Freepik Labs, the Freepik Company incubator that is democratizing design
Freepik Company , the tech company from Malaga specialized in producing and distributing graphic resources, was born in 2010 with a pure “bootstrapped” startup model, and nowadays works to keep its innovative essence. That’s why they created Freepik Labs in May 2020, a department for innovation and development that works on the creation and incubation of new projects in the purest digital accelerator style.
Gladys Vila, Digital Product Manager from Freepik Labs, states: “We estimate that the projects we develope in Freepik Labs will bring more than 140 million new users to the Freepik Company’s ecosystem . This will allow us to democratize design, and therefore, expand our target audience, focusing not only on professional users but on a wider audience that increasingly has more design needs in their everyday life, like for their social media, work or even leisure, for example, for designing a birthday party invitation.”
21 professionals invent and develop the future of Freepik Company
The Freepik Labs team is composed of 21 professionals with an average age of 28 years, with technological profiles like full-stack developers, SEO, UX designers or frontends, but also other profiles related to art and communication such as art directors, designers or content planers.
They all together have launched 6 projects, among which Slidesgo stands out because of its success and projection. The platform created in 2019 offers templates for Google Slides and PowerPoint and more than 5,000 exclusive resources on a variety of topics and receives an average of 7 million monthly visits from users around the world.
But it all hasn’t been successful for Freepik Labs. Something aligned with the startup philosophy is that there is always a lesson behind every failed project. This is the case of Tutpad , a training platform for design professionals, as a community, that was finally cancelled because the company considered that it was not profitable.
Freepik Labs is currently working on the development of new content creation tools that will be released in 2022 and will complement the existing products. To implement all these projects, the Freepik Labs team starts by detecting an unmet market need. Then, a very simple minimum viable product is launched and its performance, user behaviour, areas for improvement and the evolution of the competition are monitored through quantitative data extracted using analytic tools. Finally, this data is contrasted with a user-centred investigation. This way, the product evolves slowly until it reaches the performance and quality levels of the rest of the senior platforms of Freepik Company.
