$29 million for another photo sharing app?
Holy smokes, Pictage gets $29 million from Apex for their new photo sharing application. Now, bear in mind that this is aimed at professional photographers such as wedding photographers and such. Now, as near as I can tell the look and feel of the site kind of sucks. But, there is a point to make here. Remember that Flickr is not that old. People were sharing digital photos online for 10 years before they even started their company. Arguably, you could have said that the issue of photosharing had been solved LONG before they launched their company.
So, why today is it the world’s largest photo community by far? Two reasons. First, they focused. The idea of building community into photosharing was perfect (after all it is called photo “sharing”). Second and more importantly was near perfect execution. If you can build something that other companies already do and you know customers already use the stuff but you do it ten times better then I think there must be a good business opportunity there. I visit sites like Zazzle and it makes me realize that people live with poor functionality to get something done. But, if someone comes along and pays attention to detail and shows consumers that they can accomplish their task with far less pain then I think consumers will migrate away from incumbent sites.
Make things easier. Amazon nailed it early with their “1 click” to buy concept. That’s about as easy as it can get although I would argue that they too can learn from some of these new Web2.0 companies who’s interfaces blow away the old guard in terms of appearance and workflow. I’m trying really hard to bear all of this in mind as we keep quietly developing away on ImageKind.