Snappa

Christopher Gimmer

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Snappa is a Canadian graphic design tool company. The company was founded in 2015 by Christopher Gimmer and is based in Ottawa.

Snappa makes it easy to create any type of online graphic. Create & publish images for social media, blogs, ads, and more!

Company History

Christopher Gimmer details the beginnings of their company in their Starter Story interview: (source)

Q: How did you get started on Snappa?

I started off my career in finance working for the federal government. Then in 2010, I took a trip to southeast Asia that changed my life. Towards the end of the trip, I dreaded the thought of going back to the office and I no longer wanted to do work that I didn’t enjoy. That’s when I first started thinking about starting a business that would give me more freedom and meaning in my life.

A few years later I met Marc (now my co-founder) at work. After we became friends, I found out that he knew how to code and he was dabbling in some side projects. We discussed the idea of starting a business together and we were both pumped to do so.

The first thing we launched was a student dating website called ClassmateCatch. Although we generated 1,000+ signups (mainly through flyers), we had no idea how to scale the business and we didn’t really know what we were doing. The business ultimately failed. That’s when I started reading everything I could about online marketing and how to grow a business.

After learning how to do keyword research, we discovered there was a lot of search volume for Bootstrap themes and Bootstrap templates so we launched a marketplace called BootstrapBay (we’ve since sold it). We managed to grow that site to $10k/month in revenue strictly from SEO and content marketing.

While creating content for BootstrapBay, it was always a huge pain to create images for our blog posts. I wasn’t a designer and my Photoshop skills were lacking. When I looked around to see what other tools were out there, I found that all the graphic design tools were either overly complicated or too basic. I felt like there was a need for a simple, yet powerful graphic design tool geared towards marketers and entrepreneurs like myself.

Fortunately, around this time, I wrote a blog post about where to find free stock photos that went viral and started ranking on the first page of Google. Because of that, we created our own stock photo site called StockSnap.io (we’ve since sold this as well) which started generating a lot of traffic.

Now that we had an audience to market to, we promoted Snappa on StockSnap.io using a simple banner ad and sent this traffic to a landing page where we collected email addresses.

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Once we got a few hundred people opted-in, I sent out a few surveys and did 15-20 customer interview calls to validate the idea. Once we were convinced that Snappa was something people wanted and were willing to pay for, Marc got to work and started building the prototype.

Source (source)

Technology

They use Slack and Trello for their productivity. Ahrefs for their seo.

Company History

Technology

References