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October 10, 2007
flauntR Founder On Competing With Adobe and Low-cost Startups
Today we have a QandA with Bal Balaji, currently heading up online photo editing site flauntr.com, and founder of the company that developed it, DeviceDriven.
Regular readers will recognize his name as the founder and former CTO of mobile software firm Surfkitchen, and because he's won our puzzler contest a couple of times by now.
Read on to find out what happened when he launched the web-based image editor a week or so ago, how he's proven his concept of 'affordable startups', and why this entrepreneur won't tell you which mobilephone is the best - we've tried to get him to give us advice on the topic to no avail.
The following is based on a demo and interview in Zurich with follow up by email.
We read that the one-click wizardry that flauntr offers is an Adobe Photoshop "killer" (source Killer Startups review). It is not the first time you've created something to challenge Adobe, right?
Right, I founded SurfKitchen which competes against Adobe in the on-device-portal space. SurfKitchen continues to hold its ground. As a result I know quite a few “great” people at Adobe. But that does not preclude hand-to-hand combat in the marketplace.
Calling flauntR a Photoshop-killer is flattering but inaccurate. Photoshop is a power tool for professionals with a steep learning curve and 600 dollar price-tag to match. FlauntR is a free online creative suite for image editing with one-click effects aimed at consumers.
You told us that the tool had 5000 users register in the first two days. You didn't put out a press release or get written about in TechCrunch or Slashdot, so how did the word get out?
Last week was amazing. Within a week flauntR moved from 250 to 200,000 results in Google. Adobe featured flauntR on their flex.org showcase. flauntR was also the editors pick on the Yahoo gallery.
It all started with some small, quality bloggers who covered flauntR in great detail. One of them called “DemoGirl” even did a screen cast.
Within hours it was in German, French, Italian, Portugese, Romanian, Spanish and even Chinese blogs. We guess it is the quality of the posts by the bloggers which delivered the numbers.
How will you generate revenues?
Image editing will always remain free for consumers, we will not have a "freemium model". Printing, which we will launch prior to Christmas is a key revenue stream. There are other equally significant revenue streams which we would rather not disclose.
On the KillerStartups site, our vote was that FlauntR would get acquired. The majority of other readers at that point in time voted that it would receive VC funding. Any comments?
flauntR has begun raising a round of funding as backup for the funding provided by DeviceDriven. We have to admit that there are signals of interest in acquiring the company. This is primarily due to its unique position in the digital imaging value chain. So we are also taking an immediate exit possibility seriously.
What kind of integration to the bigname social networks and photo sharing sites do you have, and why?
At present flauntR supports only flickr. flauntR will be integrated with 16 photo sharing sites and social networks within 2007. This is because flauntR’s image editing capabilities are complementary to photo sharing and social network sites.
You said that flauntR was developed by DeviceDriven, your software design services company based in India. How long did it take your team to develop it?
We have been at it for about 6 months. It is all built in Trivandrum which happens to have a 20,000 strong developer community. It is considered by National Geographic to be among the 50 places of a lifetime.
How much did it cost?
To date we have invested close to 400K USD on development and infrastructure. We have built significantly more than we have launched.
Guess that proves your conept of an affordable startup. What was the biggest challenge?
Biggest challenge in the past: Parking our convergent P2P network project called cloudHub before starting on flauntR.
Then the biggest challenge was to get the UI right. Making things easy is difficult, and requires extensive user testing and re-design. The UI will continue to remain a challenge, especially since we shall be launching 7 more applications in 2-3 week intervals over the coming months.
Seven? Please confirm that.
Yes. Additional products like photostylR and photoeditR. These are not feature releases but standalone applications.
Can you name some of DeviceDriven's other customers and what the team's strengths are?
DeviceDriven is solely focused on on-device application development. We have done over 200 projects for the big names like Qualcomm, Nokia, BenQ and Siemens, and start-ups like RealEyes3D, flyTxt and Colibria. [This is the reason he won't endorse a particular phone manufacturer].
Our key differentiator is our deep knowledge of mobile device platforms and UI design. I think flauntR has made good use in particular of the UI design skill set.
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Thanks for the interview. And thanks for reading the alarm:clock euro.
Posted on October 10, 2007 10:09 AM | Posted to Online services | Permalink
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