Apply HN: Lenzy – affordable photographers guaranteed to suit you, booked in 50s | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: Lenzy – affordable photographers guaranteed to suit you, booked in 50s

4 pointslouisswiss9 comments

With Lenzy you can choose the perfect photographer for your needs, get a guaranteed price and book/pay within 50 seconds. Bookings will either take place via our web-app or, more commonly, our JS plugin embedded in third party websites and apps where users might need the services of a photographer (e.g. a job platform, shopify, airbnb, ebay etc). Instead of choosing a photographer based on their profile, our photo recommendation engine lets you choose the right photographer for your needs based on samples from their portfolios in a tinder-style interface.

As avid photographers ourselves, we know that this is the optimal way of finding the right photographer for your project, due to it being a much more subjective, individual perspective than other on demand services such as cleaning, transport etc, where safety and peer-approval are paramount (the photographer who my friend thought did a great job at her wedding, for example, is probably not the right person for my e-commerce product photos). Interestingly, thanks to the general increase of interest in photography and the improvement in photography hard- & software, 90% of the 'best' photographers out there are actually amateurs, art-students and other hobby-photographers who 'occasionally do shoots for friends'. By harnessing this eager supply, matching efficiently and increasing the demand by making awesome photos available to everybody at a price they can afford, we can offer a better quality experience than 'professional photographers' at less than half of the price.

We are a team of 3, who have worked together successfully on projects before...

- 1 designer & professional photographer - 1 (mainly front-end) dev/amateur photographer/sales guy - 1 back-end dev (not great at taking photos, but has seen thousands in his lifetime)

We have a working beta and partnerships with third party sites which are profitable.

We would love to field your questions/feedback :)

Lots of nascent demand for pro photo services. Culture is becoming visual on an unprecedented scale. Two quick queries:

1. How quickly do you think you could scale this globally? Customer requests a shoot on a volcano in Greenland for example ;)

2. Why not provide a full service solution? That is not just the photographer, but for a fashion brand shoot for example, all the models, hair, makeup, location, catering, legal clearances and the other 100 things I am not anticipating ;)

Thanks, we agree! Even more importantly, the definition of 'pro photo services' is changing rapidly from high prices, fixed retail location to high quality, style & subjective fit.

1. This would be awesome and hopefully we can manage it someday, however a lot of stock photo websites actually cover this pretty well already (assuming you just want custom photos of the volcano). In our experience, if you can afford to actually have your event/wedding/CV-headshots (now that would be an awesome LinkedIn profile photo) taken on location in Greenland, you tend to find shipping out your 'usual' photographer with you and putting them up in a hotel as a negligible cost ;)

2. This could be something we expand to later, but we want to focus on what we know and do best now and make it a really great service. Also, our JS plugin means we partner with companies already offering some of these services to generate free new bookings, so we don't want to alienate anybody :)

Forgot to add that in a lot of cases (especially fashion shoots), there is more equipment needed (lighting, reflectors etc) and normally a second person is needed to 'handle' this equipment during the shoot.

We are working with our photographers to give every one of them access to this service/equipment and normally one of the models will help out as the second person, keeping costs low.

In this business, the proof is in the results.

I imagine many YC folks have seen these types of companies before.

I can name 2 in my head, but they don't do the tinder style interface.

eversnapapp.com PrettyInstant.com

Godspeed. I think you're on to something.

Thanks for the inputs - I agree, there must be 100s of similar applications each year relating to on demand photography.

We love the concept of eversnap, however it is a bit of a risk leaving your wedding day/event in the hands of (possibly inebriated) guests :)

I think our target market is less events/weddings and more the other areas of personal and professional life where great photos can make a BIG difference, but price and time constraints (for finding the right photographer)discourage people from using traditional services (like PrettyInstant). Examples would be when renting out your home, selling something online, photos for the marketing department (headshots, teamphotos, e-commerce product photos, CV-style photos etc.

We love the tinder interface and it seems to work well, but at the end of the day it won't put us head and shoulders above the competition. What really sets us apart is that with us, you book a photographer by judging how they shot a photo which had similar requirements to your shooting. It seems crazy to us as photographers that PrettyInstant (for example) guarantees to only work with 'the best' photographers, yet depending on what style you are looking for, the lighting and the general setting (is it a headshot or documenting a party?), any one photographer could be the perfect fit for you or they could be terrible.

disclosure: I work on eversnap

eversnapapp.com was never meant to replace pro photography wedding photos, but to add some authenticity to the mix (and capturing any friends and family get together), plus we offer live slideshow moderation ;)

We also complete the offer with our own professional photography service on eversnappro.com

That said, best of luck to you and your team!

nice - I hadn't looked at eversnappro.com before.

I wasn't trying to insinuate that eversnapapp.com was trying to replace pro photos - I love the idea, the execution and would definitely use it myself ;)

What is your marketing plan to reach both the customers and the photographers who will use the app?

Ah, the classic chicken & egg problem ;)

Finding awesome photographers has been much easier than we expected - by posting 'photographer needed' adverts on forums/in camera shops/in facebook groups it is easy to get a few hundred responses within a week. Over 50% then sign up because there is no fee or obligation and hey, why wouldn't you?

We don't have the website live in an open beta yet, so we don't know how much the b2c marketing will cost - we are actually focussed heavily on working with partner websites to get them to embed our JS booking widget into their websites. We are trialling with a job-platform and it is a great way for us to reach customers at exactly the 'right moment' (ie when they have the need for a photographer but perhaps hadn't fully considered it). The partner website then gets a commission from each booking, so it is a great additional revenue incentive for them as well.

So far, our customers have been really happy and word of mouth seems to work really well for getting new bookings - this was really important for us as we weren't sure that the customers would refer their friends to us at Lenzy and not just to the photographer they worked with directly. By giving our photographers a small commission on bookings we receive from their customers' referrals, we seem to have avoided the HomeJoy problem (for now).

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