrics were the most important?

It took a few months until I realized I needed to narrow. We decided to focus on only two metrics: Day 1 retention and Graduation Rate. We held ourselves accountable to student learning (Graduation Rate), while also building an engaging product that would keep users coming back (Day 1 retention). And we focused on Day 1 retention because it was our first opportunity to measure a user coming back. All other retention goals are downstream of Day 1.

Noticeably absent is any user growth metric. We didn’t need to grow until we’d nailed these other two metrics. If we weren’t keeping users interested and we weren’t teaching our students, we weren’t ready to pour more gasoline on the fire.

Narrowing down to two success metrics was clarifying. We didn’t spend time on marketing beyond some simple paid campaigns. We could look at our list of ideas and focus on the best ones based on whether they helped with retention or graduation. Things like tablet support, making the code editor support more use cases, and referrals were no longer important.

Once we had a shared set of goals, we were able to start making some hard decisions.

Your users are right

From June to December 2017, things were rough. We had agreed on our success metrics, but we weren’t making either of these numbers go up.

We made a lot of changes to the app. We expanded our curriculum to create a better “end-point”. Nothing seemed to improve our metrics. I kept hoping the next change would be the one, but it wasn’t.

We continued hearing from users that our curriculum was confusing and that they really wanted a progress bar. I didn’t get it. We’d designed our curriculum to be dynamic so that the perfect next lesson was picked for the user based on their performance. That way lessons could also be swapped in and out, too. And we’d just added a progress bar. Why weren’t users getting it? Couldn’t they see the progress bar?

At the same time, some folks on my team had started to note that they didn’t feel comfortable with the dynamic curriculum. It was confusing to them, and it was computationally expensive.

That’s when I realized: Our users were right. They’d been telling me all along that our app was confusing, but I just wasn’t understanding. And my teammates had heard them too, and I still wasn’t listening. I was too attached to how we’d been doing things and the investments we’d made.

So we made a pivot to make our curriculum a linear path, with clear progression and progress. We stopped trying to be too smart, and listened. And that’s when everything started to change for the better: all our numbers started to go up and to the right.

Stick to your core, the rest is just details

When we made the pivot from a dynamic curriculum to a linear one, I was super concerned. Our investors thought that the dynamic curriculum was cool, so did people on our team. Was this new strategy interesting enough to keep our team excited? And this new model had us using points and achievements. Was that cheating?

That’s when I reminded myself of why I wanted to build Grasshopper: I wanted to teach more people to learn to code. The dynamic curriculum wasn’t working; swap it out for a curriculum that did work. Who cares if you’re using a points system, as long as more people learn?

Building Grasshopper has been a learning journey in letting go and empowering the people on my team to make decisions (and it’s a journey I’m still on). It turns out that if you have a great team, the best ideas will come from them. My job as the lead is making sure that we’re all arriving at the same place: teaching more people to learn to code.

Since making our pivot last year and realizing that I was too attached to a version of the app that wasn’t working, I’ve been more open to suggestions and experimentation. I’ve let go a little, and it’s been great to see what my team has done when given more responsibility. My team has built features, developed new courses, and made changes to Grasshopper that I wasn’t initially sold on. But it turned out I was wrong, and the features my team developed increased our core metrics. We’ve also unlaunched some things. But the most important thing has been staying true to our mission and never wavering. The rest is just details.

Go for growth when the metrics are right

Through my years at Google, I had learned that you don’t want to overpromise and get it wrong. You can never recover user trust. When I worked on Project/Google Fi, we onboarded users slowly until we knew our customers would have a great experience, and it went well. I wanted to follow a similar model with Grasshopper, and not do marketing and press until we knew we had a great product.

After months and months of flatlined metrics, we returned from the holidays to graphs that went up and to the right. We were so excited. The pivot to the linear curriculum paid off!

In September 2017, we had set some goals for Day 1 Retention and Graduation Rate, and we hit them by February 2018.

In addition to seeing our success metrics go up, we actually saw organic growth taking off. Starting in January, we saw a larger and larger percentage of our growth coming organically.

