Povio, the polite photo app that students love, joins YC’s winter batch | Hacker News Reader

Povio, the polite photo app that students love, joins YC’s winter batch

techcrunch.com

95 pointsbjenik60 comments

Definitely a good "disruption" to all the noise that is broadcast on twitter + instagram by all those that you follow. I think they also nail it pretty much with their tagline: Play photo ping and stay in touch with friends

If the founders are reading this, was this the original idea ? If not, I'd love to know what did you all start with, and how you all pivoted to this particular idea? (Crunchbase says: founded in October 2012)

I came up with an idea when I was on the top of a snowboard ramp(i was a snowboard pro), trying to capture the moment and share it with my friends over Instagram. But it felt like bragging, I didn’t want to collecting likes, comments and build my ego. Than I thought - if my friends would ask me where I am right now, I would be glad to show them and it would feel totally unintrusive!

So that was the initial idea for pull photo sharing app!

As a beta user for a year or so: it really feels good to be pinged. :)

And it's great entertainment to just browse what friends have been doing for last 24h.

+1 from me

Congrats on the traction! Quick question since I haven't downloaded the app, how would that have worked at the top of the snowboard ramp since your friends would have had to ping you right at that exact moment? Were you thinking that you would take a picture to reply with later? I'm trying to understand how the app works if 90% of the time that I might get pinged I'm not doing anything interesting (we can't all be snowboard pros ;)

What did I just read? I have really, really low standards for web content, but this seriously reads like a fifth grade book report. "Povio is for now 100% focused on growth. It actually sounds like Povio has some kind of shot in the space."

That's true! But doing things that only have 1% chance is exciting. That’s what life is all about! You know what is even harder? What has even lass that 1% chance? Winning a World Cup in bigair snowboard competition!

And I managed to do that 4 times.. If I don’t choose the hardest tasks out there, my life would be boring ...

Easy as that.

OP is quoting and criticizing the article's writing not startup odds.

Oh.. I'm sorry!

What's going on here...

Great attitude, and from one Slovene founder to another, keep on rocking it :). Good luck to you guys over there!

I did read in the story you were a world class snowboarder which is awesome. I was just trying to say that I'm disappointed with the quality of the story that TechCrunch has published about your product. It's not very well written and didn't explain your product well. But it doesn't reflect poorly on you, just on TechCrunch. Best wishes and good luck!

Thank you

Interesting idea. A couple of suggestions: 1) Don't do the auto countdown thing with the camera. Just let me take a picture. 2) My knee jerk reaction when I received a photo was to ping my friend for another one right away. In fact all my friends did this until we got fed up with each other. Maybe limit pings to once an hour or something. 3) Give comments more focus. If someone sends me a photo I want to interact with them about it. Maybe that's why I'm heading to ping them so quickly...

Otherwise I'm happy to see a novel approach to social networking.

1)if you tap on the picture while countdown you skip 3-2-1

The autocountdown thing is still horrible, because it can take more than 3 seconds to focus image in some cases (especially on Android devices).

In like 50% of cases when tapping on ping notification I end up with either blurry image of my feed or a blurry image of something else.

Also I don't really see what kind of value that counter adds to anything.

You can tap&hold on screen while countdown, when you release the screen it will immediately take a picture - so by holding the screen for more than 3 seconds you can overcome this. But there's still lots of room for improvement.

You can also "press-and-hold" on the picture. And when you lift the finger the photo is taken. Counter is pretty sweet when you get used to it, believe me :)

Definitely agree on getting rid of the countdown feature. It's definitely bad as a first user experience; almost certain the first picture anyone takes will be bad and they may not see the "Slide down to retake" text.

Also, I like to be able to send text with the picture too, just to give a bit of context. I really imagine using this as a reverse Snapchat that let's me get pictures instead of sending them. Being able to give context to the picture is great. On a related note. I like being able to see comments on a picture when scrolling through the feed. Making the comment viewing section a separate screen in the app makes it less useful.

Also as a comparison to Snapchat. How long do the pictures stay around. Forever?

Agree, it can be a little tricky for 1st experience...but for the ones that stay, is a convenient feature.

I think the comment next to the pic would make it worse - pics are the easiest/the fastest way of consuming the content. This is why the News feed is now really light - you can scroll/check out new pics really fast, and I like that. If I want "heavier News feed", I go to Twitter/FB/...

Pic stays in the News feed for 24h, as far as I know.

Instead of creeps silently going through photo feeds, they can directly ping you for more photos!

Seriously though, I hope this idea catches on and it can possibly be the start of a trend of social media users becoming more "humble". It would be nice to see things flipped on it's head and move away from the push model of "here I am, here is a constant stream of useless shit about me".

Agreed. I definitely think this is the sort of thing that would encourage you to share photos with your close friends (would you ping a random stranger for updates?). Think many smaller circles, instead of gigantic newsfeeds.

However, by nature of that alone, photos thusly shared are more likely to be of a private sort. I'm curious about what level of privacy these guys will offer and how they intend to back it up.

I was really excited for the same reason. Sadly, it seems all of my friends are either too old or disinterested to be on Povio. I had a serious forever alone moment when I fired it up.

