Booststrapping for success with Joaquin Cuenca Abela, Freepik Company

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with Joaquin Cuenca Abela, one of the founders of Europe's fast-growing graphics company, Freepik Company.  Based in Spain, Freepik was founded in 2010 by brothers Alejandro and Pablo Blanes, along with their friend Joaquín Cuenca Abela, founder of Panoramio (acquired by Google).

Abela talks about how the company grew from a bootstrapped free online resource for finding graphics to a full-fledged subscription service that recently topped 500,000 subscribers. The company has 400 employees.  In May 2020, the Swedish investment fund EQT acquired a majority stake in Freepik Co., making this operation one of the largest exits in the Spanish market. Freepik Co. also stands out in its immediate geographic area since it is one of the precursors of “Technological Malaga”, the city where it is headquartered

Energize your sales with Shareme.chat, the proven texting platform. 

ShareMe.Chat 
ShareMe.Chat platform uses chat-to-text on your website to keep your customers connected and buying!

Make More with Matt Heslin
Explore strategies to thrive financially, build legacy, and enhance life experiences.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Mediaclip
Mediaclip strives to continuously enhance the user experience while dramatically increasing revenue.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Erin Manning  
Welcome to the dead pixel society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau  
The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Photo Finale, and Advertek printing. Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. And today we're joined by Joaquin Cuenca Abala, the CEO of the Freepik Company coming to us from the south of Spain. Hello, Joaquin. How are you today?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Hello, Gary, how you doing?

Gary Pageau  
I'm doing great. For those of our listeners who aren't familiar with the Freepik Company, can you give us a short explainer of what the company is and when it started and who was involved?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Okay, so I think that the short version is we are on a site of historic images. We were born as a site that was focused on illustrations, and then we started doing icons, photos, presentations. Sure. Okay. So I mean, you can define us maybe by our competitors, you can think on people like Shutterstock, Adobe stock will be like not direct competitors. Okay. And you asked, Where do we come from? We are actually based in South Spain. So we are a bit on outlier there. We were a bootstrap company. And this is because of necessity, like here, there is not that much VC money. One only way to start was to start with our own revenues. Sure. Actually, that's I mean, we actually started the company because we didn't have any revenues. And we had trouble finding illustrations. So we actually we actually started certainly have other people, illustrations we created for us, we were doing websites, and we needed illustrations. And it was it was a hassle to find free illustrations. So that's actually how we started the company.

Gary Pageau  
Well, that's how a lot of successful businesses get started is the founder see a need for their own personal use. And they realize, hey, it's a business. But you personally, you you're not a stranger to the photo industry. Correct. You had an experienced experience before you started this company.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
You're right. You're right. Like a few years before that in that's ancient times, but in in 2005, I actually started photo community. He was Panoramio. So in this side, people share geo located photos. And the idea was to, you know, to, to show the world to other people. The cool thing about Panoramio is that we go the deal with Google. And our photos were directly integrated in Google Maps and Google Earth. And after a few, a few months, actually, Google acquired the company for a while, that was actually the only way to get your photos in Google or Google Maps. So I spent I spent a few years working at Google in Zurich, actually. And then I came back to Spain. I met Alejandro, a co founder in in free big problem. And we started actually a couple of companies. This was not the first one. Sure. And one thing led to the other. Yeah, we are no.

Gary Pageau  
So you were doing websites or something, and you're cute. And then you realize, shoot, there isn't a great place for to get graphics for this. So what was the first iteration of that company? Was it Freepik itself or which one of the of the verticals that you have?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
I was pretty big itself. That was basically it like we were doing websites. One of them is very popular, actually. It's a website about soccer. And we needed illustrations, and we were on a budget. So and we weren't can were kind of

Gary Pageau  
cheap. Sure, yeah, we're a bootstrap, you have to do what you have to do. Right.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
So we were fishing for free illustrations. And, you know, at the end of the day, we had like a collection of like 15 sites, but really free illustrations. And that was it. That was like the whole universe of illustrations. So the first product was, let's just make it easier to consume this content is there right? So we did a search engine just to search on those sites. And we actually made it public because it was easier to make it private. Sure. Yeah. So he was a really, really unexpected. He was, I mean, it started as a weekend project. Yeah, we believe it turned into a one month project, you know how this thing goes. Okay. And then we love though, we actually started to get traffic, which was a nice surprise. So just to stay in there server costs, we, we put some ads there. And, and then, you know, got more and more people it became it became very popular quickly. And then we got an email from Shutterstock. And they asked us to put on a link on our site to their content. So here's the idea, the idea that we started to get a business model there is, people were searching for free content, okay. But there was not that much, you know, the quantity was very limited. And the quality, everything was limited there. So the idea is you were searching for something, and the first row was going to be content by Shutterstock. So you saw something that, you know, that you like, on the premium side, so to say, and you got no results on the free stuff? You know, we're not really people were clicking on the show, they're struggling, we're going to show their stock report in there. So in a way, Shutterstock was our premium site. Okay, sure. You know, yeah. And that's how we started. So you're