By February, we knew we were onto something that was working, so we decided to put announcement plans into action. We were surprised that no one had paid attention to Grasshopper even though it was public for months. Because we kept a low profile, we gave ourselves the opportunity to announce and tell our own story once we knew the product was right.

_Graph of our 7-day [moving average](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=") on Day 1 retention. After months of flatlined success metrics, our pivot resulted in 2x Day 1 retention, even as we added more users.

Monitoring and scaled support pay off

On announcement day, we got into the office at 5 am PT. TIME Magazine did an exclusive on Grasshopper, and it was going to hit the site at 6 am PT. Nothing was open, so we brought a waffle iron to the office and cooked some bacon in our microwave.

Once the story launched, we saw our metrics start to climb. It was super exciting! TechCrunch did an article. And then a bunch of other outlets started to pick us up. By 3 pm, things had leveled out and we decided to go out and grab a beer to celebrate. We’d launched, gotten a lot of new users and nothing broke. Growth was modest, but we were out there in the wild. A job well done. We went home that night feeling good.

The next morning, things were on fire. Asia had picked up our launch. Our engineering team was alerted just in time, and they turned off non-essential services (like our dashboards) before our server load prevented Grasshopper from functioning.

Once we got our data back, we found out that we had 63xed our previous 24-hour record. We had been hoping for 10x. The next few weeks were hard. Our engineering team worked to rewrite our backend to be scalable, and our curriculum and support team handled user issues. We survived because we’d invested in monitoring, in building toggles to turn off services quickly, and in a forum and in-app feedback system that scaled for massive user growth.

If you’re ever in a similar situation, I can’t emphasize enough how helpful it was to have all these things in place before we announced.

There is no such thing as work-life balance; there is a work-life compromise

Fast forward to today, and we have 1.5M users now using Grasshopper. I’m so proud of the team and what we’ve accomplished, and proud of our students for how much they’ve learned to code. But time to get a little personal:

During all this, I also had my first baby. I was going through first-trimester exhaustion while executing our pivot. I was 35-weeks pregnant when we did our public announcement in April. And I still feel like I’m ramping back from maternity leave, even though I’ve been back at work for a couple of months. Adjusting to parenthood + working on Grasshopper has been filled with unexpected challenges.

I wish I had advice for folks here. I wish I could tell you that with a successful career and lots of resources, work-life balance snaps into place. I can’t. But what I can offer is being real about what it’s like, balancing between being a leader and a mom: It’s f-ing hard. Work-life balance implies that there’s some sort of ideal state of goodness that can be achieved if one works hard enough. Instead, I’m constantly trading off between taking care of my family and my company.

I leave work at 5 pm so that I can have some time with my daughter before putting her to bed. Some nights, I skip time with my husband to work on Grasshopper, only to have my daughter wake up unexpectedly early the next day. I’ll do my best to feed her, but because I’m so tired, we don’t smile as much together before I head to work. And then I’m less creative when thinking about Grasshopper strategy during the day.

Being a working parent feels like I’m doing a complex ROI analysis on every activity, for work and family. All I can hope is that I’m making the right choices along the way, and be humble about the challenges. I hope that being honest about the challenge gives the working parents reading this post permission to celebrate all the amazing daily compromises you make. And if you’re reading this and aren’t a parent, but work with folks who are, maybe think about telling them how great a job you think they’re doing in both their roles.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks so much for reading! Hope you’ve found some of the lessons valuable, and hope to be back to the freeCodeCamp blog soon to share some more insights from Grasshopper. And if you’re looking for a way to get started on your coding journey, download Grasshopper. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

I also write and tweet about diversity and inclusion topics. To follow me, here’s my Twitter and my blog.

Over the past two years since I became a Tech Lead at Wix, I’ve come across questions on how I got this role. I must be honest and say that I wasn’t actively looking for it, but looking back I would like to share a few tips for developers who want to become Tech Lead.

I think the role of tech lead is hard to define and differs between people.
For me it’s mainly about mentoring: helping the engineers on the team improve. This means helping them with their design, code reviewing, and teaching them the best way to communicate with other teams and make an impression.

