Thoughts on Picplum Automatic Photo Prints | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Picplum Automatic Photo Prints

paulstamatiou.com

93 pointsPStamatiou43 comments

Picplum reminded me of picwing which I believe is another YC company.

I had a chuckle when I noticed that they both have the exact same testimonial from Jessica Livingston, modulo the company name.

I'm not quite sure how both can be true:

"Picwing is the easiest way for me to get digital photos printed. I just email pictures to my account and never have to think about it again. With Picwing, I can be sure that my family back East receives photos of my new baby regularly. They couldn't be happier!"

"Picplum is the easiest way for me to get digital photos printed. I just email pictures to my account and never have to think about it again. With Picplum, I can be sure that my family back East receives photos of my new baby regularly. They couldn't be happier!"

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3637134/quotes/jl_picplum_quote.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3637134/quotes/jl_picwing_quote.png

Picplum bought Picwing and is essentially a rebranding of the same service, along with improvements. The testimonial holds because it's the same thing, just with an updated name.

I'm confused. If Picwing was acquired, why is their site still active? Was something licensed?

UPDATE: from http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/22/a-woman-a-cupcake-a-bank-an...

PicPlum acquired the assets of a previous Y-Combinator company PicWing, and took over its printer relationship and initial user base. The company currently has $150,000 in funding offered by SV Angel and Yuri Miller to all Y-Combinator startups earlier this year. The founders say they are beginning their fundraising now, and will be looking to hire soon.

We haven't migrated the users over yet so we're keeping picwing up in the interim. Picplum was created-from-scratch with no code from picwing but we find value in their current userbase.

Nice use of qq.FileUploader. What are you using for those floating (top right) user notifications like when I delete a photo?

Wrong link (altho that cupcake is a good read): http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/12/yc-funded-picplum-beautiful...

Well that would explain it wouldn't it.

Branding is already better.

Congrats on the new startup, Paul!

My only caveat to you is that you're flat out wrong that film is dying. Compared to the now-exploded market for entry-level and above pro-sumer SLRs like the Canons, film is tiny. However, the actual market for film has stayed pretty steady, thanks to new players like Lomography introducing medium format cheaply to a new generation of artistic kids.

I'm actually sympathetic to your outlook because when I was your age I used to roll my eyes at the idea of film. I had my 5D tricked out with a 14L/35L/85 II L/200L kit in my bag. Eight years later I'm shooting almost exclusively on a Hasselblad, but my Mamiya 7 and Mamiya C330 and FujiFilm G617 are all well loved (and I still have fun with a Holga).

Here's my suggestion to you, one photography obsessed startup guy to another: set aside a weekend to bike around with a rented Hasselblad 503 or Mamiya 7. You'll need three rolls of film: Ilford FP4 Plus 125, Kodak Portra VC400 and FujiFilm Velvia 50.

The first thing you'll notice is that with 12 shots on a roll, you have to exercise constraint and make every shot count. You'll start remembering why you took a photo, how you were feeling. Suddenly the shots that you'd discard on a 5D II are some of the most charming of the lot. You learn to appreciate that turning your most interesting creative decisions to a mass-produced autofocus IC is kind of a drag. Happy accidents abound.

I'm warning you... it's a rabbit hole, and you might never come back out (but you'll be very happy there).

I think this is a killer idea. I have a 6-month old and the only picture we have of him on the fridge is an ultrasound picture.

I would recommend making this as easy to gift as possible. A subscription like this might be more popular as a shower gift than something new parents purchase themselves. (Citrus Lane does an excellent job at this.)

More market validation: I also have a 6-month old and am really tired of the crop, upload, select photos, select size, select paper, fill out shipping addresses, enter payment info process I have to do every few months to send photos to family. I will say most of my family wants digital copies and don't care as much about prints -- unless they are amazing photos.

But, I have several family members that don't have computers or are not savvy enough to save photos to their computer. And they love prints. I'm your target market and I have to say this sounds like the perfect service for me.

"I would recommend making this as easy to gift as possible"

That has been the most requested thing in the past week. I think we'll have to make a splash with some kind of gift card come Holiday 2011!

People want to give gifts, not gift cards. :) Make sure that it's a stand-alone product (eg. a 6-month subscription) that can then be extended or upgraded, not $50 towards a membership.

Let me chime in and add to the argument of paper vs. digital. We sell personalized kids books. Now you'd think, who in the heck buys books still? I'll tell you who: grandparents, aunts & uncles. While our eBook sales have risen steadily and with our iPad app coming up, I'm sure eBooks will take on an ever larger share of sales, people of a certain generation with spending power still love to touch paper.

Noticed a comment about the Picwing acquisition stating that the printer relationship was one of the aspects of the deal. You can't imagine how valuable that relationship is. We went through 4 printers before finally getting one who had the quality we wanted, turnaround time we wanted and price we wanted. From our first printer to our current printer, our cost per book fell by over 400%.

Big fan of physical printed objects. Interested to know how you guys differ from what the guys at Sincerely are doing and if you plan on opening up an API for prints.

An API for prints and can deliver worldwide. Now THATS a business!

We're finding Olark really useful as well. It's easy to set up and ensures that every day we chat with users. People are willing to chat about a product with less friction than they would send an email to a feedback address.

I feel like selling printed photos is a lot like selling CDs. You know at some point nobody will ever use these anymore. You don't know when, exactly, and they'll probably outlast the CD, but I personally already get annoyed when someone gives me a non-digital version of a photo. If I like it enough I scan it and throw it out, if I don't I just trash it directly.