Is this thread being astroturfed? So many lo-karma/zero-karma commenters.

You actually went and checked? :)

A lot of the comments look like Yelp reviews from the cousins of a pizza shop owner.

Hate to be skeptical but I agree, the comments here are way too short and positive compared to what HN normally has to say about X or Y startup.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the team is Slovenian, and we're quite proud of what these guys have achieved, and if we can help in any way, we do.

I thought so too, but habosa may have a point. There was another (badly written) TechCrunch piece about a startup from where I'm from (in the US, so probably all native speakers) and there were a lot of well-wishing, hiphiphooray comments.

"Photo apps today are about a traditional feed model — you post, and it gets pushed out. The problem with that is it does not work terribly well with shy people – and into that category fall millions of teenagers."

Shy people still won't ping others. Don't see how this will solve that problem.

Oh well.

Shy people will get pinged by their friends and feel like they've been invited to share. I think that's what they're getting at, not positive.

Yeah, it's flattering and would make me want to take a picture to oblige. Very clever.

I really liked the idea, so I just tried it out on my android tablet. Of course critical social networking mass isn't there yet, so I wanted to invite some friends.

Here are a couple of things I noticed * It took me a while to figure out that the app wanted to send invitations via SMS, which of course want working on my tablet. * you can't uninvite the people you've invited (tapping should toggle the invite state) * there isn't any OK button to send the invites.

Really nice idea, and I love the name! Out of interest, does anybody know how they went about seeding it in a university? The article just skips over it as a quick step along transitioning to SV, but it sounds really hard to do.

I like the concept, and event want to use this, but maybe you can have more thought put in to the example friends. I do not categorize my friends as Mr. Example, Miss Hotty, and Best Buddy....especially as a woman. The Miss Hotty is especially creepy - you want guys to send pings to just hot girls? This feels like harassment.

Yep, just like I suspected. Been on there for 10 minutes, and already getting friend requests from creepy guys I've never heard of. I would only use this with close friends.

Pretty cheesy right?, I wrote my thoughts about it in this post https://medium.com/p/c0cc85f9c6db

"Mr. Example shares a photo of his delicious food, Best Buddy shows off his coffee and Miss Hotty shares a photo of her lingerie laying on her bed and a body shot in a changing room. "

Wow! I did not get to that screen, but that's seriously disturbing. Thanks for posting. Surprised none of the mentors at YC mentioned this to them.

One of the things I liked about Snapchat was the ability to find friends without using Facebook. I think that would be a good addition here.

How is it "joining" the winter batch? Isn't that batch just about done now?

Great success story. @matevzpetek would you mind sharing more detailed steps on how you seeded the app at Santa Clara University? Impressive stats - Inside 4 weeks, 30% of the University’s students – 1,200 students – signed up for Povio

Android user here - anyone else having a difficult time using this app? So much of it feels like a hackathon hack. It's shoddy, unresponsive, and overcomplicated.

Take pinging for example, when I added a new friend (and she accepted) I couldn't ping her. The orange circle never showed up. I had to navigate to several different views for it to activate. Also, commenting on a photo opens a.... popupbox? What?

I think the idea is kinda fun and I hope these guys succeed, but I also think they need to rethink their UI.

I like that this both starts a conversation and provides a conversation topic in the form of an appealing picture. Definitely would use this if it was in my area.

This looks pretty interesting (I just saw a demo); the old facebook strategy of winning a specific college campus, then replicating to other campuses, seems to work well.

(It's also interesting how a world-class athlete has gone into startups; there are definitely a bunch on wall street and in sales, but doing a startup, outside sports, isn't as common I think. Pretty awesome.)

I'm always taking a photo of my screen. I need blur functionality, because I don't want people to read my code. I solve this now by shaking the phone, but since I did this 500+ times already, you might consider a feature.

I think they shouldn't. Simplicity is the key of Povio and they are doing an amazing job at keeping it minimal ;)

I've been using Povio for the last 3 months; pinging friends is incredibly fun, and the network effect it has is amazing.

Povio is a great way to stay in touch with remote friends.

Very well done product video on their site. No voice over or explanation at all. Right into showing the product in a perfect use case. Catchy tune also!

I'm addicted to POVIO! my friends and I are having a ball using it. much better and more chill than snap chat in my opinion.

I still don't get how this is different from just texting.. I must be too far out of the loop on this stuff.

I really like this concept. This actually sounds like a photo app I would use, not just browse occasionally.

been using this since the start and the evolution of the product is just amazing. The team is doing a wonderful job at simplifying everything around a very good core experience.

I hardly open Instagram these days and don't use Snapchat, but have been using Povio 5+ times/day over the last year.

It's a really polished application (iOS), I was quite impressed when trying it out.

How does Povio make money?

It doesn't. It waits to be bought.

I'm using it on a daily basis, more than twitter actually.

Love it! Way more useful than FB or Snapchat!

I love this app. It is the most used 3rd party app on my iPhone. I cant imagine better way for fast communication with frends. Keep up the good work !!!

I like this, I can see it being popular.

Simple, fun & fun. I love it.

The easiest way for staying in touch with my friends and family, love the simplicity.

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