When I started in the industry, the only career path I knew was management. Today it’s already clear that management is a different role than it used to be, and you can also advance by becoming a Tech Lead or an Architect.

Becoming a tech leader

I think the keys to becoming a good tech lead is asking questions and expanding your knowledge while being friendly and socially aware. Here are my top tips:

Really understand what you’re working on.

Fully understand the product requirements, the design of your system and the different technologies you use. Even if you weren’t part of the decision making, ask the questions: why were specific technologies chosen? Why was this design preferred?

Know all parts of the system, including the parts other people are working on. You don’t need to read every commit done. But you do need to know what your peers are working on and what their part of the system does.

Say what’s on your mind.

It’s harder for shy people to learn and become leaders. You have to always sit at the table at meetings and make your opinion heard. Try and be involved in conversations.

Challenge decisions made by other people, and don’t be afraid to ask architects or tech leads why they made a specific choice. Successful people welcome the debate and are always happy to explain their choices.

Technical people can and should challenge product decisions. You should always have the customers in mind and make sure that what you’re working on gives them value.

When you see something wrong — get it fixed.

Don’t stand by when you think a mistake is being made. Politely inform the person in charge and ask what they think about it. You might find that you are wrong, but a lot of times you will help fix a problem. If the responsible person doesn’t have the time to fix it, you can offer to contribute your time. This way you can learn another area of the code and you will be appreciated for being a team player.

I had a few times where I integrated with other projects and didn’t think their design was right. I told them I didn’t fully understand why they chose this design and asked them to explain it to me. Most times it made sense after they explained, because I wasn’t fully aware of all the limitations and concerns. However, a few times I managed to help by highlighting concerns they weren’t aware of.

Even if your concern is wrong it’s good to raise it: You will get better at understanding design and concerns and your opinions will be valued.

Volunteer for extra work when you can.

Every once in a while an opportunity will come to volunteer for some side project or some other task. Be the person that volunteers, even if you’re not sure you can do the task. This is the way to grow, you will learn your missing capabilities and maybe get the opportunity to work with people you don’t know yet.

A few examples we have at Wix:

• Be in charge of weekly lectures organized for the backend engineers,
• Make sure Post mortems are created and shared for production issues,
• GDPR integration across the company.

I personally volunteered to help engineers that write talks for conferences, as it gave me the opportunity to work with different engineers I don’t usually interact with.

Volunteer for extra work

Invest in making connections.

Some people refer to coffee breaks as a waste of time, but I think they are crucial. When you meet people and create a social connection you create a relationship that will help you in the future.

As human beings, we’re much happier to help our friends. The more friends and connections you have, the faster you can get help when you need it. This helps integration projects go more smoothly if you know the people you’re integrating with.

This is also a great opportunity to step into conversations other developers are having about their design. You might hear about new opportunities that can advance your career. The more people know you, the more opportunities you will get.

Last week I overheard a conversation by engineers I didn’t know and realised that they are unaware of a product I was working on. So I joined in politely and was able to save them lot’s of time while make new connections.

Invest in making connections

Seize opportunities.

Opportunities will come your way, either inside your company or from companies that wish to hire you.

When a good opportunity comes by you should grab it. Don’t let your imposter syndrome deny you a great advancement. You have to believe that if you were offered the chance — you can make it. There might be a learning curve but learning new skills is how we grow.

If you hear of a good opportunity you like and weren’t offered, ask if you can have it. You might get a negative answer, but there is always a chance you will get a positive one.

My first position as a tech lead was offered to me by a project that was going through a big rewrite and thought I could help. It was a big job but I seized this opportunity. I opened many doors for me for other tech lead roles in the company.

Seize opportunities

Becoming a leader is about taking initiative and showing your peers and your managers your capabilities.

Becoming a Tech leader involves all of the above and having a deep understanding of technology and design.

If you play the part of a tech leader in your current role you will become one. Believe in yourself and your capabilities and you’ll succeed.

You’re welcome to follow me on twitter :) Thank you for reading!