Gary Pageau  
more at the at that point, you're more of an aggregator Correct. You're exactly,

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
exactly. We didn't have any capacity to create content or anything like that back then. Or too small.

Gary Pageau  
So then you started placing some ads to kind of build some revenue, then then what was the next step in the evolution of the company? That is, you're obviously not doing that now, you've realized, you know, there's a need for this content. But like you said, probably some of it isn't very good. Or it's basically a way to upsell people. So what what was the next iteration?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
So there we go that, actually, so we started doing that, we became pretty popular. And then one day was one of the sites that we were indexing. He reached out to us, and he said, Hey, guys, I don't want to be there. Please take down my content, again. And it was an issue, because in total, we had 3 million images indexed. And these other side was the owner of 1 million out of the 3 million. So we lost overnight, like 30% of the content, right again. So at this point, you know, what we did was a hack on the number of total images that we had in the PHP code, we actually added up plus 1 million results. So that, you know, people didn't notice that much, right? Yeah. But we weren't, we realized that we were on shaky grounds. Okay, right. So that's when we decided that to own the whole, you know, user experience, and to own our destiny, so to say, we needed to create the content, we needed to be the owner of the content, great. And the unexpected benefit is that we were struggling to improve the user experience on the site. Okay. But at the end of the day, we only had any impact, until the user clicked on the image and went to a third party site, right. And then I was out of our hands, right? And the experience was, was really not great. Okay, those people. You know, those pre sites, they were quite often like spammers, they were, the content was not always legal. So that was near the time, okay. So in general, the experience was not really great.

Gary Pageau  
So when, right because when someone clicked through, they basically were leaving your environment going to another way. So they were actually using this modern attractive interface and basically going to a garage sale.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Exactly. That's exactly. Okay. So when we start to put in our content in the platform, the experience actually became much but it was much more polished, you just click on got it, we're not asking you to where are you sourcing that content from? Oh, at the very beginning, we just started hiring illustrators, and we have absolutely no idea what was the price? What was the you know, the expected quality nothing, the only thing that we got as information is that we got the logs in our search. So we saw like lots of people searching for background Christmas data. And we started asking for this company, right network.

Gary Pageau  
Yeah, because you are getting user feedback saying these this is the type of content people are searching for. Let's create the content people are searching for if for our own use,

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
and exactly and the very beginning it was very, very expensive to produce this content. And as time goes on, you know, we we read to, like faster illustrators people that were able to create this content, cheaper and in less Time, and we are actually hiring some of them. And we're starting to grow. Actually, you know, our hack that worked for us very well is that some of this content, we didn't publish it immediately to something that we did is that we create an illustration or something that was really complex. And we actually got in touch with some bloggers. And we gave them this content for their audience. So for them, it was a very nice gift. It was something that was pretty expensive. They bought it on on their website very naturally, you know, they linked to us saying, okay, thank the freebie for this freebie. Actually, this started to gave us, you know, to this help us improve on SEO? Sure. And with

Gary Pageau  
natural link building back in,

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
it's the right audience. And he was, you know, really good link. And then like, one month later, this content was anyway on our site. So it was a win win. It was a free, like, marketing growth strategy. We didn't had that terminology back then. But you know. So dad already tells you what our channel like our main channel is SEO, we did any any bait campaign. We recently started doing some of that, but really working. Our main channel is still SEO.

Gary Pageau  
So but your model has changed again, we're now you have a subscription version. So right, what was that timeframe? Are we talking about? Are we I mean, you've been in business since what time? And then when did you evolve into creating your own content to again, adding this new model?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
So we started creating our own content three years after we started, roughly, okay. And 40 years after we started, we created our own subscription. Okay, how happen is here in Europe, we have this third type of Germans being squared. Okay. I don't know if that translate to, to the US. Okay.

