The world has too many cheesy-looking stock photos, and the world has too many stock photography platforms. That is for sure!
Getty, iStock, Shutterstock, Stocksy, Fotolia, Crestock, 123RF, Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels and I could keep on going. Millions and millions of photos, videos and icons can be downloaded online, and there are just as many license terms and limitations to understand. And the images are too picture-perfect looking and cliché-like.
If you want to experience the opposite of simple, just try typing in the word ‘marketing’ on one of the big image-platforms, and you get more than 15,000,000 search results. But is that really, what we want, or what we need?
Spotify: The difference between digitalization and transformation
When Anders Thiim and I founded JumpStory in the Summer of 2018, we wanted to totally change, how the world of stock images works. No more dull, boring, cliché-looking or overused images, more complex license terms, and no more search-experiences like on Altavista 20 years ago.
The visual industry didn’t need another company trying to make image-selling digital.
It’s not really difficult to digitalize things, but it’s hard to transform or disrupt them.
Just think about how people started by putting encyclopedias online as PDFs.It was digitilization, but it sucked! We know It didn’t make the world better or easier. It just turned something physical into something digital, whereas Wikipedia truly disrupted, how a multilingual online encyclopedia could be created and maintained as an open collaboration project.
When you transform or even disrupt things, you often start by breaking all the rules of what can and can’t be done. It’s really an exercise in transforming your own way of thinking more than it’s about the actual products to begin with.
Afterwards you see things more clearly. They appear to you simple and pure. Just like our Swedish neighbours (JumpStory is a Danish company) Spotify did, when they transformed the music industry many years ago.
Daniel Ek and his visionary colleagues at Spotify managed to totally change the user experience. So it wasn’t just a matter of putting a lot of music online, but to re-invent the way that we search and get inspired by music. Napster might have disrupted the industry some years before, but it was Ek and his team that (unlike Napster) managed to transform the online music world into something better and more sustainable on the long term.
Spotify were and are brilliant – not because they make music digital, but because they create true value by constantly measuring and understanding, how we actually like to listen to music.
They quickly realised that the more they succeeded in inspiring people to listen more, the better their product worked, and the better their business became.
JumpStory: Simplexity is the key of everything that we do
The same transformation of an industry hasn’t taken place in ‘our’ industry yet, but it’s about to happen, and JumpStory is leading the way.
At JumpStory our North Star Metrics are all about delivering authentic images with high impact rather than just images. We constantly measure on the number of successful images searches (where a user actually downloads an image) and on the results that they generate afterwards. These metrics justify the need for JumpStory.
In addition to this, we build everything based on our MANTRA of ‘Simplexity’. This means that we use complex technologies like machine learning; deep learning etc. to deliver as simple user experiences as possible for the marketers & integrations partners that we work with. After all – the world is already complex enough, as it is, right?
One example of this simplexity mindset is our
‘one click’-philosophy
that we develop everything based on, and currently this has resulted in features such as:
- Removing the background on photos & videos with one click
- Optimizing big-size images to be used online with one click
- Tagging and having your images made searchable with one click.
How a vision turned into reality at the speed of light
Sometimes Anders and I have to leave the office and go somewhere quiet and peaceful to really grasp, how fast things have moved, since we came up with our vision less than four years ago.
Today JumpStory has achieved milestones such as:
- Thousands of happy customers in 150 countries
- Major integrations with partners like APSIS and SEMrush
- An amazing & international team from many different countries
- Millions in funding.
We always believed in our vision, but believing is one thing. Executing on it is another!
Especially considering that we’re challenging an industry dominated by billion dollar companies from the US (Adobe, Getty, Shutterstock etc). From our humble offices in a suburb to a city named Aarhus (that none of our international customers have ever heard of) in a country named Denmark in Scandinavia (that at least most of our customers have heard of!).
From Algeria to Argentina, from Australia to Azerbaijan, digital marketers are using JumpStory to find REAL, HUMAN and AUTHENTIC images for their marketing. Images that are – by the way – performing up to 80% better than traditional stock images.
Using AI to make the world more HUMAN
As I write this article in the Summer of 2022, our vision is turning into reality. We’ve created an authentic and simple alternative to the complex and articifial world of stock photos, and thousands & thousands of marketers are using us every day. Why? Because we’re doing something that may seem like a contradiction, but is actually working: Using AI to make the world more HUMAN!
We’ve named it Authentic Intelligence.
At JumpStory we don’t like to have secrets. We put everything out there in the open.
Because we don’t like to have secrets, let me explain to you exactly, how we use machine learning to make the image industry more human:
- We start by sourcing from more than 500 million images created by 100.000’s of amazing photographers and film-makers from around the world.
- Then we use machine learning to automatically remove images that don’t look authentic. This saves you the frustration of having to browse through millions of cliché and artificial looking images.
- Afterwards we use neuro-marketing to score all images and further reduce the library to only contain high-performing images of real people & real emotions.
- To make your life even easier, we build integrations for you to access these high-performing images in the products and platforms, where you already work.
If you would like to understand this technology at a deeper level, I did a presentation for 3000 entrepreneurs and marketers at a major tech-event in Europe a while back. Long before COVID stopped all of these amazing events from taking place.
Dhiraj Mukherjee, founder of Shazam (500 million downloads app), wrote the following on Twitter afterwards:
“Questions are more important than answers. It was a fabulous talk from Jonathan Low about curiosity, imagination and the power of young people.”
If you want to see the presentation, here it is ..
If you want to know more about JumpStory; connect with me/us; work at our startup etc., please do reach out! Leave a comment on LinkedIn or even better write me directly on jl@jumpstory.com
Thank you so much for your time and interest in what we do!
Finally: Some facts about our product – what we have to offer …
- 80% better image-performance results compared with our competitors
- Super fast & intelligent AI-search
- Photo editor, archive, background removal AI and other smart image-tools included
- Unlimited downloads & commercial license
- Millions of images to choose from (photos, videos, icons, vectors, illustrations)
- Flat rate – just 16 USD/month
- Global insurance
- A WordPress plugin.
