Between David and Allie’s photos and stories, as well as the Death to Stock Photo community, the couple is seeing between 15,000 and 20,000 new subscribers every month. The photos from these trips helped grow their image library while empowering the creative community. They also used their new revenue stream to fund creative adventures like road trips and surfing expeditions. #deathtostockĪ photo posted by Death to Stock on at 6:40pm PST Do you know someone who could use funding? Someone who needs to take an adventure, buy equipment or do the work they dream of doing? Tag them below. We’re taking a percentage from those monthly subscriptions and investing it back into our community. Our premium offering now goes full circle. “It was cobbled together but it allowed us to test the idea without actually building anything.” “Six months in, we tested a premium plan,” says David. David and Allie had given tons of value without asking for anything in return – and their endeavor had reached the point where it was time to find out if their community was willing to support their mission financially. (The site has since been redesigned, but they left the original landing page up since it was so effective.)įriends passed the word along and within six months, 20,000 creatives had joined the movement. To say the idea gained traction is an understatement.ĭavid created an uncomplicated landing page that converted at nearly 50 percent. The duo created a simple email newsletter in order to deliver their photos for free. “We just started emailing people we knew and asked, ‘Are these photos useful to you?'” David says.

Both creatives, they also recognized a trend of expensive and subpar stock photography taking over the web. In July of 2013, photographers David Sherry and Allie Lehman realized they had piles of hard drives full of unused photos that were just sitting around. The product – monthly photo packs for creatives – arrives in the form of a remarkably beautiful email packed with images. Would you treat email differently?ĭeath to the Stock Photo is an email-first startup. Not a tool for selling or a channel for promoting but the actual product that people paid for.

Imagine if your product was an email newsletter.

Evernote stock photo