As programmers, we do a lot more everyday besides writing amazing code.

Yes, coding is what the majority of us love to do the most and what people associate us with the most. But there are various other skills involved in being a great programmer.

Below are some of these skills I think we sometimes fail to acknowledge. They are worth nurturing further to become a better programmer and also a better person.

Reading

We read daily.

Be it a fellow programmer's code, (sometimes bamboozling) documentations, blogs, forums or Jon Skeet facts on StackOverflow, we read constantly.

The more we read, the more we know about a technology, a framework, or others’ views and experiences concerning said technologies and frameworks.

The day we stop reading, we risk becoming obsolete. That is how fast the field of technology moves. The best way to do something today may not be the best tomorrow.

Hence, the more we read, the better we become.

It is really important for me to read others’ code and have an opinion on that in order to understand what good code looks like. That is how I can write better code or suggest improvements to the code that I inherit.

• Burhanuddin Rashid

Writing

We write a lot of non-code content in our projects. This includes beautiful documentation, comments, and commit messages. Some of us enjoy spending our time writing blogs.

Having good writing skills in our documentation and comments makes our code easier to understand, debug, and maintain. A good commit message can help save hours in the future when you want to identify what exactly changed in your code base.

Writing non-code content does not come naturally to all of us. Feedback and motivation from peers helps a lot.

We ask for feedback, we work on it, and we improve. And if we don’t always ask, just go ahead and give us the feedback compassionately anyways, we would value it the most.

I think when you write blogs, you want it to be perfect because a lot of audience is going read that, so you learn more and more. Also second thing is I always believe writing things down helps you never forget them.

• Manjula Dube

Listening

We listen and translate constantly. We constantly convert non-tech feature requirements into tech solutions.

When we hear “Add a button to do X”, we think of the various implications that change could have, the code involved, the things it could break as well as the user experience.

We care about our users as much as everyone else on the team.

A supposedly simple requirement could get us thinking for hours. We listen and ask questions. Debate a feature’s value. We do not want to miss out on any details, as fixing missed requirements later becomes very frustrating and expensive for us.

Listening is a very basic and one of the most important skills any Developer should have. The easiest way to understand the requirement is by “empathizing”. Put yourself in the shoes of the client or the end-users and look at things from their perspective. Ask yourself questions like:
• How does it solve the problem?
• Is it intuitive enough?

• Sanket Sahu

Communicating

In my opinion, ease of communication defines the success of an organization. How easily different stakeholders on a team can communicate to one another dictates the chances of us reaching our goals successfully.

We have ideas. We like to share them. The easier the communication channels are, the easier it is to share ideas, know what is expected of us, and contribute to the commonly aligned goal.

If communication is difficult around us, it becomes a red-flag and makes things difficult for a lot of us.

As a developer, it is important to communicate compassionately with your design team. Once you receive designs, and you have feedback, ask the designers “What was the thought behind this?”, “Is this what the user wants?” Asking the why rather than saying “.. these could be better”, helps establish effective communication and ensures your feedback is well-received.

• Faiz Malkani

Prioritizing

We are constantly giving tasks priority scores.

Should I work on this feature or that? What would help me? What would help my team? What would help the users? Would someone else write this better? Should I try to write a perfect solution from the get-go or write something that works now and then refactor it to make it better before I ship?

Prioritizing tasks well can help us deliver better and reduce wasted efforts on redundant tasks.

Priority is important as there is always room for improvement in development and there are many features to add and many issues to solve. If we do not prioritize, the project will be never ending. I mostly prioritize things “time taken, impact, end result, effort, value to user, value to business”

• Amit Shekhar

Camaraderie

We are great team players.

Software usually involves a large number of people from different teams. Each release involves efforts from backend, frontend, API, designers, product managers and testers, among others. A bug in the backend system is not a backend error, but a team bug. We all take collective responsibility for it and help solve it.

The more we think and work as a team, more successful all of us are individually.

Within a team, team work helps in getting the work done at a faster pace as we are aware of strength and weaknesses of each member. Just like in a game of cricket, knowing the strengths of your players helps identify which bowler should bowl to which batsman, enhances your chances to win the game.

