How Malaysian husband and wife bootstrapped one of the world’s top stock image players

Andy and Stephanie Sitt. Photo credit: Inmagine Group.

Over the past 17 years, Inmagine Group has grown to become one of the world’s top stock image players and it has done so under the radar.

100 percent bootstrapped, the Hong Kong-registered but Malaysia-based company has a 450-strong workforce in more than 40 offices around the globe.

Boasting an annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, it has been profitable for years. Its website 123RF, which accounts for bulk of the revenue, is said to be the world’s fourth-largest stock image library with 72 million items, drawing 16-18 million visitors a month.

Getting there, however, was a rough journey.

Humble beginnings

Like many startups, Inmagine’s origins began in an apartment with a laptop and two co-founders – husband and wife Andy and Stephanie Sitt from Ipoh, Malaysia.

It was the year 2000 and Andy had just quit his job as financial controller of Digital Vision, a British company that sold stock images in CDs while showing customers printed catalogs (which would later get acquired by Getty Images for US$165 million).

Eager to upend the industry, Andy returned to his homeland and launched his ecommerce bid.

“I was convinced that I could change the way people purchased images and do it from Asia,” he recalls.

“Stephanie, my girlfriend then, was the only free labor I could get,” he says of his now wife, who had just finished her marketing degree at University of Hertfordshire at the time.

Using whatever little savings they had and their credit cards, the duo set up Inmagine, selling premium large-format photo prints – both their own and from existing photo firms – for US$500 apiece. Their market consisted mainly of ad agencies.

While selling online eliminated the cost of printed catalogs and CDs, producing their own content came at a hefty price. “We hired photographers and scouted for locations and models to build our own content. It was a full production – we did hair and clothing. We hired graphic designers to do photo editing,” Stephanie recounts. “Post-production expense was also high. We needed to hire people to work on the metadata of all the assets and a sales team to cater to demand.”

From a team of two, the company slowly grew to six people, then to 10.

Lack of funding

Inmagine’s sales didn’t blow up initially either. Largely driven by word-of-mouth referrals, whatever sales that came in were reinvested in production.

Ushering in the digital age

Transforming into an ecosystem

What lies ahead