
Ask HN: Please review my startup - Stockyoo.com - hellweaver666
I've been working hard on this for a few weeks now (around looking after my 3 month old son), and I'm about to do my pre-launch test (likely a few hundred GBP worth of Facebook ads targeted at a young demographic) to see if there is much interest.<p>I'd love it if you could check out the site and let me know what you think of it (concept, copy, design etc).<p>One thing I'm interested to know is if it's immediately obvious what the purpose of the site is at this stage, or if I need to make it more obvious.<p>You can find the site at http://stockyoo.com<p>Thanks!
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jawns
Based solely on the domain name, I assumed your site had to do with financial
stocks, rather than stock photos.

If you want a descriptive domain name, it looks like these are available:

* STOCKMOBILEPHOTOS.COM * STOCKCELLPHOTOS.COM * CAMSTOCKPHOTOS.COM

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treeface
On the other hand, I might actually click on a domain called "stockyoo.com"
out of curiosity, whereas I would assume something called "camstockphotos.com"
is probably a scam site or the poor product of a domain squatter.

Then again, I never buy stock photos.

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hellweaver666
That's what I was thinking... I'm looking to build a memorable brand name
(more like digg, reddit, google etc) and a domain packed with keywords isn't
the best way to achieve that.

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nicholaides
There are types of users you want to attract: buyers and sellers/submitters.
It seems like the home page is geared towards the sellers, which makes sense
because you need to get a bunch of photos for it to be useful to buyers.

The one thing I would note is that it's not quite obvious what the photos will
be used for, which may make it hard to determine what type of pictures you
want. I was able to infer that it's for stock photography, but I'm pretty sure
I only know what that is because I do web development.

One more tip that's a little off-topic: If this takes off (and hopefully it
will) you'll be getting a deluge of photos that will need categorization and
moderation. You should check out <http://houdinihq.com/> which offers an easy
API for using Mechanical Turk. You can email me at mike@ablegray.com and I'll
hook you up with the guy who runs it.

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hellweaver666
Thanks - looks useful! I'm hoping to get users to do their own tagging after
the photo has been approved, but I'll still need to approve tags which would
likely become a bit of a bitch after a while - a way of automating will
definitely be useful!

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DirtyAndy
I appreciate that initially you need photos and maybe that is why the site is
geared as it is, but what you really need to be testing is if you can sell the
photos, will people come to you to buy them.

I'd assume the "cell phone generation" is a slightly younger mix, one person
telling someone else that they managed to top up their phone credit this month
from the money made from selling cell phone pictures is going to be all the
advertising you need, could be very viral in that regard.

But marketing those photos to potential buyers is probably where the hard work
begins, and in my opinion your site says nothing to point me in the direction
of buying photos, what I could use them for etc. iStockPhoto, Getty Images and
the like don't target photographers on their homepage, they target people who
use photos and you need to do that to.

Awesome idea though, I really like it, I can really see how you can make money
from it and how people might find it useful. Being able to geotag and search
against that would be amazing too - concerts, riots, natural disasters etc
etc. Good luck. (Future feature, let Twitter trends create a list of "Photos
we need now" so that when photographers come to your site they know what
bloggers might be looking for).

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simonsarris
I agree that finding buyers will be the big thing here.

I suspect a large, untapped market for this sort of thing for local newspapers
as the buyers. Make sure there's good local search.

Photos of a fire in the town, or some store's opening, or any other impromptu
news-worthy event will be captured via cameraphone before reporters hit the
scene and these photos will be of good worth to the local papers.

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dho
Why should local papers use your service when they can ask their readers to
send them the photos directly? At least here in Switzerland there are already
newspapers doing this.

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DirtyAndy
News breaks, you write an article and you go to this site and find a photo for
your article and post article with photo.

Or you post the article with a message (like BBC does too) saying "Are you
there, send photos etc", go back update the article with someones photo etc.

Yes I know readers will automatically send some photos in, but a _live stock
library_ is a really good idea to complement readers photos (and whilst I
might send a photo to the BBC, my local paper is pretty low down my list - I
appreciate that differs on quality of local though).

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nicholaides
Clickable: <http://stockyoo.com>

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dot
I had a similar idea a little while ago, but centered around news and event
photos. Send in your geo-tagged photos a political demonstration, an accident,
a crime or a celebrity fling... Journalists could then search for hot spots
around the world with a lot of activity right now... maybe something to think
about. Good luck!

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bjonathan
a french startup is doing that: <http://www.citizenside.com/en> quite
successfully

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ig1
I think it's pretty hard to break into this market as most of the big players
are already over-saturated with photographs in most standard categories. It
might make more sense to focus on a specific subset of the market that's
under-represented (shots of people doing activities, etc.) or local news
events.

Also given your audience you might need to be extra careful with model
releases, because if the people in the photographs are minors their parents
will have to sign a model release and not the subjects themselves.

The pricing seems off as well, if someones going to pay for a photo they'll
probably be willing to pay more than $1. Also if the photographers are only
earning $0.50/cents and only a tiny fraction of photos are actually sold, I'm
guessing your photographers will get frustrated with not earning money quickly
and leave your service.

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rezrovs
"As long as you can email them to us" - is this the only mechanism for sending
the photos? I realise you might have written this to simplify the page, but my
first reaction was that I'd rather be able to upload them. Then on the 'Photo
Guide' I do read that I can upload them. Perhaps instead of that sentence on
the home page it would be better to link to the Photo Guide.

Looks like a pretty good idea though :) Good luck with it!

