Pickle Pics

Working with a team I knew from Moldova, we built protoype Android and iOS apps using React Native and Laravel on the backend to test our technical assumptions, work through the UI and make progress towards launching a Beta. The prototypes support backing up photos from phones, Google Photos, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr and using data from those services to sort the users photos. It also intelligently deduplicates and backs up albums, titles, descriptions, and more.

Pickle Pics, Inc. was officially incorporated as a C Corp in Delaware. This enables the company to sign agreements, get Apple developer keys, issue stock options, and do all the other things that make a company a real company. I used Stripe Atlas to create the initial company documents.

After lots of R&D on photo service API, learning about EXIF data, competitive analysis, and iterating on wireframes, I ended up with a specification and designs for a prototype that could be shared with potential customers to find Product Market Fit.

I did Balsamiq wireframes, but the Figma designs were done by a designer I hired.

Check it out:
https://www.figma.com/proto/XqSKtbgKtS4OzDYPAY7qlr/Pickle-Pics?node-id=57%3A1103&starting-point-node-id=57%3A1103

In the spirit of Lean Startup, I wanted to test the market for my product before we built it. So I created a website (https://picklepics.app) that made it appear like the product was already live. It offered a free trial, but advertised different tiers of subscription.

There was a lot of trial and error and updates to the website. In the end, I spent $1,200 on Google ads for photo organization and backing up Facebook photos. I got 300 sign ups and 11 people entered their credit card on the ugliest Word Press form ever! The idea has legs! :-)

I really wanted this product, but did anyone else? I read The Mom Test as a guide on how to do customer interviews. The main tactic is to ask people about their problems and not to pitch your solution. In my case, as a parent, I see other parents take pictures of their kids all the time at soccer games and school events. When I do, I pounce and ask them "What are you going to do with that photo? What problems do you have doing that?" I quickly found out that almost all parents said a few things:

• They took this photo so that they and their child could remember this moment
• They were already worried that they would never find the photo again
• Despite having Google or Apple photos on their phone, they said they "do nothing" to organize their photos and were sad and embarrased about that
• "No time" is the overwhelming reason why
• They take "3-5" shots per scene to "make sure I get a good one"
• "Texting" was the main way to share the photo with the grandparents

From all that, I knew Pickle Pics could add value to them only if it saved a lot of time, but that users are leaving breadcrumbs for us to find their valuable photos.

In the end, I surveyed or interviewed over 70 parents.

During Covid, I tried to organize my photos and get them all into Google Photos. It was impossible to get albums, descriptions, and other data from Facebook and Flickr into Google. Uploading photos from old hard drives also create many copies. I couldn't believe that in 2021, photo organization was still a mess. Google and Apple do some temporary sorting in how they display your photos, but it's opaque on what it's doing and not that great. I decide to create a service that would:

• Automatically back up your photos AND any albums, titles, etc from anywhere, ongoing
• Do "perceptual" de-duplication so there's only ever one shot per moment
• Make it easy to share my curated feed with my mom, brothers, etc.
• Identify multiple photos taken of the same scene and hide the outtakes if I had shared one of them

Then I realized, by tapping into my sharing behavior, my photos would be being organized with no extra effort from me. As a parent with no time, I really wanted this product for myself and would be happy to pay $100 a year for it. So I quit my job and founded Pickle Pics.

By 2012, I had a camera phone and several digital cameras. I had photos on my phone, work and home computers, Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and Dropbox. It was a mess and still is. I patented an invention to gather those photos from all those sources. It would identify shots of the same moment, even if the bytes of the files are different, and create a single archive record. The data from all the sources would be collected into the single record. The outcome is no duplicates, even if the file has been modified, and tags and descriptions from social media get saved with the original resolution file.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130129258

I built a web app to delete duplicates and reorder the photos by date taken. At the time, Flickr only ordered photos by date uploaded, so I wrote code to go through all my photos and edit the date uploaded to match the date taken. I also created a feature to batch delete duplicates. This was the beginning of my journey on DIY photo organization. The site is still live (http://flickrocd.com/) but no longer functional.