• Nikhil Thakkar

Mentoring

Many of us are self-taught and are constantly learning.

We may not know the best way to do something from day one. Hence we look for mentors. Mentors help us identify mistakes early on, cultivate the right mindset and become more confident.

As our confidence grows, we start trying new things. We sometimes make mistakes, learn from them, and share our learning with the world. This is when we start being mentors to someone else.

Mentoring, in my opinion, is more like BitTorrent. You have pieces of the whole, no one person has everything, and you’re always sharing what you have with others who don’t, even if you have 1% of the file.

• Aniket Kadam

Community contributions

As we grow, we start understanding the extremely important role the community plays in our growth and start contributing back to the community openheartedly.

We start looking for local meetups, conferences and open source projects we can contribute to. We give away our most important talent for free, for the growth of the community. Be it through giving talks, attending talks, supporting speakers, organizing meetups, writing blogs, open sourcing stuff, improving existing open source stuff, etc we do our part in the community.

We are the community and play a vital role in its growth.

Did I miss a skill? Want to discuss any of the skills in more detail? Want to share a personal story related to one of these skills? Should this be a part of an education curriculum? Comment below or connect with me on Twitter!

How could you go from almost no traction and running out of money, to getting millions of visitors to your website?

You could do like Crew accidentally did with Unsplash. Create an open source side project that directs millions of visitors to your paid product.

At the beginning, when they were starting a marketplace for freelancers, Crew couldn’t find a good photo for the homepage of their website. So they hired a photographer (what they found online was either too crappy, or too expensive).

Once they did the photo shoot, they had a ton of leftovers. So they chose 10 pictures and put them up on a Tumblr blog for others to download for free — “10 free photos every 10 days”.

And from the moment Unsplash/Crew promoted their 10 pictures on a humble Tumblr blog on HackerNews, they’ve been getting millions of visitors and redirecting thousands of new customers to Crew’s marketplace, ultimately saving their business.

[With Unsplash] We kept having this huge growth curve for the amount of effort that we were putting in, while on Crew, we had a full team and we were trying to get growth and it was a real battle. Eventually, we hit a million downloads within that first year, and that was our mark that this was really not slowing down - Mikael Cho, Founder of Crew and Unsplash

That’s just an incredible return on investment for a few unused pictures that were going to gather dust in a hard drive.

That’s why today I’m going to show you some of the tactics Unsplash used to grow and sell Crew, their freelance marketplace, and grow their photography platform to 1 billion photos viewed per month with over 300,000 free high-resolution photos and 50,000+ contributors.

1. Take your “unused” creations to untap unreachable distribution channels

Unsplash had unused photos from a photo shoot for their website. And they had three choices. They could forget about them. They could try to sell them on a stock photo website. Or they could just give them away.

And giving them away has proven to be a far better idea than just keeping them for themselves or trying to sell them on a stock photo platform.

Recently, a team of researchers found that the most shared articles from the New York Times were ones that gave readers practical utility. Giving someone something useful tends to have the biggest impact on people. When you pair two powerful things like giving and photography, you reach a whole new level of impact.

To start doing this, you can use simple and free tools like WordPress.

Unsplash started on a $19 Tumblr blog to post its free photos. Once it really got traction and attracted customers and cash, it made sense to spend some time and money on building a proper platform to host Unsplash.

We believed the good from giving our images away would far outweigh what we could earn if we required payment or credit. This proved true. By setting our images free, Unsplash turned into something much more meaningful than the hundreds of dollars we likely would have made selling them. Those first 10 photos photos have been seen 58 million times. Unsplash has become a community of over 20 million creators. People from all over the world have generously contributed over 250,000 photos, moving hundreds of millions of creative acts forward - Mikael Cho.

Unsplash photos have not only helped designers and entrepreneurs create demos and websites, but have been a source of inspiration for everyone from teachers to nonprofits to independent creators.