Every day a bunch of people who want printed photos die, and a bunch of people who will never want one are born. That's not a good spot to be in for the long term.

Prints are just our first venture into the space. We'll use this to create a place where people store their best photos. We think there's a good opp to be had if we're in that situation.

Printed photos and CDs differ in that printed photos are useful without a computer, whereas CDs hold no sentimental value and are used only as a transfer medium.

My parents would greatly disagree with you. They're fairly computer literate, but for them photos don't "count" unless they're on paper. I always feel guilty because they never get to see many of my good photos locked away in Aperture. I think that's exactly the market here.

Exactly. Your parents. Not you.

(That said, there’s plenty of time for this startup to thrive. I wouldn’t worry about it.)

My wife feels the same way, actually. But isn't that the market here. It is computer literate people with lots of digital pictures (me), with relatives that want prints (my family).

I don't think this startup should worry about the demise of prints any more than Netflix worried about the demise of the DVD when they started. (Of course, they've since worked hard to transition to digital, and been very successful at that, but not at the beginning.)

Well we're obviously just talking about anecdotal evidence here, but I'm a young-ish hacker-news-reading programmer, and I am really excited about this service because I love having prints. I also want to sign my brother up for this so I can get pics of my nephew but only 15 per month, not the usual 150-per-facebook album.

I think you are on to something there with the 15 prints a month limit...

Figure out some way to create a scarcity of images, so only the worthwhile pictures are used/shown, not the 150-per-facebook album, as you mentioned.

Maybe I'm an outlier here - but I actually prefer physical photos. It's too easy for someone to just spray digital photos everywhere - when they're physical, you have constraints that mean I'm seeing the photos you decided were worthy of being printed.

Apparently my market is supposed to shrink - but I know among friends as well, a printed photo still carries a lot more weight than a digital one ever will.

Yeah I'm certainly not suggesting there's no demand for this now. I just think the demand will shrink over time. I don't think I'd want to try to build a long term business in a market that will certainly shrink.

Until you can stick a digital photo on your fridge, prints are here to stay.

or as pg put it "until everyone has a touch screen fridge"

Even then, it still doesn't feel the same.

You get annoyed when someone goes to the trouble of giving you a photo they considered important enough to print and share with you? I understand that living simply is a goal, but that sounds a little silly. Your comment makes me wonder if you stab these unlucky photos with a pencil and burn them before "trashing it directly" — presumably before the jerk can leave the room so that they understand the existential crisis they have narrowly averted. :)

It's safe to say that humans are a sentimental and even nostalgic bunch. We crave individuality and expression, and photos are the ultimate simple expression of our life and times. Getting prints back is a joy greater than Christmas (for those into that sort of thing) any day of the year. It's actually kind of addictive, and having physical copies of those moments trumps online sharing for all of the obvious tactile reasons.

As long as people have kids and crushes, books-in-progress and wallets there will be printed photos... and thank goodness for that.

Thanks for the olark.com link. That is an impressive service.

There are tons of competitors with much lower prices. They will need a lot of luck.

This is one of the major strengths of YC. They can build a small, profitable company with customers that read HN and TC. This gives them time to build a good product. Once they have that down they can go out and raise some money to help them compete more aggressively. And with a solid product.

There are tons of competitors in every market. We are not competing on price. We are a premium product and we offer a much better experience and a higher quality product than most of our competitors.

I doubt your "higher quality" product claim. Most photo printers today use pretty much the same machines, give you many paper options.

"Much better experience" is just a speculation.

You are a premium product indeed, price-wise.

Well why don't you try us and our competitors and let us know what you think.

Hmm... I'd like to try you, and don't have time to try a bunch of other people as well. Would you mind explaining in your own words what is better about the quality of your prints (or service in general) than the others?

@jordanlev So we have tried ordering prints from a few other big digital photo printing sites. First thing that you will notice is that everyone uses much thinner quality paper then we use. We use heavy Luster Fujifilm photo paper, much thicker than many others. Our photo process is lightjet chemical process, most other companies use either a digital or inject process which is not as good as chemical photographic process. We are also putting in a lot of effort in package design and are going to be experimenting with designs over the coming few months.

Whats stopping competitors from using heavy Luster Fujifilm photo paper and a lightjet chemical process? Is using them both sustainable for business? There must be a reason why "others" dont use these...

Our photo process is lightjet chemical process, most other companies use either a digital or inject process which is not as good as chemical photographic process.

I bet 99.9% of customers cannot tell the difference between prints made by a

1) lightjet

2) Fuji Frontier

3) Noritsu

4) $500 inkjet printer

According to your FAQ, you are using "Fuji Crystal Archive" paper, which many of your competitors use (Snapfish, for instance).

It looks like you are targeting yourself to a high end market, while your print sizes are 4x6", which is very strange.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want you to fail, I'm just surprised with your business model, it's really confusing.

I need to update the FAQ but we have since switched to lustre paper which is not crystal archive (that is only glossy).

One customer told us: "Shutterfly was really disappointing: pixelated, poor colors, and just a cheap feel - we'll never use them again." I quoted him in my post. Feel free to reach out to him to confirm.

As I mentioned in the post, 4x6 is just the start. We've only been working on this for 2.5 months :)

You're not answering the questions, but rather reply with a ridiculous testimony of some random person (even if it's true, it's one data point).

I don't know how we could be more clear about our current business model. Not much to discuss there. As far as print quality is concerned, you seem like you have made up your mind that there is no difference. We have seen prints from different suppliers and printers, and there is a significant difference in quality. Here is some context that will educate you on quality printing process http://blogofwilliam.tumblr.com/post/9277485802/picplum-a-qu...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com