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hellweaver666
I wanted to make it easy for people to share the photos straight from their
mobile device. I know a lot of phones don't have built in upload facilities
(e.g. the iphone) so I wanted to make sure there was a mechanism to these
people to get the photos to us. I had considered MMS but decided email would
be the best solution in this day and age.

I definitely will allow browser based uploads at some point in the future.

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fleitz
iPhone definitely has upload facilities. I share photos from my phone directly
to Facebook. I know it's not supported in Mobile Safari, but it's possible.
I'd implement something like swfupload so that it's easy to upload the photos
on to your site.

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simonk
Isn't swfupload flash?

But, anyways it won't work on something like the iPhone because there is not
folder structure for it to look for something. You have to build a iphone app
like Facebook did.

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guiseppecalzone
This is really interesting. For people trying to make money, the barrier to
entry is minimal. Moreover, since people can upload right after you take a
picture, you get rid of the bulk upload headache.

People are dying to make money on the fly. Think about the popularity of
Mechanical Turk and other work at home sites.

One thought: Because it's so easy to post images, you may end up with a lot of
subpar photos.

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znt
It sounds like a good idea. Why don't you explain the revenue process using
catchy graphics like: 1- Take photo 2- Submit 3- Profit!!!

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hellweaver666
I definitely need to tart things up a bit, the homepage is currently a merge
of what will be the final site (focused equally on buyers/sellers) and my test
page to gather email addresses.

I might see if I can fit this in - perhaps where the current text blocks are
at the moment.

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patorjk
Have you done any research into how to price the photos and who the buyers
would be? $1 seems a little low. If news agencies would be the target, I would
assume they'd be willing to pay more. You may also want to allow people to put
up Creative Commons licensed photos. It could get you more users, which would
lead to more people looking at the photos.

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apowell
How are you going to handle gathering model releases for the individuals in
the photos? For example, iStockPhoto has detailed requirements on which photos
require a model release
(<http://www.istockphoto.com/tutorial_9.0_modelrelease.php>).

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hellweaver666
That's a good point. I'm not sure if this will fly, but as I understand it,
getting a model release is the photographers responsibility. I will simply
require them to "agree" to a statement that declares they have the permission
of all people in the photo.

~~~
andrewjshults
While you can probably indemnify yourself against legal responsibility of a
photographer not getting a model release, based on your target photographers
(teens and twenty somethings taking photos with camera phones i.e. in a
hurry), this is something that could quickly kill your reputation if someone
uses one of your images and gets sued because the photographer never got a
model release. One suggestion on this would be to have something in your
mobile app that would allow the user to collect the model release at the time
of capture. I'm sure there are a lot of legal issues with what would be
considered an appropriate signature.

One of the reasons people feel comfortable using crowd sourced stock photo
sites like ShutterStock and iStockPhoto is that they are willing to take up to
a certain $ amount of the legal responsibility you get sued for using an image
(as long as you use it within their guidelines). If your target buyers are
news outlets (who are allowed to use images more liberally than for commercial
use) this might not be a huge issue, but I'd be kind of wary about using a
stock photo site that basically took the stance that I had to counter sue the
photographer. Not a idea killer, but it's worth looking at what the
established players do to see if it makes sense from your business
perspective.

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mrspeaker
Great idea! I agree with retroafroman - home page should have some examples -
and I'd do an example photo next to, or composited on top of, the "end result"
of the photo used in a website. This way people who don't understand the world
of stock photography will visually see why people might want their snaps.

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fleitz
Concept is great, copy is ok. I'd be more concerned about finding buyers for
the photos than getting the photos.

Tailor your homepage towards the buyers and run Facebook ads along the lines
of 'Pizza for your cell phone pics'. Instead of buying FB ads, why not spam
the craigslist gigs section?

Where are you planning on advertising for buyers?

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retroafroman
I'd personally like to see some more examples. If you already have some
content, it would be nice to have a link to a sample gallery (or top pictures,
or something) on the front page. The examples of what not to send are good,
but what are some examples of what you want?

~~~
hellweaver666
At the moment... we have pretty much nothing, but I'm going to submit a bunch
of my photos and get some friends and family to do the same to get a small
user base going before it goes properly live. At the moment, I just want to
gather a few email addresses to see if people are interested in the idea at
all.

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jkent
This is a neat concept - if you have indexed, up to date content, then people
will pay for it - particularly the news outlets. They buy images all the time.

Can you tag images as they arrive in near real time?

A twitter for real-time photos, perhaps?

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d4ft
Getty images bought a company like this in the mid 2000's. They did current-
event photography from phones. Might be something worth looking into.

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jkent
That company was iStockPhoto.com, if anyone is curious.

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WesleyJohnson
Using IE8 at work and there is an IE conditional showing through on the page
just above the photo header:

<!--[if IE lt 9]> <![endif]-->

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hellweaver666
Thanks - I'll check that out!

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raquo
Is a photo of Virgin balloon really copyright infringement, or is it just you
taking the safe side? (referring to Photo Guide)

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adamklein
Needs a better tagline than "Make easy money from the photos on your camera
phone!" How about, "Profit From Your Pictures!"

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tsbaron
I would also mention somewhere that this is a marketplace for photos. There is
a heavy focus on selling photos but almost none on buying them until the third
box at the bottom.

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hellweaver666
that's deliberate. At the moment, we don't have any users in either category -
we have to get the photos in before we can start selling them, so that's my
priority to start with.

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binarymax
On the Photo-Guide it might be a good idea to provide 'What to send' examples
to contrast your 'what not to send'.