_A few things [made with Unsplash](https://madewith.unsplash.com/" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

If you are a designer or content creator — whether it’s code, recipes, agriculture, film editing, graphic design, photography, fashion, electronic hardware, material design, cars, planes, robots, or whatever — and it’s hard to get distribution for your work, there is a place for your open sourced ideas, especially if you share quality content and design.

Unsplash, Github, Instructables, Arduino, Adafruit, OS Vehicle (Now Open Motors), Local Motors, Wikihouse or Opendesk’s successes are a testament to that.

When two-time #1 New York Times best-selling author Tim Ferriss was blocked from distributing his book in Barnes & Noble, he uploaded excerpts from his book for free on BitTorrent to get distribution. Writer Leo Babauta “Uncopyrighted” everything on his popular blog, Zen Habits, in service of spreading his work further than he ever could alone. Chance the Rapper became the first artist to win a Grammy without selling physical copies of his album and giving most of his music away for free - Mikael Cho

You share something for free and attract an audience and contributors, which in turns attracts an even bigger audience and inspires even more contributors to create and contribute.

70% of people who download images from Unsplash are people who have never downloaded anything from a stock photo site before. And the same applies to any other industry. 70% of people who will download new copyright-free content will be people who are currently not buying anything from that industry anyway, but who could in turn become creators, remixers, and promoters.

It’s fair to imagine that if you share your designs in open source and invite other to share as well, you could be untapping a whole new audience who would have never have had access to your kind of work and help you build and promote it.

Takeaways:

• Make a list of all of the unused content you have created
• Share this content in open source on a WordPress, Dropbox or whatever free tool you can find. Make sure of three things. Firstly, the content you’re sharing should not be widely available elsewhere. Secondly, people should find the content really useful even though it’s free and be motivated to contribute to its creation. Thirdly, the content should be so useful that people would be ready to pay for it.
• Open and publish 1 to 10 ideas per month. For example, 1 to 10 photos or designs per month.
• And offer people to subscribe to your newsletter to get more open ideas each month so that you can keep growing your audience.

2. Find an audience who would pay for your open source project, and give it away freely

Don’t go to where your open source audience is. Instead, go to where people are already paying for the kind of open source content you are already sharing.

A mistake I see many people make, and that I also made myself in the beginning, is to share your work with other peers because they will understand what you’re making. Many developers join other developer events or LinkedIn Groups, instead of going to events or groups where nobody does what they do.

Beware, your peers know how to do what you do, so they might be interested in your open source content, but they won’t pay you for whatever other service you offer.

So you should look for people who will pay for your services. And if you are a non-profit, this would be people ready to push the donate button.

Nothing beats free. So whatever people have been paying for, they’ll be delighted to get it for free. Which should drive tons of traffic and attention to your open source project, but also to your paying products.

In Unsplash’s case, they didn’t go to photographers at first. They went to Hacker News to share their free photos, a website that gathers a community of entrepreneurs and computer science enthusiasts.

We put that up on Hackernews, and within a few hours, it went to number one. The site started crashing because we had public Dropbox links. The head of engineering at Dropbox happened to look at the Hackernews post and said that they’d upgrade us to the maximum pro plan for the day. They’re not supposed to be used for public Dropbox links, but he said they’d keep the site up because they think it’s cool. And that was day one of Unsplash - Mikael Cho

Cho knew his audience was looking for free and beautiful photographs for their websites. And they are often hard to find even on Flickr, or even in stock photography websites. So Unsplash was a really good fit.

And on top of that, an audience of entrepreneurs could also be interested in hiring other developers, freelancers and designers on their Crew website, creating a virtuous circle for their business.

Here are some other examples of open source projects’ paying audience and peers:

Takeaways:

• Make a list of the kind of people who already pay for the content you’re offering in open source
• Then list the websites or events where these people go to regularly
• Promote your open source content in these websites and events. For example, Unsplash went to Hacker News, VentureBeat, Digital Trends, Lifehacker, and Tech Vibes, where it knew many developers are looking for free and beautiful photographs people couldn’t find on Flickr.

3. Direct traffic to your service or product page with your open source project

Once Unsplash got people coming to their platform, they just had to add a link to Crew to attract new clients to hire freelancers from their marketplace.

