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Unscripted Photographers founder Cheryl Kitchener was “hooked” from the moment she produced her first app in 2012, helping people take selfies before forward-facing cameras were widely available.
Today, the Byron Bay-based young entrepreneur runs an app that assists photographers to build creative businesses and over the past five years she has grown to more than one million users and 15,000 paid subscribers globally.
Those numbers are no fluke as even Kitchener’s first app secured millions of downloads. The Unscripted Photographers app is among more than 20 apps she has created over the past 13 years.
“My first app was a tool that provided a countdown timer so that I could take a selfie of my sister and I, and later I added photo editing functions,” Kitchener tells Business News Australia.
“I also think it was the first hot pink app on the App Store at a time when the App Store looked like brown bookshelves.”
However, Unscripted Photographers is proving to be Kitchener’s biggest business success so far – an impressive record for the Canadian who landed in Byron Bay as a backpacker during the GFC and struggled to find a job.
The fast-growing Unscripted business currently generates annual recurring revenue of $5 million, which is up 40 per cent over the past year.
“I don’t see any reason why we can’t continue on this growth trajectory and, if anything, I’d like to increase it,” says Kitchener, a finalist in the 2025 Australian Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
Unscripted is among the world’s top-rated apps for photographers, but curiously about 90 per cent of the app’s user base comprises US women aged between 25 and 40, a statistic that Kitchener is unable to explain.
“Of course, we do also have thousands of male photographers,” she adds.
Unscripted Photographers is designed to turn her subscribers’ creative passion into a profitable business, especially early-stage and Gen Z creatives.
“I find that the most exciting part of what I do every day – making entrepreneurship super accessible to young creatives,” says Kitchener.
Kitchener, who studied photography and videography before falling “headfirst into the world of weddings”, created the app from her own frustration.
“I craved a platform that gave creatives the freedom to work on their own terms,” she says.
“There just wasn’t a tool that helped photographers feel confident and run a real business all from their phone. So, I built it.”
Kitchener describes Unscripted Photographers as “very much for the aspiring new creator who is trying to figure out how to make photography a business”.
“The photography world is full of talent, but most photographers struggle with posing clients, managing bookings and delivering polished galleries in a professional way,” she says.
“Most creatives don’t understand the commercials of the need for a contract or to send invoices, or the need for a deposit and final payment.
“A lot of people start layering these strategies as they grow, but I created a platform that is a business in a box – a done-for-you system with everything you need to be compliant from day one with all of that annoying admin stuff sorted.”
Unscripted has also expanded to include photo delivery over the past year, a critical area where Kitchener says modern technology can sometimes let customers down.
“Getting your photo from a photographer via Google Drive or Dropbox is usually not a nice experience,” she says.
“That kind of file transfer is not emotional. When you spend maybe $7,000 on your wedding photos and get a Dropbox link, that’s not ideal.
“Photo delivery was a really big feature that we launched last year, and it was a lot more technical and complex than we initially gave it credit for.”
Unscripted has developed a digital album experience which provides “a big cover on top and the photos in sections below” with all photos designed to load easily.
“From the client perspective you can download different resolutions on your phone which makes it more seamless with easy sharing,” says Kitchener.
“You don’t have to think about it as a client. Just make favourites lists and share them with your parents or grandparents.”
Despite a slow start in 2020, when lockdowns cruelled the photographic industry, Kitchener has managed to bootstrap solid growth at Unscripted Photographers over the past five years.
The company now employs about 20 – many of them located in Byron Bay where they drive business growth through social media content, podcasting, networking and collaborating with other photographers.
“I work alongside the team and every day we are elbow-to-elbow in the weeds together,” says Kitchener.
“It’s great working with a group of young creatives. Eight of them are here in Byron Bay, everyone is about the same age, and they all have a passion whether it’s music or photography.”
Unscripted’s free app is designed to whet the appetite of photographers to potentially subscribe, helping them plan a shoot, create a shot list and get inspiration and education.
“That’s where we get most of our top-of-funnel traffic from,” says Kitchener.
“Then the retentive users end up accessing our business features, while the most retentive ones use it for their photo delivery as well.
“We have over one million free users and it’s quite easy to get downloads. Our organic tunnel does a great job of educating and inspiring people to come and download our app.
“We have 15,000 paying users and they’re the ones who are building proper businesses.”
It’s a remarkable journey for the entrepreneur who put her life “on a different track” when struggling to find a job at Byron Bay in those early years as a backpacker. Her early apps were paying off.
“I started making $50,000 a year and then I got it up to $200,000 a year and then I was totally hooked,” she says. “I wasn’t going to do anything else.”
It also helped that she “fell in love” with Byron Bay, “married an Australian, and had Australian babies”.
“I just love it to death, and I feel so blessed that I have been able to build the business in such a creative community,” says Kitchener.
She also concedes her success “was totally accidental”.
“I didn’t even know the levers that made it so successful in the early days.
“I didn’t understand the concept of going to a venture capitalist and do a round or take finance. I didn’t understand that concept until two years ago.
“But once I started networking with people in that world, I realised that I have a really cool tech product here.”
Kitchener points out that she has never had any finance experience or ever worked in a corporate job. She simply describes her career outside of the business as a “waitress and a mum”.
“Understanding the levers that make the business successful, and the key metrics that you can adjust on a day to day, has taken me years,” she says.
“We now have some really great repeatable levers we can pull and we have lots of plans to increase average revenue per user in the next few years.”
Kitchener sees the next big problem to solve being how to source clients for its app users.
“Everyone in the world needs a photographer at some time in their life and we have the biggest community of young aspiring photographers. It seems like a natural progression. Marketplaces are a tricky beast, so watch this space.”
As for Kitchener’s passion for creating apps, not much has changed since her early success all those years ago.
“I will always have a little side app in the mix,” she says. “I find that it scratches my creative itch.”
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