Pick Your Photos

I started building this since June last year. I didn't really focus too much into it at the beginning, it was just a way to pass time and play with newer versions of Ruby on Rails.

Sometimes I had bursts of intense coding as I got hooked by a specific feature that I wanted to build. Trying to display a gallery of photos on which every photo displayed keeps it's aspect ratio, it's lazy loaded, works nicely on mobile is quite the feat.

These last few weeks though I have been pouring into it almost a 100% of my free time.

I didn't really want to release something half baked, or that looked bad, given that my intended market is professional photographers and they are really aesthetic/visual beauty oriented.

"If You're Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late"

I've talked with some of photographers and I, more or less, understand what they're looking for. But likely I haven't talked with enough of them. I know they're out there but I am not entirely sure I know where I can reach them in order to market to them.

"Spend more time marketing than building."

I follow a lot of indie hackers and entrepreneurs on Twitter and most of them start first with some marketing pages and then, when they are sure, they start building. I already integrated payments, have a VPS and have the product running (not officially launched yet, only my wife uses it) and I haven't yet built the landing page.

"Build a landing page first."

I am in like 6 months, on and off, into this. I really like what I have right now. It looks good and offers the basic functionality they need for client galleries, selection and delivery. But, again, the people I follow usually talk a lot about how they launched several products in a month, and how they intend to launch, say, 20 products this year. And although I understand where that's coming from I am not really sure I, personally, would love to work like that.

"Fail fast."

I am very likely making more mistakes. These are the ones I could think of the top of my head, but the ones that get you are the ones you don't know about. And from now on the journey is going to get more interesting as I am almost ready for the "launch".

At least with some photographers I know and I can reach out to directly.

So, more mistakes to come soon...

... or rather how my wife did.

I am a professional software engineer. I love building stuff. For a while I had the bug in my head again to start something up on the side, bootstrapped as a side project. I fell victim to the "perfect idea" fallacy though and I had been waiting for a long time for the "lightbulb moment" which never came.

Till one day my wife, a professional photographer, complained about some tools she used to deliver her photo shoots.

After discussing the pros and cons with her, what she liked, what she disliked, I decided that this was as good idea as any, and it was better to get started doing something than just sitting around waiting for the idea.

And so I started...