

PicPlum (YC S11): Beautiful Prints, Automatically Mailed for You - canistr
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/12/yc-funded-picplum-beautiful-prints-automatically-mailed-for-you/

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callmeed
I don't mean to be a downer/naysayer, but how can you argue that photo
printing is a growth industry?

I run an ecommerce service for wedding photographers and know a lot of other
people in the industry. From where we sit, the consensus is that _people are
ordering less prints_. All the growth we're seeing is from album/book sales
and digital file sales. 5-10 years ago, a portrait photographer could charge a
$100 sitting fee but still make $1,000+ on print sales. That is now
hard/impossible. Everyone simply asks _"Can I have the files on a disc?"_.

I can't see how it would be any different for the general consumer and their
images. People get their utility from seeing the image on Facebook. My mom is
63 and she looks at our family pictures on FB every day.

Wont the generation that is accustomed to (and prefers) tangible prints be
dead in 30 years?

My $0.02

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frossie
People are ordering fewer prints, but which percentage of the prints they are
ordering are pictures of kids for grandparents? A significant proportion, I
bet.

Anybody who has walked into a relative's house and seen their gorgeous DSLR
emailed baby picture printed on some crappy paper by some crappy printer
proudly displayed has died a little inside.

The reservation I have about PicPlum (and, I suspect, why I never got around
to signing up for its previous incarnation, even though I was interested in
principle) is the fact that you still have to do the curation - a step that in
practice I would forget. I would be interested to know from somebody who has
signed up whether the service can be configured to remind you to send it some
pictures).

[edit: grandparents might be online, but they seem to have a perverse need to
stick pictures of their gene pool on the fridge anyway. Hell, mine have an
Internet updatable LCD frame which sucks new pictures over all the time and
_still_ they print out for the fridge, handbag etc. ]

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tptacek
My kids grandparents are on Twitter and Facebook, as a data point. They are
not especially technical (I'm the only one of their 4 kids to have a career in
technology).

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tednaleid
My parents (my children's grandparents) are moving away from physical photos.
The thing that pushed them over the edge was us starting to use an EyeFi card
(<http://www.eye.fi/>).

It's an SD card that can wirelessly transmit pictures and upload them
automatically to designated endpoints.

All of the pictures we take are automatically uploaded to my flickr account
that my parents have access to. When we talk regularly on the phone, they've
already been out to flickr to see the latest photos.

For the few pictures that they think are good enough to have physical prints
of them, they can order them from snapfish directly from flickr.

Previous to owning an EyeFi, it'd be weeks or months before I got a chance to
manually go through and curate the photos to find the "best" ones actually
worth sending to a service like PicPlum and I'd always get complaints from my
parents about the delay.

