Everyone, welcome to the Foto Podcast. My name is Michael Howard. I'm one of the co-founders here at Foto. It is April 23rd, 2024. So I just thought I'd make it really quick, podcast and update you on something a couple of things that we're thinking about. And this is just so you know, I am.
I am just going to do this in one take. So this may not be the cleanest podcast ever. And it's a little off the top of my head, but I feel like it's important for me to connect with all of you. At least once a month. So you can hear my voice and let you kind of in on what we're thinking about. So right now we've you know, we've had a lot of people interested in photo and we have a lot of people kind of asking more releasing.
We've been telling people four to six months to go public. And I think really what that means is that photo could launch in four to six months in various states or you know, it could be a different state in terms of progress at that time. So a lot of this is kind of tied to funding and can kind of continuing on what we're doing now. And so I kind of wanted to run you through three scenarios of how we what we could do over the next year.
And this is all tied to funding essentially with photo. So option one for us is continuing to do what we're doing now. And we're doing a two person team and really just you know, it's me and see he'll is my co founder. He's the technical person. So he's the one doing all the software development. I'm one that's helping kind of got the vision and deciding on what features we should build and prioritizing things and doing the marketing and connecting with the audience.
Handling legal documents. All of that stuff. We continue what we're doing now. And we could push public version of photo out in four to six months. And so you guys right, so everything has pros and cons. So the con to that is that photo would probably be still missing some key features. It still may not have all the bugs squashed and fixed. But we could at least get it out publicly and see what happens and get feedback from a wider group of people.
The other con though about that is you know, if it does well, then we're going to have a lot of users and a lot of photos being uploaded, which means our cloud computing cost is going to go through the roof. We don't have a lot of fallback funding right now to handle that. And then we would get in a situation where we would need to raise some money somehow.
And there's a couple different options we have with that either through equity crowdfunding angel investors, you know, VCs or just turning on something for subscriptions or something that's pretty simple that people just want to pay to help support the photo build. But we would be pressed at that point to do one of those three like pretty immediately if photo started getting adopted at a fairly good clip.
And this you know, it could happen as soon as we turn it on Friday and then by Monday like we're drowning, you know, we just don't know. Could also turn it on a Friday and then nobody really cares. That's also a very viable option and probably what is more likely when we go public. But we need to prepare for all scenarios. The other option is option two would be kind of tapping into the community that's forming around photo now.
If you're listening to this or if you follow us on Instagram or threads, a sub stack or any of those places, the other option is we could see what you thought would be valuable in terms of just continuing to donate to photo just because you believe in what we're doing on a monthly basis. It makes those recurring and but the goal would be to raise enough money or get enough people donating that we could hire two more full time developers.
And that would mean we know we could double or triple our speed. So even if we do launch in four to six months, photo would have, you know, two to three times more features, two to three times more stability, things like that. That's an option kind of done some back of the napkin math, if you will, and we would probably need 4,000 people, you know, donating $5 a month roughly. And that would get us where we need to be to bring on to more full time developers plus the heal.
You know, I could set something up through like a square space or something like that, which our marketing site is through, but I could also, you know, we do have sub stack so people could just become a paid subscriber to sub stack and do it that way, which is $5 a month or $60 for the year.
And that would get us where we need to be, but we would need like 4,000 people right now, you know, we have a little over a hundred paid subscribers that are supporting us, which is great. And we love and appreciate so dearly, but you know, it's not enough to hire full time developers, but it does help keep the lights on for sure for what we're building now.
So it's wonderful that people see what we're doing and they've chosen to kind of chose and to support us financially, which is fantastic. And we're so grateful. Option 3 is we do want to do an equity crowdfunding campaign at some point. And so this is where anybody that pays attention to photo can become an investor and own shares in photo.
So that if we ever go public or if we ever choose to sell photo for some reason, you would get a financial return. So you would be like you being an actual financial investor. And you would get, yeah, return on your investment at some point down the line if one of those two things happen. That would be a little higher stakes yet, you know, there's a $100 minimum to invest in photo if we did that. I think the max is like 4,000 or something.
And then we could run something like that before we go public. You know, I could do something in a month. But you know, I question if our audience is big enough to do something like that to raise the amount of money we need, which would be, you know, between 150,000 to $250,000 at minimum to get two full time developers on.
We could also wait and do that when we go public, you know, part of my fears, part of my personal fears, if we can't get photo with Polish is what we want, when we go public, then that could leave a slightly bad impression on people. And then so they wouldn't want to invest when we go public at that point. You know, all of it's tricky, nothing guaranteed.
But that would allow us to kind of still continue to build through the community this forming on photo and doing something different than what most tech companies do, which is exciting and something we're heavily considering. Option four, I don't even know what option I'm on now would be going through angel investors or VCs, which is a traditional path that tech startups take.
But that's how most people end up in terms of big tech. So, you know, we could get kind of precede, we could orient not guarantee we could try to get precede or seed investment, which is still very hard in terms of the investment climate that's out there right now, especially for like a social media app, a lot of the dollars are going towards AI type stuff right now.
