Smugmug
A venture for premium photo sharing:
Posted in: Uncategorized
-
David Vogt
Posted in: Uncategorized
Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
ETEC 522 – May 2012
Ventures in Learning Technology
-
Before you publish your posting, please make sure that you select a category (eg. Introductions) as well as assign some meaningful tags (keywords).
- c
- compose new post
- j
- next post/next comment
- k
- previous post/previous comment
- r
- reply
- o
- show/hide comments
- t
- go to top
- l
- go to login
- h
- show/hide help
- esc
- cancel
mackenzie 3:06 pm on May 23, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Overall, this pitch for Smugmug was energetic and fun despite its lack of visuals, which is interesting since it is promoting a site for photosharing. Although the CEO does provide a definition of the service, what differentiates it from other sites, and its profitability, it fails to present a pain point or how it resolves the pain, its marketing strategies, the competition, or how much money they need to grow. Although I didn’t mention championship, I could assume that since they already have over 100,000 customers that they must be producing a reasonably successful product to which they are already attracting customers. Profitability is somewhat in question since I don’t know how much they are charging for the service. Potentially, they could be charging only one dollar for a yearly subscription which devalues many previous assumptions in regards to value, attraction and competitiveness of the service. Having more holes than a sieve in the presentation, I would not consider this opportunity for investment even with more information. Based on my knowledge of photosharing and contrary to the claims of the CEO, picture quality is based on resolution; greater Giga Byte storage provides the client with two possibilities, fewer pictures at better quality or more pictures at lower quality. Photoquality is at the discretion of the client, not the photosharing site.
Colin Kam 6:08 am on May 24, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
NO, I would not invest in this venture. After watching the video, I kept asking myself “why would I want to invest in this company?” When I think of photo sharing websites, I think of the big-name competitors: Flickr, Photobucket, and maybe even SkyDrive and Facebook. Even though they may have limitations (upload size, storage size, ads, etc.), these services are free!!! (… and have more registered users than Smugmug). More registered users typically mean those companies pop-up first when people type “photo sharing” on a search engine.
Aside from lack of ads and ability to upload high-quality photos, Smugmug did not provide good reasons to invest in their company. As a novice photographer, I would still use Flickr despite a 300MB upload limit, since I could upload 15MB photos (which would translate to high-quality images). If I needed more space, I could always create another free account. If Smugmug had acknowledged its competitors and provided a clear competitive advantage (in terms of either cost or differentiation) instead, I might have been more open-minded and listened to the longer venture pitch.
chrisaitken 6:15 am on May 25, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree Colin. Too many competitors offering the freemium model. I’m not sure how Smugmug could attract customers without any kind of free service to trial.