5 ms·

PicPlum (YC S11): Beautiful Prints, Automatically Mailed for You

144 points by canistr 15y ago

brlewis 15y ago
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."
- martianpenguin 15y ago
  you mean something like wells fargo buying wachovia?
- bfung 15y ago
  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...
jamesteow 15y ago
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.
chrisgoodrich 15y ago
Interesting that Paul & Akshay decided to take over another YC company rather than run with their own idea.
pc 15y ago
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.
damoncali 15y ago
I had this very idea a few years ago, and did nothing with it. Glad to see someone running with the concept!
blackboxxx 15y ago
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.
qeorge 15y ago
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.
- dkokelley 15y ago
  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)
  - abstractbill 15y ago
    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.
    - colomon 15y ago
      Wouldn't be surprised if Skyping with their grandchildren is stronger. ;)
zokiboy 15y ago
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?
- lyime 15y ago
  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.
canistr 15y ago
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.
- lyime 15y ago
  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.
callmeed 15y ago
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
- uladzislau 15y ago
  Totally right, prints are just as obsolete as desktops from other today's front page thread. Especially now when you have iPads and other tablets with outstanding picture quality.
- martianpenguin 15y ago
  I think you're comparing the wrong things here. People ask for the photos on disc because they can then go print as many copies as they want for a fraction of the price.
- frossie 15y ago
  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. ]
btucker 15y ago
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?
adamgray 15y ago
Doesn't Shutterfly already offer this service?
- rorrr 15y ago
  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.
  - Daniel_Newby 15y ago
    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.
inmygarage 15y ago
Congrats on your launch! Do you have plans to integrate with services like Flickr, Instagram, etc?
- lyime 15y ago
  Yes we do! We want to make it super easy to get your photos into Picplum. Stay tuned.
badclient 15y ago
My grandma doesn't have an email address. Why do you require it for recipients?
- jhawk28 15y ago
  You just need to select "Print Only" and then no email is requested.
tednaleid 15y ago
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/ 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.
- PStamatiou 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
pnathan 15y ago
Interesting! I do like having selected photos printed out for non-computer viewing. :-)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jseliger 15y ago
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".
bostonvaulter2 15y ago
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.

144 points by canistr 15y ago

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."

martianpenguin 15y ago
you mean something like wells fargo buying wachovia?
bfung 15y ago
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...

jamesteow 15y ago

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.

chrisgoodrich 15y ago

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

pc 15y ago

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.

damoncali 15y ago

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

blackboxxx 15y ago

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.

qeorge 15y ago

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.

dkokelley 15y ago
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)
- abstractbill 15y ago
  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.
  - colomon 15y ago
    Wouldn't be surprised if Skyping with their grandchildren is stronger. ;)

zokiboy 15y ago

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?

lyime 15y ago
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.

canistr 15y ago

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.

lyime 15y ago
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.

callmeed 15y ago

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

uladzislau 15y ago
Totally right, prints are just as obsolete as desktops from other today's front page thread. Especially now when you have iPads and other tablets with outstanding picture quality.
martianpenguin 15y ago
I think you're comparing the wrong things here. People ask for the photos on disc because they can then go print as many copies as they want for a fraction of the price.
frossie 15y ago
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. ]

btucker 15y ago

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?

adamgray 15y ago

Doesn't Shutterfly already offer this service?

rorrr 15y ago
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.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  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.

inmygarage 15y ago

Congrats on your launch! Do you have plans to integrate with services like Flickr, Instagram, etc?

lyime 15y ago
Yes we do! We want to make it super easy to get your photos into Picplum. Stay tuned.

badclient 15y ago

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

jhawk28 15y ago
You just need to select "Print Only" and then no email is requested.

tednaleid 15y ago

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/ 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.

PStamatiou 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

pnathan 15y ago

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

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jseliger 15y ago

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".

bostonvaulter2 15y ago

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.