_Source: [https://unsplash.com/@samuelzeller](https://unsplash.com/@samuelzeller" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

This simple link in Unsplash has attracted over 5 million visitors to Crew. From mobile and web designers and developers willing to offer their services on Crew, to paying customers interested in hiring their freelancers to get custom websites or apps made.

But Unsplash doesn’t only benefit Crew. Any photographer contributing images can add a link to his own business and benefit from Unsplash’s traffic.

_Source: [https://unsplash.com/@samuelzeller](https://unsplash.com/@samuelzeller" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

In Fact, by uploading 460 images, Samuel Zeller has gotten over 255 million views and over 1.7 million downloads of his images.

That’s how his first client, the biggest banks in Switzerland, found him and gave him 4 projects when he started as a freelancer in 2016.

The reason why they reached out to him? They were already using a few of his Unsplash images in their global database and wanted more in the same style.

Takeaways:

• Use your open source project to link to and promote a paying service. For example, Unsplash used to link to Crew’s Marketplace. Adafruits tutorials links to their e-commerce products, WordPress links to their affiliate hosting partners, and so on.
• Give contributors a place where they can promote their own profiles and services.

4. Create a win-win relationship with your creators of free content

Once you’ve found people willing to pay for your services and download your open source content, it’s time to invite your peers to contribute.

This will make your open content more valuable, and will also attract an audience your contributors want to reach.

At the beginning, photographers could post ten photos every ten days on Unsplash if they had been approved. And that’s really when Unsplash took off to another level.

Unsplash could compel photographers to give their pictures for free by showing them that giving content sitting in their hard-drives could help them create an audience for themselves.

Some other benefits they could get for contributing are:

• To direct unprecedented amounts of exposure that created a lot of site traffic
• To get client referrals
• To use it as social proof (a photographer can tell his clients that his pictures have had thousands of views and downloads on Unsplash)
• To practice their craft
• To use photos to build an audience they can direct toward making a living.
• Or trying to truly give back to the community.

In fact, photographers have themselves reported getting client work booked after posting just a couple of photos. Others have been flown around the world on photoshoots. Some have gotten enough work to leave their jobs and become full-time photographers. Some have been able to build audiences for new products. And every contributor Unsplash spoke to has enjoyed the impact their photography has made toward moving creativity forward.

Today, a photo featured on Unsplash is seen more than a photo on any other platform. More than on Instagram. More than on the front page of the New York Times.

_[Source](https://twitter.com/ugmonk/status/870260821678592001/photo/1" rel="noopener" target="blank" title=")

Photographers no longer need to come with an audience or have an agent to be great. Unsplash brings an audience to them.

As an independent designer myself, I understand you can’t do everything for exposure because exposure doesn’t pay the bills. But to completely dismiss the value of exposure doesn’t make sense either.

All artists need an audience to survive. Why do we spend time posting on Instagram if we don’t get paid for it? Because those posts build an audience over time.

In the last ten years, several platforms like YouTube, iPhone, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, and Medium have enabled more and more of us to express and connect. Sometimes, this expression and connection is done for fun. For nothing but the purpose of creating. Other times it’s done to create an audience for something else. Filmmakers distribute trailers for free on YouTube to sell a movie. Musicians release free songs or entire albums on SoundCloud to sell concert tickets. Authors give free chapters and pour thousands of unpaid hours into blogs to sell a book.

New open source platforms don’t kill industries. They change the distribution - Mikael Cho

Open Source platforms can open up an opportunity for so many people to share their craft with huge audiences instantly. New platforms create a distribution channel and community we otherwise wouldn’t have. In this sense, there’s never been a better time to be a creator.

Takeaway:

• Make a list of places, websites and events where your peers are hanging out
• List and explain to contributors the benefits they’ll be getting by contributing their own content (For example, getting site traffic to build their audience, get client referrals, social proof, a way to practice their craft or give back to the community)
• Provide a way for others to contribute their own content as well and curate their content. This could be a simple call to action to send you a contribution by email at the beginning, and after a while you could just create a form from which people can directly post their submissions.
• Curate their contributions to make sure quality is high
• Encourage your community of contributors to use your project to promote their own paying services or websites so they can also benefit from sharing their content in open source. The bigger the incentive to contribute, the more they’ll want to build open source content on top of your platform.

