Kyle
Stacy Carlson isn’t your everyday startup founder. She’s not a caffeinated-up hackathon junkie, or a gamer chick turned business developer extraordinaire. She’s a stay-at-home mom from Lincoln, Nebraska, who turned her digital scrapbooking hobby into a startup that now has a team of 21 designers, and 13 employees.
Silicon Prairie News reports that Carlson was never one for paper scrapbooking (me neither). But when her daughter started getting older she wanted to find a way to preserve those hundreds of digital pics that every parent has of their kid. She got back into computers and immediately picked up digital scrapbooking as a hobby.
When Carlson started gottapixel in 2005, it was a place where digital scrapbookers like herself could share layouts with online friends. The layouts that were publicly available weren’t nearly as good as what the user base at gottapixel were uploading to the site.
“When my cousin Brenda, and I started in 2005, it was a hobby. We started with just a few members, a gallery, and a desire to create a digi home that was reliable, friendly, and fun. 7 years later, we have over 25,000 members in our forum, 7,000 active products and over 275,000 layouts in our gallery…but even though the site has gotten bigger, the family feel is still there!” Carlson told scrapstacks.com
GottaPixel has become one of the most respected and trusted sites among people who do online scrapbooking. Some of the designers who make digital scrapbooking layouts for gottapixel have their own websites and galleries, and Carlson told SPN that the best designers make more than $1000 per month for their work.
Now that her kids are in schoo,l and the company is running on all four cylinders, Carlson is active in the startup community via Startup Lincoln, AwesomeCamp, and Ladies Who Launch.
Are you a digital scrapbooker? Try it out at gottapixel.com
