Fotny

Almost three years ago, the idea for Fotny started at my brother’s wedding. I was standing there with a printed photo thinking, “This should be digital. I just want to post it on Instagram.” That simple moment kicked off everything.

After that, I started noticing use cases everywhere: parties, conferences, birthdays, team buildings. Any time people took photos, the same problem kept showing up: everyone wants the pictures, nobody wants the hassle. I talked to a bunch of people about it, and almost everyone said, “Yeah, that would actually be useful.” That gave me enough confidence to keep going.

Somewhere along the way, I thought: what if AI could help here?
That’s when I added face recognition to automatically group photos by people. This changed the whole product direction and became one of the most unique things Fotny offers today. Photographers love the idea of saving time, and guests love not having to dig through hundreds of random photos.

I initially launched a simple version and actually got a bit of organic traffic and a tiny bit of revenue — nothing big, but enough to feel real. Then I made a classic mistake: I killed my old messy WordPress site and “upgraded” to something way more polished. And boom… my traffic tanked for a couple of months. It’s finally starting to recover now, but it hurt.

Right now my biggest struggle is marketing. As an engineer, building is the easy part. Getting people to find what I built is the hard part. I’m slowly learning, experimenting, and trying not to fall into the trap of rebuilding things again instead of promoting them.

Anyway, that’s where I am today — finally launching properly, sharing openly, and hoping that Fotny finds its crowd.

Happy to answer anything or get feedback!