Need feedback for validating ideas on my cloud storage for pictures & videos

I think competing with Google Photos and Apple Photos is going to be next to impossible if you don't figure out a differentiator that is very important to users. Especially if the product is going to be paid. Ads can make money but from what I've heard they're not really viable until you have like, hundreds of thousands of users.
My product, Stowbots (stowbots.com) is in this space as well but I've found differentiators that I think people will care about.

Hi

this sounds interesting, but challenging... as you said this is a matter of resources and scale to have overhead cost as low as possible.

I think that regular users are a the ones left without options right now. you have professional services like flikr, or almost free options like Russian sites with very low cost but you need to connect to your computer and take the time to upload and delete from the phone, there are other available options that will do it for you up to some gb like gooogle photos, but then privacy becomes an issue... I believe almost everyone is becoming skeptic about big corp data handling practices..

regarding space and photos I have always believed something could work is a kind of "rented temporal space" normally people don't care about space.. and even though your phone is constantly remaining you that you need to free space you can continue your normal daily activities in such state.. you simply don't care about it until is inevitable and critical. and this state usually happens when you are not in your daily routine, you are on holidays.. you are in a concert and at that time you find out you can't take even one picture.

so you could target travelers and tell them hey you can move this 150/350/500 old pictures from your phone during your travel, we will store them for 2 weeks while you are abroad and then you can decide to pay to keep them or download them to your computer or hard drive, or just delete them... now the point here is that many people after coming back from vacations won't go through the photos, and the fear of losing them will motivate them to pay. if the service runs smoothly and the price is acceptable it will be a deal for them..

or you could charge upfront for the 2 week storage which will be very low presumably and you can push a lot with the pain there, your adds could be something like: you have spent $$$ on your awesome holiday and you won't have any memories of it because you don't have space for photos, for just $5 you could free space and take as many pictures you want.
at this point, people have already ste up their mind to enjoy and spend for that joy.. so they will be easier to convince to buy the service.

I would leave adds as the very last option.. nobody likes them.. and even less when you are trying to see or show your pictures

Hey Andreu nice project.

Disclaimer: I'm also working on a similar solution like this. I'm currently in an analysis paralysis phase so there's nothing to show but that's fine for me, I'm not in a hurry. So, just this disclaimer in case you see something in the future that looks just like yours :P

Answers:

How are you personally dealing right now with storing & sharing your memories (pics & videos)?

Depending on the target they go in either of these three:

• Google Photos - Personal, all my photos
• Facebook - Friends, coworkers etc
• Whatsapp - Close family

Are you currently using any cloud service for that? What features you like and which you don't, or what features are missing?

• Yes, Google Photos.

Features I like: Search and navigation.

Search is very good (and may seem a bit creepy for non tech people) If you type "Beach" it shows you all the beach photos regardless of the location.

The navigation is really cool too, you can scroll faster and the years go by really quick.

• Dislikes: Not a dislike per se but after a few years, you can accumulate thousands of photos, often times they are very similar (like when you're taking 10 photos of the same thing just to get one right) . Apple photos added a new feature recently to address this problem, I haven't used it yet, but here's a demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psL_5RIBqnY&feature=youtu.be&t=3039

Are you paying for any service?

Nope, it's free (forever?) I think that's because I own a Google Pixel.

Are you willing to try out a new one? Would you pay for it?

• Try absolutely, but I would need an export solution or something similar. I might pay for it, but of course has to be better than free.

Is subscriptions / paid plans a good idea?

• I think it is

What ads system would you recommend for this audience?

Aaaaand that's a bit of the problem. The audience is everyone

What other business models could be interesting, without selling away user's privacy? I'm not planning on sharing media files with third party, at least not without user manual permission on specific ones.

I cannot think of anything else than subscriptions. For ads to work they need to:

A) Have a lot of traffic but no one will visit the site unless you follow the social network model, where the photos are public (like instagram) and you create a "followers / influencer" dichotomy which I personally don't like.

And B) You have to profile your users in age, gender, ethnicity etc. etc so your ads are better targeted.

See Google and Facebook ads preferences to see what I'm saying:

https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/