Gary Pageau  
Yeah. It's universal constant being square.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yeah, exactly. And they're actually Britain square. So what happened is that one of our German visitors, he actually called us on the phone, again, because you could download everything that was more free big, but there was a restriction is that you had to link to us in use it. Right. Right. So yes, this German gentleman, he called us. And he explained his situation it was he wanted to get married, he was gonna get married. And he wanted to use one of our illustrations in his wedding. But it was not proper for the willing to have a design by Fiebig. There, he wanted to report that attribution. And on the phone, I just, you know, you get take it out. I mean, it's very easy. Just click on the layer, delete it. No big issue. There. No, no, but that goes against the terms and conditions. Yeah, I mean, no one cares, just delete it. I mean, it's okay. Who knows? Nice, another guy, you know, I need to sign so it was like, dude, just take it. But he was very insistent. And, you know, we realized that for proper business, you actually cannot do that you cannot just ignore the terms and conditions. So we created a subscription. And the only added value at the beginning was you have exactly the same content. But if your subscriber you're allowed to use it without linking to us, right. Okay.

Gary Pageau  
And how much was that subscription to start with?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
I mean, at the beginning, at the very beginning, it was, it was nothing, but because you need to wait for some months, you know, for it to accumulate, right. Yeah, I think the but, you know, it was it was a very quickly, something important I think the first month was something like 20k You know, but it accumulated very quickly. Yeah. So it was a you know, we started putting a big screen with a little ring every time we made a cell you know, contain tingling very quickly I after two weeks or something like that, we had to take it down because he was too nice. Okay, was really nice.

Gary Pageau  
So then, but it's not free, you didn't stay free. So that then it did not stay free. The subscription?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yeah, no, no, no, but but this description was not free. You had to pay for the subscription. But the thing is that with this subscription, you had access to exactly the same assets. Right? You're just gonna love the rights. What's theirs the license that was different? And then we started adding more value to the to the premium site, we, we selected a fraction of our content. And we made it subscribers only. Yeah, they were beginning we got some complaints like yeah, the best for the subscribers and then and actually was a random, it was completely like 20% of the random from the data collection went to subscribers. And then you know, the next natural step is that once we got like a marketplace, so to say with our content, I mean, let me say that in a different way, once we had like a subscriber user base with our content, we created a marketplace, we allowed like third parties to order content there, and we took out a fraction.

Gary Pageau  
Sure. So which is kind of interesting, because you kind of open that up to how you started. Yes. Right. Because I mean, you were you were playing in other people's content. And now you're you're doing that kind of this way, too. I mean, there's obviously more of a transaction involved in they're opting in, whereas it in your original model, they weren't necessarily opting in? Well, that's kind of interesting. So what percentage or proportion of your catalog is your content versus marketplace? Comment? Do you have any idea how big that is?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yeah, sure. It depends on the content type. We're talking illustrations for those. Okay, so on illustrations, it is roughly like 75% is older people, illustrations 25% or our illustrations are Nikon's. It is more like 50 have a higher proportion. It is a little bit more than 50%. In our side, it's maybe 6060 something, okay? On photos is way more third parties than our own photos. You know, what we found on when we went to new content types, you know, something that we learned is that you have to understand each content type, each content type is different, and needs to be nimble in different way. Right. So the big difference with photos is that you cannot shoot photography for a worldwide audience from here from Malaga. He doesn't want right people, new friend. Coordinators, dear friend, you know how you read everything? Yeah,

Gary Pageau  
like, I noticed, like when I see the stock photo sites, even license plates on cars, you know, the European style is like a rectangle. And in America, it's different. So

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
it doesn't work. You really need to go there, you know, make something local. However, with illustrations, it works pretty well. Yeah. legislations you have some cultural differences. But you can actually, you know, understand them and produce them from a single location. So naturally our model of like, well, we are Team, we make our own illustrations, and we offer them like for free. It worked very well, because we were working with illustrations, I don't think I even think it would have worked with photos.