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PStamatiou
We are trying to separate the culling process from the uploading process.
Doing some of the culling bit by bit instead of having this one big
overwhelming "ugh I need to connect the camera, import 200 photos, go through
them and find which ones to print" task. We've got a few ideas we're going to
be testing in the coming months.

~~~
tednaleid
The biggest pain for me was the uploading process. Once they're on a website
(like flickr) viewing and selecting good ones is easy and relatively quick.

If you can become a target for an EyeFi uploads (I think they have 20-30 built
in so that doesn't seem like a stretch for them to add one more), I think
that'd be a good consumer story and would decouple the uploading (the real
pain) from the culling.

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brlewis
Has this sort of thing happened before? "PicPlum acquired the assets of a
previous Y-Combinator company PicWing, and took over its printer relationship
and initial user base."

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bfung
I was about to jump the gun and comment that YC backed a direct competitor to
an older YC backed startup. This is the second startup to provide this
service, how will it be different than the first? Maybe the approach to
tackling this market is a bit off base...

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qeorge
The value proposition of "take photos of baby with iPhone; grandparents get
them automatically in the mail" makes so much sense to me. Glad to see PicWing
living on.

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dkokelley
I completely agree. Most of the web 2.0 picture world involves pictures sent
digitally to all of the social networks and smart devices. I think this leaves
out an important market or two in the photo sharing industry. Most notably,
the technologically unfamiliar (grandma and grandpa), and the photo purists
(people who want physical prints for display, but can't be bothered to print
out inferior quality shots on inferior printers). Many popular photo sharing
services degrade image quality for transmission and storage. (See: Facebook
and iPhone)

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abstractbill
_Most notably, the technologically unfamiliar (grandma and grandpa)..._

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the strongest driver in motivating older
people to learn about computers was the single use-case of viewing photos of
grandchildren on facebook.

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colomon
Wouldn't be surprised if Skyping with their grandchildren is stronger. ;)

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btucker
So is this basically a relaunch of PicWing? It seems like pretty much the same
thing, just more expensive?

One other point. Isn't it a little odd to use a testimonial from the lead
investor of the service in such a prominent way without designating them as an
investor?

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pc
Trivia: Akshay, one of the founders of PicPlum, previously built mugasha.com,
to which I (and probably many others) owe a lot of our coding productivity.

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chrisgoodrich
Interesting that Paul & Akshay decided to take over another YC company rather
than run with their own idea.

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jamesteow
Very cool idea, though I'd be down for one that's aimed at the prosumer crowd.
I've been wanting to print out 8x10 or larger photos for the last while but
have been way too lazy.

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zokiboy
I'm not in target market or I don't understand its benefits. If I have to
choose photos and email it to them, how is that easier than choosing photos
and uploading them to shutterfly?

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lyime
Curation is still a chore (we are looking into ways where we can fix that).
Where we come in is the automation when you send us the photos. Each month we
will group these photos you send us and send it to your recipients (grand
parents or other family) in a nice package. It is not a fun experience to
upload your photos and get them printed through most other services.

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inmygarage
Congrats on your launch!

Do you have plans to integrate with services like Flickr, Instagram, etc?

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lyime
Yes we do! We want to make it super easy to get your photos into Picplum. Stay
tuned.

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bostonvaulter2
Where's the pricing page on the main website? The learn more page said the
pricing was on the FAQ (which is odd) and then the FAQ doesn't make it that
clear and introduces terminology like batch in an adhoc fashion. Also I can't
easily see what services it integrates, I'm personally interested in
Google+/Picasaweb, Facebook, and Flickr.

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adamgray
Doesn't Shutterfly already offer this service?

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rorrr
Shutterfly and 20 other photo printing companies, and much much cheaper too.

PicPlum charges $7/month for 15 4x6" photos (that's 46c per photo).

PePhoto or PhotoCheap charge 6c per photo, which makes PicPlum 7.7 times more
expensive.

Seriously, what kind of idiots are willing to pay that much?

Would not invest a dime into this.

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Daniel_Newby
_Seriously, what kind of idiots are willing to pay that much?_

The same sort of "idiots" who pay for Guiness instead of Colt 45. Market
uptake comes exclusively from perceived value. Penny pinching only matters
insofar as it affects perceived value.

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jseliger
I just signed up: my girlfriend moved to NYC, and when I was there visiting
her I kept meaning to go to one of the drug stores and make prints. But I
never did.

EDIT: I realize that this thread is likely to devolve into, "I'd love to see
obscure feature X," so let me contribute: I'd love to see larger sizes,
especially 8.5 x 11".

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canistr
Will there be some sort of seasonal/occasions model in addition to the monthly
one? Because I could see this being incredibly useful around Holidays (i.e.
Christmas) and having an automatic Christmas card generated and sent out to
all my family and friends.

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lyime
At this point you can use the pay as you go option to send prints with
flexibility. We are going to add a slick one-off printing and sharing
interface over the next month. We are looking to experiment with ideas around
the holiday season.

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blackboxxx
This idea and business model fail to rock my universe, but it immediately
rocketed to the top of the front page, so they must be doing something right.

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damoncali
I had this very idea a few years ago, and did nothing with it. Glad to see
someone running with the concept!

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pnathan
Interesting!

I do like having selected photos printed out for non-computer viewing. :-)

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badclient
My grandma doesn't have an email address. Why do you require it for
recipients?

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jhawk28
You just need to select "Print Only" and then no email is requested.