5. Creating other revenue streams for Unsplash’s Future

Now that Crew has been sold to Dribbble, Unsplash became its own entity. Since it can’t rely on Crew to fund its operations anymore, it has to become financially sustainable.

So to find new ways to earn money with a 100% open source company, there are a few ways that Unsplash could be headed foward:

Native advertising:

There’s a lot of really interesting real estate that exists on Unsplash. For example, the way people are using Unsplash today is a lot like Google search except that it’s for images. The plan is to add a native advertising component to Unsplash.

Let’s say someone is searching for shoes and there are these really nice pictures of shoes already on the platform. Let’s say Nike shoes are also on the platform. That way you’d have a native advertising element that’s built into that search.

It’s would still be a high-quality thing. Instead of using crappy banner ads and showing a bunch of advertisements, targeted ads could be displayed. This would add value to Unsplash and would also be a way for Unsplash to make revenue.

Unsplash could also work with contributors to make some of the content, so the photographers who work with a brand and want to get involved with Unsplash could actually make connections.

There’s a whole double benefit that happens. We believe that the best way we can make money is to help others make money - Michael Cho

People searching for these images can in turn embed them in their websites, creating even more advertising for the brand.

Other Open Source projects like Read the Docs are funding their projects with what they call “ethical advertising”.

• They respect users while providing value to advertisers.
• They don’t store personal information about users.
• They only keep track of views and clicks.
• They don’t build a profile of your personality to sell ads against.
• They only show high quality ads from companies that are of interest to developers.
• The products advertised should be interesting to the user.
• The ads won’t flash or move.
• They report that they run the ads they want to have on their site, in a way that makes them feel good.
• And they also give 10% of their ad space to community projects, as a way of saying thanks to the open source community.

Update: Unsplash actually put in place their sponsored banners after this post was written. You can find them in the homepage and in the reminders to credit the photographers you get when you download an image.

Screenshot of Unsplash page with sponsored links to Squarespace

Ad Revenue Sharing for Photo Contributors

Another way Unsplash could make money would be to insert these ethical or native ads and give the ability for contributors to opt into an ad revenue sharing option.

Scott Webb explores this idea:

Could Unsplash work out some kind of algorithm to determine ad revenue for contributors based on their photo views and photo download? Maybe photo likes would be incorporated into the algorithm too.

Whatever the case may be, with highly targeted native advertising built into the site, could a revenue share happen with contributors? Could we see something like we see for content creators on YouTube, but with photos?

I don’t know how it could be technically worked out, but that Unsplash Team is smart or they’ll find the talent to make it happen.

Takeaways:

• Find a simple business model to fund your open source operations.
• If you don’t know how or where to start, to find out how to make money with Open Source, go to this post from the great Lars Zimmermann. See which model suits your project best, and get creative.

Conclusion

Unsplash has become a key player in the digital photography industry. You can do something similar by being the one to disrupt an industry yourself. Gather your community and benefit your industry.

Here are the 5 key takeaways you can borrow, modify, and adopt for your own business based on Unplash’s real-life marketing tactics:

1. Leverage unused content you have created. Share it on a free platform like WordPress or Dropbox and publish every month 1 to 10 new ideas or designs. Invite people to subscribe to your newsletter to keep growing your audience
2. Find those people who are already paying for what you are offering for free.
3. Once you know where they are, promote your open source content in the websites and events where they hang out. Don’t forget to put a link to your paying project in your open source content.
4. Make it a no-brainer for people to contribute. Give contributors a page where they can promote their own profiles and services, list the benefits they get for contributing, and invite them to your project.
5. Find a simple way to get paid for your open source operations. See which model suits your project best, and get creative.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Cem-Marvin von Hagen on Unsplash

Originally published at boldandopen.com on June 7, 2018.