So it's not an easy fundraising pitch, especially when everything's so much toward the video, I don't know how much Silicon Valley right now is loving still photography, unless you're tying it into AI in some way. So that's just kind of where that's at in terms of the industry, but that's something we could potentially try to do and raise the problem of that is it's going to push us down a path of needing to raise more typically.
And once you get into like a series a or series B, basically when you're getting to where you're raising tens of millions, right, which is probably like your second or third round of fundraising people getting involved at that level expect you to become a billion dollar company and they expect an exit at that point, which is either selling or going public.
So you're kind of committing down to one of those paths at that point and there's a whole bunch of you know some pitfalls in terms of that of where you know if you're at that point, you're doing great financially, but you know you're also kind of splitting your incentive structure to keeping the users happy, but also you have the maximize profit for your shareholders at that time.
And so you're chasing profits a lot at some point and then that could you know if you're chasing profits, then that could be at a detriment to the user experience and where you're doing money grabs more than doing things that really make a great yeah just to experience online experience for the user ultimately even if it doesn't generate a bunch of money all the time.
So you start getting into some conflicts of interest, you have a board of the board doesn't like what you're doing like they could fire me they could fire so heal whatever so we kind of lose control could we potentially could lose control the company if we go down that path. So these are all things we're weighing you know getting a startup off the ground, especially like photo is extremely difficult that's why like most startups fail most companies fail.
And so far we're grateful for the attention and the interest that we've got we feel like we are on a great path and we want to continue that it's just a question of speed. Essentially so like Cihil and I can eventually get photo to where it's very polished and there's a lot of features, but if it's just at the current pace, you know realistically you're probably looking at a couple like years to make it like a really mature. It almost has everything you want type of piece of software.
So the I guess option five is we could stick with just Cihil and I go public four to six months it'll be much better than when it is now it still probably won't have all the building with those that everybody wants there still might be some slightly annoying bugs here and there but could release a paid feature or first paid feature with photo which should be a portfolio tab or thinking maybe $10 a month for that.
And that could be launched day one and go public and hope that would bring in enough money to kind of support. You know to help us grow and add members to the team where I'm at personally financial right now is I'm you know I'm running two companies are running photo and I'm running a fine art print lab that I own called mesea.
And my income comes from there so I do not photo I do not I have not paid myself and I you know it will be a while before I take a salary or anything from photo because we need to build the team out first before I can get there and we need to have enough recurring revenue that it makes sense that I can do that.
And start transitioning some of my salary from there or from photo instead of from use a yeah so that the goal for us is just getting enough money that you know can get three developers and maybe one designer and then I think we can make a lot of progress very quickly for a small team and I think we've done that even just with Ciel and I has been really great so funding is kind of where we I at least my head has been and how to navigate the next four to six months specifically.
And what decisions to make because all of that's all those options and all the strategies definitely affect you the user and the effect the company long term what we're building in terms of how much freedom we have how fast we build it that kind of thing.
So the thing that we launch recently a couple days ago or yesterday actually is a content moderation feature where you can not block anything you can set it to blurred or can hide everything and this is for images that contain new to your violence how that works is you know we're using a software piece of software that is automated and is kind of using kind of visual recognition code essentially your software.
So it's automated but it's not going to be perfect and so we're kind of seeing what is getting flagged and where we can adjust the settings because we can adjust some settings on in terms of like making it more strict or less strict you know more sensitive less sensitive that kind of thing.
So we're watching that so far so good if you are private beta user we need everybody to update to the latest version of photo so that is working so that allows us to test that more frequently and with more thoroughness also just real quick on what we're having what we're going to be working on I would say in May.
Since we're at the end of April we're going to try to do a small update now fixing some small bugs adding like a pull the refresh on the account profile page and then we're going to try to work on adding a vertical scroll feature when you go to somebody's account profile page and you tap on one of their pictures instead of having to hit the back arrow you would just be able to scroll up or down vertically within their account profile like basically it feel like the home feed at that point.
So we're trying to add that because I think we can add that fairly easily so we're going to do that we're wrapping up the UI design for the tag feature I'm hoping that we can start software development on that next month and then beyond that I think we need to build the paid first paid for pro feature which will be the portfolio tab and then beyond that even farther is basically doing bugs getting a lot just smoothing out with can adding things.
Like editing comments eventually we need to add mentions we can mention another user or count but the main thing is it will be just polishing it up those are kind of what we need bare minimum I think to go public and I'm hoping we can get those done in the next 46 months or sooner.
There is a chance we might do another public beta previously been doing kind of private beta but we may just open up to just a pure public beta closer to launching like full on publicly and this would be to help us test onboarding for new users before we just open the floodgates to like everybody.
So that's something we could maybe do in three to five months keep an eye out for that yeah and just thank you so much for your interest like you guys really just blowing us away and you're helping us so much we constantly are being affirmed by you and other people online that we bump into that there needs to be a new photo sharing out and so that's what we're building and we want to give users control over their online experience versus us.
You know being the dictator of everything and deciding what you should see or should not see.
But yeah so we have a lot to build and a lot to work on but that's where we're at for now so if you have any comments or thoughts this will be posted on our substack you can just subscribe for free that's kind of where we have our email newsletter to keep everybody updated and you can leave comments you know on this post on substack I would be glad to dialogue back and forth with you there so thank you so much and we'll talk soon. Bye.