

Y Combinator’s Picurio Crowdsources Photo Sharing - breck
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/21/y-combinators-picurio-crowdsources-photo-sharing/

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abossy
Excuse my ignorance, since I'm not too knowledgeable about the photo sharing
space, but why is YC funding so many of these sites (by so many, I mean two:
Divvyshot and Picurio)? What's wrong with Flickr/Picasa/Facebook?

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rms
From <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>:

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.

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patio11
Plus, a hypothetical investor might note that:

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.

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abossy
Thanks for the very informative reply. I wish I could upvote twice!

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ktharavaad
Some feedback and thoughts on Picurio after playing with it for a bit 1) Sweet
interface, looks very iPhoto-like

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

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jonathanberger
Thanks for the feedback. We love Cappuccino too.

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."

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jonathanberger
I'm one of the co-founders and happy to answer any questions. I hope you'll
give the site a try.

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huhtenberg
It'd be interesting to know what the effects of the TC coverage are like.
Perhaps it's just me, but I wouldn't touch TC with a long pole after the
Twitter "incident". And so I'm curious if the quality of their referrals is
worth associating the company and the product with them.

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vaksel
I'd like to see the breakdown of account sign ups they get from this coverage.

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dannyr
They'll get a lot of signups but having them as regular users is another
matter.

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vaksel
yeah thats why I'd like to see the breakdown, to see how many end up as paid
users

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vaksel
I like the interface, pretty easy to navigate.

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

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jonathanberger
Nothing preventing it at the moment. Go nuts. :)

In seriousness, if we find it's a problem we'd tackle it then. We tried to
prevent premature optimization.

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JMiao
picurio means that i might actually upload and manage photos off my camera.
i'm incredibly lazy about this stuff. congrats to jonathan, laura, and
michael!

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gstar
It looks great, but obviously I haven't been able to play with it yet.

Out of interest, is it built on Cappuccino? That'd be very YC-meta!

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zhyder
Why create a new 'room' methaphor? How is the traditional 'album' one
insufficient?

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jonathanberger
We want people to upload all the pics, not just some. Albums are typically for
only the "good ones."

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.

