1,000,000+ views/month in just 11 months
by Viktor HanacekFirst 1M month in pageviews 🙌🏻 Thanks to a tons of features and mentions in magazines like Entrepreneur, The Next Web, Designmodo, Lifehacker, Buffer Blog, WebDesignerDepot, Forbes, Smashing Magazine, INC, TechCrunch and more.
All this in just 11 months. Thank you 🙏🏻
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Hi Viktor, congrats! How do you fund hosting / time spent on development?
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Hey, thanks for your comment! Yes, hosting a website like this is quite difficult because we serve about 1 TB of data every week (6 TB in last 30 days). So I'm renting a dedicated server here in my country (Czechia) and also have a free Cloudflare plan (this is very important).
After some negotiations, and after a lot of money spent in the past, I'm paying about $250/month for the server now.
I paid everything with my own savings, but it was super easy to run it in early days:
- the whole website is powered by Wordpress and running on my own template (even today it's still running on Wordpress on my own template)
- no newsletter emails = free Mailchimp plan
- no big traffic = cheap shared hosting
- I'm using Gumroad by @sahil to run PREMIUM Membership = almost free + no development
Simply, it's profitable since day one.
But a very expensive part was newsletter — with 200,000+ subscribers I was spending around $900/month or $10,000/year (!!!). I will publish another milestone about it, so follow the product if you want to read more (I deleted half of the list ;)).
And there are AdSense ads since January 2014, then with very nice numbers.
Another thing is my own personal expenses (rent, tax, food, powerful macbook, camera gear, traveling, software, car, ...) so it's very easy to go into negative numbers.
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Use sendy as your newsletter. You will spend less than $100 a month on email if you send multiple emails (10 newsletters) a month.
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Like Yemi said, you should definitely check out Sendy (https://sendy.co/)! Its not as polished as other hosted offerings like Mailchimp, but it super cheap because it uses SES. The only downside is you have to host it yourself.
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As an early user back then, I remembered I was thinking as the name suggests that PicJumbo must offer big beautiful high resolution stock photos. And indeed thats what we got. Thank you!
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That's perfect, great to hear that! 😍😍😍
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Hi Viktor, these posts from early days of picjumbo are very inspiring! I'm starting out with a similiar project (stock animated gifs). Your knowledge and experience is super valuable for me. Thanks for sharing 🙏
Greetings from a neighbour (Poland) 👋 -
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Woohoo awesome work Viktor! Looove the photos you've curated. Congratulations!
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Thank you so much! 🙌🏻
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Hi Viktor, great story! One thing I always think is why isn’t there a high quality video stock website? Like Unsplash for video or a vidjumbo? Seems like an obvious next move but no one really dominates and the ones that do are all pretty crappy. Any ideas why no good one yet?
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There's pexels video, pixabay, coverr and mixkit.
Last one is the highest quality. It has started lately so it's not as big as others. -
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Very good question! To be honest I wanted to create this project. I named it Motiohype and I even have a logo for it on my Dribbble. But it was very hard to keep focus on quality. It was hard to take a photo AND not forget to take a video and vice versa (mostly when traveling). I realized that I have to focus only on one thing if I want to make it sucessful.
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Ah ok! Makes sense. Yes I’ve always thought there must be something more difficult to it because I think there would be big demand for video but no website seems to have done it well yet.
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Congrats Viktor! Quick question:
When you first started, how were you populating content on the site, with free stock photos? Were you web scraping or giving some incentives to users to upload photos?
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Thanks! I'm an author of almost all photos on picjumbo :)
I'm still not sure about allowing other authors to publish on the website. Almost every month I'm reporting MY OWN stock photos published on other paid and free stock photo sites.
I want picjumbo to be 100% safe source of free photos.
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That is great, congrats! Is there any links where we could read your story building it?
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Thank you! :) I only have about the author page on picjumbo: https://picjumbo.com/about-viktor-hanacek
Fun fact: I had to change the button from ‘Download’ to ‘FREE Download’. People simply didn’t believe that the pictures are actually free 🎉
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Alright, thanks for sharing!
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This is an amazing milestone! Congratulations!!
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Thank you! 🙌🏻
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That's awesome. Congrats Viktor.
Can you share some of the features and also share any strategy you've got?
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Hey Harry, thank you! I started it at a good time because all these big magazines started writing about best free stock photo sites months after I started my website.
Simply go to google and copy & paste "free stock photo sites" — I bet you'll find picjumbo via magazines/blogs on the 1st page.
The biggest impact has Entrepreneur magazine with their post about best free stock photo sites. Around 238,000 users visited picjumbo from this post.
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What's been your strategy for getting press? Are you pitching these places or are they just writing about you on their own?
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Hey Courtland, thanks for your comment. I started it at a good time because all these big magazines started writing about best free stock photo sites on their own months after I started my website.
To be honest, I think there is almost no chance for solopreneur to start a new popular free stock photo site because we all "benefit" from these old blog posts and articles (thousands of backlinks etc.).
At least it would be very hard...
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Hi, congrats. If possible can you share the specs of your servers
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Thanks Washie!
Intel Xeon E3 1230 v3, 3,3 GHz, 4 cores, 8 threads
16GB RAM (+ free upgrade to 32GB if needed)
480 GB SSD + RAID1
1x IPv4 adressIt's from my order email back in 2016, so I don't know if there were any changes since then.
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Great milestone Viktor, congrats!
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Thank you! 🙌🏻
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