Y Combinator’s Picurio Crowdsources Photo Sharing
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
9. Photo/video sharing services. A lot of the most popular sites on the web are for photo sharing. But the sites classified as social networks are also largely about photo sharing. As much as people like to share words (IM and email and blogging are "word sharing" apps), they probably like to share pictures more. It's less work and the results are usually more interesting. I think there is huge growth still to come. There may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing service, half of which remain to be discovered.
1) The technically hard problem in photo sharing, which is "Holy cow, terabytes of photos! Where do we put them?" is now largely solved by the cloud. That makes the technical risk of execution fairly low, but not so low that you're going to be able to clone a successful site in a weekend. (Exaggerating for effect.)
2) The main value add is in the software you write for the sharing site. This is really hard to duplicate, which spells "moat".
3) Photo sharing is a broad market B2C app and for whatever reasons Y Combinator seems to like those.
4) People demonstrably pay money for photo sharing, which since it has negligible marginal costs (see: cloud) means you are essentially building a "turn pennies into dollars" machine. Those get stupidly profitable at scale (amortize engineering cost over all paying accounts, sell your typical user < 2 GB of space for $X0 a year, pay Amazon S3 a few dollars to service that user, reinvest your 90% margins into customer acquisition, laugh all the way to the bank).
5) There is a built-in viral growth model, which greatly decreases COCA compared to, say, a non-viral web app, Netflix, etc. (I happily pay 30~50% of lifetime value for customers because it makes excellent sense with 95% margins. Photo sharing gets comparable margins but your customers charge you 0% of lifetime value to sign up their friends.)
6) There is built-in lock-in of users. Moving to the new shiny is going to be painful for most of them, so they won't. Plus the pain increases with how good of a customer they are, which means you only lose the pathological freebie seekers anyhow.
7) Historically, the above factors have encouraged investors and buyers to throw stupid amounts of money at photo sharing sites, which is ultimately what YCombinator wants to see.
None of Flickr/Picasa/Facebook allow you to view and download a collection of photos accumulated from a large group of people from a single page.
I personally dislike having to click through a half dozen facebook profiles/albums to view an event's photos. Similarly, I dislike having to visit multiple different photo-sharing site du jour's to attempt (and sometimes be unable) to download all of an event's pictures. Having a one-stop shop for this task (which I do regularly) is a valuable time saver.
As long as people are still being frustrated by problems in the photo sharing space then there will be room for new startups.
So 1 album will have ALL the photos from that day/event in 1 place...
PS: The email to album is "mom approved" btw, since almost everyone knows how to email photos.
But the interesting thing I'm finally really seeing is that nothing has to be wrong with those other sites. I have users who continue to use other sites and are enthusiastic about them. People who love photos enjoy sharing them in different ways.
2) I like the fact that the interface is built with Objective-J/cappacino, it feels more "native" than flash, which is what a lot of similar apps use
3) At the same time, the interface can be "broken" sometimes in that it doesn't react like you expect it to, for example, modal dialogs don't close when you press the "escape" key and the alert dialog ( after registering ) don't close after pressing the enter key.
4) Right click doesn't work.. would be nice to have a context menu to do various operations.
5) Shouldn't the loader only allow image files? I tried to upload a .pdf and it seemed to work (progress bar showed up..etc ) but afterwards it doesn't show up in my library.
6) I don't know about the whole "room" concept, I mean.. whats wrong with albums??
7) Although the cappacino based interface is super awesome, I could also see this limiting what this app can do, I mean, if its done in flash, you could do all kinds of cool stuff like the rest of the functions in iPhoto..etc
On 3), 4), 5), and 7) we definitely want to sand the rough edges. We have a "launch early, launch often" mindset though so erred on the side of getting something out.
On 6), rooms take a bit of getting used to but we think turn out more useful than simple albums. It gives a group of people a common URL to return to multiple times for different events and you can say things like "I put the photos in our room, go look for them there."
I like the idea of extending the lifetime of the room when you add a friend. Nice way to encourage usage.
By the way, I have a service that manages beta invitation programs that could be useful to your site. What is the best way to contact you guys?
Just sent you an email.
We've learned that sites attempting to store unlimited photos for unlimited time get costs that are too large, even with dropping storage/bandwidth costs.
You should add a way to search the picture titles.
Regarding payments, whats stopping users from making a fake account to extend the life of the free room? 2 weeks is long enough to make it worth doing
In seriousness, if we find it's a problem we'd tackle it then. We tried to prevent premature optimization.
Out of interest, is it built on Cappuccino? That'd be very YC-meta!
Example: we had several wedding beta rooms. There were multiple albums for rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and after-party. The group collaboratively chose the best photos from each part of the wedding to put into the albums. This isn't possible with other "group album" type sites.