Alan Kleymeyer

Yet Another Photo App

Photo applications and websites that create galleries of photos seem to be a dime a dozen; so why is ExpressDigital so successful? 

A key ingrediant is found in Joel's  MicroISV interview:

Michael: ...If you could pick one tip based on your experience in going from zero to hero, what would be the thing you would tell yourself from five years ago if you could give yourself a piece of advice now to be the one thing not to miss - the one thing you should do.

Joel: Can I have two things?

Bob: You can have two things.

Joel: The number one thing is a micro-ISV shouldn't be one person, it should be two people at the very least and one of them should have the business and marketing and sales skills experience.

The second part, and Bob alluded to this earlier, which is my prototypical example of the photo gallery which is probably nine million micro-ISVs have made an application where it's like "Hey, everybody's got these digital cameras my application lets you upload all your pictures and put them on the web and make web galleries." There have been about a million of these and a very tiny number of them have been successful and the vast majority of them have been instant flops. For some reason this is an incredibly appealing idea for software developers to do, maybe because they feel like they know how to do everything, all the steps they're going to need to do to write the code to make this work, but for some reason they never really make it work.

But what I've always told these people time and time again, and they never listen to me, is instead of making the generic "upload your pictures application" take a very, very small niche audience - wedding photographers - and make the ultimate application for wedding photographers. Find out exactly what wedding photographers need. There's a lot of money around wedding photographers, they get paid an awful lot of money, and figure out exactly what their workflow is. If you need to find wedding photographers because they're in the yellow pages and there are directories of these things. Call them all and find out what they want and try to sell them your solution.

Is PhotoReflect too expensive?

This is a great post. Randy does a great job of breaking down the cost and benefits of PhotoReflect  and comparing them to other sites.  Recently I was researching the "free" online photo sites.  Not so much for myself (I create html slideshows and FTP them up to my personal site) but to recommend to friends and family as an alternative to emailing multi-meg files through the Internet.

Or course PhotoReflect is not intended for casual personal use and would not match up well if compared to other sites by the casual photographer.  It's a site tailored to those wishing to promote and sell their work, and for that targeted market, it shines.

Customer Community

I am eager to find out who are customers are and what they think of our software.  Before I started work at ExpressDigital, I tried searching the web for discussions about our company and products.  We were not appearing as predominantly in the results as I expected. 

I soon came across the Digital Imaging Notebook blog,and found this post titled Workflow Software, where he explains why he recommends our software.  I read a few other posts including one where he reviewed another product.  This guy is good.  He is honest and to the point.  There is no doubt in my mind that if our software fails to meet his needs he will drop us in favor of a competitor.  But I'd rather have an honest loyal customer, that will put us to the fire if necessary, than someone that doesn't appreciate the value of our offerings.

I'm subscribed and hope to find more customers like him  I can learn from.

License and Ownership of Work Product

Sweet. I like how we state our policy on ownership of work posted on our PhotoReflect site.  Short and to the point:

3. License and Ownership of Work Product.                          Express Digital shall not gain any ownership interest in the Photographer’s images.

Doing it right on the first day

I started my new job as Senior Developer with ExpressDigital yesterday.  I've had some great jobs in the past.  I feel spoiled that for most of my career, I've actually looked forward to going into work.  I could tell ExpressDigital was going to be one of those places.  I love their products and their software is right up my alley.  They have the intangibles down too.  They arranged to take me out to lunch the first day, and even toasted me!  Talk about feeling welcomed.  I never understood why companies often ignored the little things that make coming to work a joy.  Maybe I didn't get an Aeron Chair,  but I did get my own office with a beautiful view of Lake Austin and the 360 bridge. Sweet.  I'm looking forward to helping make ExpressDigital even more successfull than they already are.   Expect a lot more posts about them here.