Chris Gimmer Turned a Free Photo Site's Visitors into Customers for a Graphics SaaS

Christopher Gimmer, also known as Chris Gimmer, co-founded Snappa, a graphics creation tool for people without professional design skills, with Marc Chouinard. Its main customers are small business owners and marketers who need to create social media posts, blog images, and online ads themselves but struggle to afford a professional designer. Rather than replacing the full range of professional design work, the product focuses on helping them finish everyday promotional images quickly.

The milestone of $1 million in ARR was already documented in Gimmer's post published on March 24, 2020. He said the business had reached US$1 million in annual recurring revenue a little over four years after launch, having grown without outside investment or paid advertising up to that point. Describing it as a milestone first reached in 2021 would therefore be inaccurate, and ARR must also be distinguished from that year's actual reported revenue or the founder's personal net profit.

Starting a Business with a Colleague and Learning Marketing from a First Failure

Gimmer did not start out as a developer or designer. After studying business and commerce at university, he worked as a financial analyst for a government agency. In 2012, he met Marc at work and learned that he built websites on his own time. They started an online business together and later divided their responsibilities, with Marc focusing on development and Gimmer on marketing and customer support.

Their first attempt was ClassmateCatch, a dating site for students. It attracted more than 1,000 users at schools in the Ottawa area, but promotion based on handing out flyers and attending local events was difficult to extend to other cities. Advertising revenue was also insufficient to grow the business, so they closed the service. That experience led Gimmer to study search engine optimization and online marketing in earnest.

In April 2014, they launched BootstrapBay, which sold Bootstrap themes and templates for websites. According to Gimmer's 2020 interview, monthly revenue peaked at around $8,000–$10,000, but the profit left after paying the creators was about $4,000. It produced meaningful income on the side, yet competition with established large marketplaces limited its growth. The two began looking for a software business that would generate recurring revenue.

Gathering Customers First with a Free Photo Site

The starting point for the next business was a blog post introducing free stock photo sites. When the post became popular in communities and search results, they built StockSnap, a free photo site with search and sorting, and launched it in February 2015. They directed visitors to StockSnap by featuring it in their existing popular post, and within a few months it had grown to more than 1 million pageviews a month. That figure does not mean 1 million users or 1 million paying customers.

Around that time, Gimmer was repeatedly frustrated by the process of creating images for his blog. After finding a photo, editing it in Photoshop took considerable time, and he lacked the budget to hire a designer. He felt that existing tools were either too simple or too complicated and saw room between them for a product marketers could use right away.

He did not begin development based solely on his own frustration, however. After asking StockSnap's newsletter subscribers what they used the photos for, he conducted Skype interviews with about 15 people who used them for content and social media work. Rather than asking whether they liked the product idea, he investigated their current workflow, the tools they used, and the problems they encountered when working with designers. Complaints about complicated editing tools and lengthy revision and production processes came up repeatedly.

While Marc developed the product, they promoted a waiting list page on StockSnap. After collecting thousands of email addresses, they released the beta on July 1, 2015. Users liked the built-in free photos and the simple interface but found it difficult to start a design from a blank canvas. That feedback showed them the importance of templates. They defined the essential feature set and decided to start charging once that work was complete.

The official paid launch was on November 23, 2015. They offered beta users who paid in the first week an ongoing 33% discount on their subscription fees and secured 239 paying customers and about $2,000 in MRR. By the end of December, MRR had grown to $4,000, and around five months after launch it reached $10,000. Those early sales were supported by the visitors and prospective customers they had gathered before launch.

Choosing a Narrower Scope than Canva

Snappa did not try to match every Canva feature. In a 2020 interview, Gimmer explained that they focused on online graphics used by small businesses rather than expanding to wedding invitations or birthday cards. Customer interviews also identified a faster, simpler experience as a reason for choosing Snappa, and he used that as a guide for product development.

The actual workflow follows that direction. Users choose image dimensions suited to social media or advertising, place photos and text in a template, and export the result. By providing photo and graphics libraries, resizing, and background removal in one place, the product reduces the effort of switching between several tools to create a single image.

The revenue model combines free use with paid subscriptions. On the official pricing page checked on October 1, 2026, the free plan offers three downloads a month. Pro offers unlimited downloads for $15 when billed monthly, or the equivalent of $10 a month when billed annually. There is also a Team plan for five people, priced at $30 when billed monthly. Occasional image creators can remain on the free plan, while those who produce images regularly have more reason to subscribe.

Turning Product Use Cases into Search Traffic

StockSnap helped with the launch, but it could not sustain growth on its own. When visitor growth stalled around a year after launch, Gimmer believed that cancellations would offset growth unless new traffic increased. Because revenue per customer was modest, he chose to focus on content and search traffic rather than expensive trade shows or events.

The initial content strategy was not right from the start. Gimmer said he wrote about general marketing principles and lead generation because marketers were his customers, but those posts did not lead to many product signups. After examining actual use cases, he narrowed the topics to questions people search for just before creating an image, such as "Twitter header size," and invited readers to try Snappa within those explanatory posts.

They also gave different search pages different roles. Posts explaining suitable image dimensions served people looking for information, "header maker" pages served people ready to work, and template pages served people looking for finished examples. Internal links between related pages helped extend the search benefits gained by informational content to pages where visitors could sign up for the product. Instead of directing every visitor to one main homepage, they created an entry point for each task customers wanted to complete.

The historical statement that they had used no outside investment or paid advertising should not be read as unattended operations or growth without costs. At the time of a June 2020 interview, Snappa had seven full-time team members, including the two co-founders, with developers, designers, marketers, and customer support staff working together. Separate freelance writers also contributed to content production. The growing Snappa was therefore a small company with co-founders and distinct roles, rather than a one-person business built by Gimmer alone.

They did not keep operating their earlier businesses indefinitely either. Gimmer explained that around 80–90% of prospective customers came from StockSnap early in Snappa's launch, but the share dropped to about 10–15% once their own content, search traffic, and word of mouth grew. They sold BootstrapBay and StockSnap. In particular, selling StockSnap let them secure cash, reduce the number of businesses they had to manage, and focus on Snappa.

The Limits of a Subscription Business after Revenue Growth

Growth after $1 million in ARR also needs to be considered. In an April 2026 interview, Gimmer recalled that ARR had risen from around $1 million just before COVID-19 to about $1.5 million during that period and then plateaued. However, in a March 2024 interview, he had already said revenue had fallen below its peak, so the $1.5 million figure should not be quoted as current revenue.

The structural problems he identified were cancellations and limited scope to increase revenue per customer. An inexpensive image tool is easy to subscribe to, but it is also easy to cancel after making the images needed. Even with a Team plan, there was little scope for customers' spending to increase substantially as their businesses grew, leaving an ongoing need to acquire new customers.

Gimmer later started a new business called GoodMetrics, a web analytics tool. In a 2024 interview, he explained that instead of selling Snappa and starting again from scratch, he was maintaining the existing business and investing its profits and accumulated cash in the next product. However, GoodMetrics' official shutdown notice, checked on October 1, 2026, states that the service would remain available to existing customers only through September 30, 2026, after which access to dashboards and tracking would end. His personal project list still marks it as active, but the service's own shutdown notice takes precedence when assessing its current status.

Reading this case as a formula that making a product simpler than its competitors guarantees success is insufficient. Snappa secured a way to reach customers before building the product and established its own customer acquisition channels after launch, but that did not automatically give customers a reason to keep their subscriptions for a long time. Looking at both its success in acquiring early customers and the limits it encountered in long-term subscription retention gives a more accurate understanding of the business's achievements.