Gary Pageau  
Okay, so how, so you've got this photography library? That is not to be started, which which has grown? Do you see? I'm just curious about the usage among your among your customers, right? I mean, are they typically come for photos and stay there? Or is there a crossover between the illustrations and the icons and the photos? Because what I'm seeing from from my end is there is this sort of convergence of illustrations, graphics, and photography kind of melding together when people are creating content? Because they're used to doing it on social media, right? They're used to adding stickers and graphics to photos all the time now and that people are expecting to use it. Are you seeing that among your audience?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yes. To some extent, like some of the other users certainly want exactly that. Right? They want to blend together different images. And it doesn't matter if it's a photo and illustration, icon, stickers, whatever, right? And this is part of the audience. Then there's some other part of the audience that is more professional. And it's, you know, when you are actually creating yourself an illustration, it is very useful to use free big because you can download and use different elements that you're gonna modify and blend together into your creation. Right. So that's That's more the, you know, the typical use case in pre pic, rather than more than a content creator is more like a professional illustrator that uses our content. Okay, more, it's very typical to have freelancers that work for other companies. But we do not have that many prosumers. Right. And we are starting now to serve this segment with we big, which is our last tool, which is an online tool where you can access all our catalog, but in free big, it's more like people that want illustrations and they want to work with them. Okay, sellable, different.

Gary Pageau  
Okay. So do you think your, your customers or clients or subscribers are, you know, when they're using a illustration? Their intent is like you said to modify it? Right? They're going to use it as inspiration, use it as an element to something else? Do you see that same behavior? On the photo side? Or do you think people are just saying, I need a great photo of of a beach in Spain? Here it is, and they find it.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
I mean, donated importance is different in photos, people want the photo? Just, I mean, it's it is very difficult to modify substantially a photo without destroying it. Right. Right. So typically, people want the right photo, you know, and either it is or it is not, it is not around with illustrations you have, you can modify it a little bit. So you can work a little bit with that, then then there is some big difference. Just to clarify where much stronger and the illustrations and people mainly come to free to download illustrations, photos for ourselves is it's a fraction of the size, what fraction is something like 20%? Okay, or total downloads is not as big as illustrations.

Gary Pageau  
Right. But what what am I saying? Is that it because there is sort of a crossover there, right? So people already have a Freepik subscription. It certainly is. Something is a value add that they want. So let's talk about subscriptions. You breach, we reached a milestone of how many subscribers?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
We won over half a million subscribers?

Gary Pageau  
And what amount of time?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
What we started getting subscribers. I think it was in 2015. Okay. So it is already close to six, seven years.

Gary Pageau  
So but and you've kind of done it the old fashioned way. Right? In the sense you're trying to grow, you kind of created a business. And you've been growing organically. Like you said, you haven't been out there buying subscribers and doing crazy things. You've just been basically running your business and people are finding it.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We until I think two years ago was when we run our first ad campaign. And for us, it is not a big channel. It is we don't know how to use this channel.

So what are the specific segment or size that you have? Because you know, Freepik is sort of the one that everyone but you also have icons and some of the sort of those sub brands within the Freepik environment? Or how does that how do you structure that?

Well, free big is becoming like our one stop shop little by little it started hosting illustrations. It also hosts our photos. And in host some of our icons, the integration with icons is not that, you know, very good. We had like a different brand for icons, which is flat icon. Yeah. Which is really specialized on icons. And we have a different brand for presentations, like slides slideshow, which is slidable. Okay, it's getting very, very popular. So just to give you some, you know, a rough idea of the the size, typically freebie, it's around 25 million monthly visitors roughly between 25 and 30 year flood icon it's going to be at six, 7 million monthly active users. And it's like to go it's now at 9 million.

Gary Pageau  
So, I would not have expected there were that many people interested in icons that just amazes me.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
I you know, actually we are we are like the first player in the industry. By far in all countries worldwide except in the US. We are actually tied with two or three other players in the US but outside of the US. We have more than double the traffic than any other Yeah.

Gary Pageau  
That's interesting. So what is the path forward? In the sense you've kind of, you know, there's video, there's audio, there's other assets to address this market, you could be approaching D, are you at liberty to talk about where you may be going next?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Sure. Ah, well, we are experimenting a little bit with videos, we started the video site, which is VT fi. But this t like us learning a little bit about, okay. And the other big, bad that we made is we big, which is there are many, many people come in to freebie that want to use our assets, but they do not have the technical skills right for you. Right? So we biggest an online tool that allows you to use everything that there is not yet everything we're talking, build a site.

Gary Pageau  
So how is that different? Cuz I saw that on the site. And to be honest, I was unsure of how different that was from Freepik was we pick so so so what how is how is that different?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
So today, they are pretty different, right? Do they we big has an exclusive set of templates in there like printable illustrations. Okay, you know, to get your it's things are meant to be printed, roughly. Right. And so, and they are specially created for four weeks. So it is still like a tiny, tiny, tiny subset of everything that there is, you know, a challenge that we have is that the things are on freebie, they are not mean to be easily modified. Right? So when we try to translate that to an online tool, we face challenges, like things are not properly done so that you can change it. And we are working on that. So we're working in to make more of the content that we have on free big. Right? And free, biggest more focused on the professional that just wants the content that has tools to use this content like Adobe Illustrator, and he or she is completely comfortable with those tools. And we're big is for those users that are not casual users. Exactly. Guess for users.

Gary Pageau  
So you've got some tools built in there for modifying adjusting fonts and things. So that's it. That's a pretty hot market. Right now. There's a lot of people who are addressing their market, because there are a lot of people are creating content, like you said, for printed purposes, maybe a poster for a school or something like that. And they're not going to fire up Adobe Illustrator, they're just not going to do it. They're not going to have a yes, I think it's addressing an interesting market. 

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
So it is it is growing very quickly. You know, something that we learned over the years is that you need to know your medium. Okay, there are there are many such facilities, and we are still learning what people want there. So where I see a gap in the market is that for, for little companies, it's still difficult to make everything that you need for your business. Sure, here we go Harun style, my wife has a cafe, you know, and she struggles with that, right? Even you have like an easy to use tool to draw things, you actually need so many things and all of them to be consistent. But it's it's still a challenge. So I think there is a gap in the market there. On. And, you know, a strong point that we have is that as we have so much material, we can reuse it very quickly, you know, for different purposes. That's what happened with slides ago. slides go again, it's, we it's let's go a step further that has been very successful in education. Okay, it's an actually, we created so many slides, so many presentations, because we have so much content on ready, you know, on our platform, so people doing those presentation that were just, you know, dragging stuff, turning one after the other presentation. So it was a, you know, a very fast creation process. And the low Slidesgo to just go in 3d or from zero to 9 million monthly active users.

Gary Pageau  
So it seems to me that the constant among all of your evolutions between your different businesses is is really your you're driven by your users. It seems like you're really taking into account what your users are actually doing as opposed to focus grouping it you know, people are telling us this so we're going to build it you're actually reacting to how people are actually interacting with your platform.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yes, I mean, it's let's go we started like that was not universe not our natural next day about another next time Looking at competitors, he will have been going up and going after a video or audio or something like that. And that that's what everybody was doing. Actually, you know, looking at what people use the images for, we realize that many of them uses those images to make presentations. That's why our next step was to build presentations, right? So you know, our rationale was, again, let's make the whole thing so that it is even even closer to the end product. And, you know, you work very well. So we try to stay close to that, like, look more to your customers, rather than to competitors.

Gary Pageau  
So how is your staffing grown? It's been, we started with just you and you and your buddies. And now, how big is your team? And where are they located? Are they all in Spain or

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
not? We are close to 400 people. Most of them are in in malaria. I think we are here. I mean, now with the pandemic

Gary Pageau  
it's hard to tell where people are right 

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Itsis difficult to count them. But I think we are 300 320 people here in Malaga. And then we got like, Around 50 people around Spain. And then outside of Spain, we have like 30 people roughly.

Gary Pageau  
Okay. So you're so you're very, very much, you know, you're not a dispersed company. So how so? How, so what is the company culture there, then, like, if you're if you are kind of concentrated, you're not dispersed around the world? Do you think that's an advantage to your company? To be so close?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
I think so. Yeah. I mean, first of all, we try to respect like employees questions, right, with the pandemic, OSHA people nowadays, they want to work remote, and we are fine with that. Yeah. But, you know, like, being close, has some advantages. We try to use them like, we are kind of luring people a little bit to the offices. So if you want to come Please, come. We, you know, there are different cultures, some, some companies are a little bit more competitive, some companies are a little bit more, let's say family-friendly, and so on. We try to be family-friendly. So sure. More, you know, more than half of our employees, roughly half 52% are females. Women. And I think that, you know, part of that is because we try to be family friend, we ourselves have other families. Sure. And that's part of our culture, right? I don't know, I mean, you have to make that compatible with, you know, having a good growth, because we want to grow when Yeah, we're not the company. But I think that's how it will define it. The reason for that much about that, like how it's our culture is just, it's like this story about a couple of features in and one of them is what is this water thing? It's difficult to explain.

Gary Pageau  
 It's just the environment you're in right back. It's just where we are, it never really occurred to you. Because you like you said you had a prior experience working in Zurich for Google. Right. So you did experience another work environment. When you came back home? You said, Well, we're going to do it here in this in this region, which I guess from what I've heard is, is kind of becoming a burgeoning tech hub a little bit, right?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Well, a little bit. We were part of that. I mean, we are one of the biggest companies here in south of Spain. In a way when we started, it was kind of virgin. Right? It is, for those that do not know, south of Spain has around 8 million people roughly. And there are not that many companies competing for this talent. So now way we got the DC like we both, there was a pool of talent of local talent that we can tap in, and there was not that much competition. Now, Google got in many other companies there. More and more companies going local, which has pros and cons. Okay, I like it, in a sense, like, they are making like salaries higher again. So that has some cons for us. But also some pros because you got more people with more experience, and that's good for the company. And I say generally very happy with the outcome, how things are going.

Gary Pageau  
Well, and you recognize there is there was talent there too. I mean, that was part of that. Yes. I mean,

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
I didn't choose If you're getting Malanga because of the local talent, I did it for personal reasons. Alejandro, which I mean, we didn't put the match for him, but he was the one that actually got the idea. And, you know, we were all together, but he is the guy that in us that thought, first of all, number three big he is, he's born here in Malaga. So it was not a conscious decision to go for Malaga. Because we were going to be able to find so many employees. Exactly. It's just where we where we take it with the pros and cons.

Gary Pageau  
So I mean, you've got, you know, essentially their employees from the region have you had to partner with like, local educational institutions or anything like that, to grow that, that? employee base?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yes, for the artistic side. So we did that for illustrators. Okay, this has been very successful, not just on the tech side. So on the tech side, a little bit, I like we, it's gonna sound weird, but we do that with high schools, there are like many people in high school that spent like three months here, then, and then they go to like, high studies, maybe University, maybe, you know, some other formal studies, and very often they come to they come back to us, you know, like, it is typically a very, a very successful source of employees for us. So we did some of that. But in general, we still do not have a like, very deep approach with university or something. Right?

Gary Pageau  
Yeah. Well, that's, that's good. So where do you see the company going? As it moves out of the pandemic, and the worldwide economy starts recovering? What do you see for the outlook over the next two to three years for your type of business in the future? Sort of the software as a service, graphics business?

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Well, I can tell you where our gaps, Okay, where did you know, for example, something that is non GAAP is items, I mean, do you look at worldwide sources for items, and we kind of dominate, almost worldwide, okay? So these now that, that much room to grow, they're still like, for those who are growing, they're very strongly, and we're like, I think for next year, we expect to double and then we need, you know, we need quite a few doubles to get to the size of something like shoe there's target. And our intention is more to growth, a smart, you know, to, to direct production and purchases of content, to, to cover the gaps in our offer, not go, you know, free willing, not just get everything, just high number of results. We are selecting the content to cover the gaps that we have in our offer, on the course that we have, because we don't think that in the short term, we can compete in total number of results. Right.

Gary Pageau  
So you're being more strategic as opposed to just doing dumps? 

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
Yes, exactly. And then something, you know, I, in my opinion, we have a huge opportunity in in education, it still kind of untapped. And we see that with with the slides go where we're just starting, it has been very well accepted by educators worldwide. And I think there are see, like, so many features that we can add to this product for once. Something that I see on the next couple of years coming is some integration of our offers. So you have week, for example, which is an you know, an online editor, I can see, you know, a short term future in which slides go, which uses Google Slides, you know, they slides go can use our we begetter inside the slides go. Right. And maybe people will like to edit illustrations directly in Freepik and have some other content on Weebly. So, you know, my intention is a little bit to unify a little bit, all the different projects that you know, that we created over the years,

Gary Pageau  
because you are seeing cross pollination on your users. So in some cases, you've got, you know, people who are doing it using illustrations and for them to do edits, they've got to download it and do it in Illustrator or something. And whereas in another another section, they may, they can use a really big editor, right? 

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
And every time they have to switch product, you're you're adding friction

Gary Pageau  
So reducing friction, and being strategic is the future. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much, Joaquin, for spending time with us and sharing your business and your vision and hope you have a great, great week. Thank you so much.

Joaquin Cuenca Abala  
It was my pleasure guy. Thank you very much.

Erin Manning  
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.thedeadpixelssociety.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai