HN Explorer

Ask HN: Please review my startup - Stockyoo.com

38 points by hellweaver666 ↗ HN
I've been working hard on this for a few weeks now (around looking after my 3 month old son), and I'm about to do my pre-launch test (likely a few hundred GBP worth of Facebook ads targeted at a young demographic) to see if there is much interest.

I'd love it if you could check out the site and let me know what you think of it (concept, copy, design etc).

One thing I'm interested to know is if it's immediately obvious what the purpose of the site is at this stage, or if I need to make it more obvious.

You can find the site at http://stockyoo.com

Thanks!

41 comments

[ 173 ms ] story [ 1706 ms ] thread
retroafroman
I'd personally like to see some more examples. If you already have some content, it would be nice to have a link to a sample gallery (or top pictures, or something) on the front page. The examples of what not to send are good, but what are some examples of what you want?
hellweaver666
At the moment... we have pretty much nothing, but I'm going to submit a bunch of my photos and get some friends and family to do the same to get a small user base going before it goes properly live. At the moment, I just want to gather a few email addresses to see if people are interested in the idea at all.
mrspeaker
Great idea! I agree with retroafroman - home page should have some examples - and I'd do an example photo next to, or composited on top of, the "end result" of the photo used in a website. This way people who don't understand the world of stock photography will visually see why people might want their snaps.
dot
I had a similar idea a little while ago, but centered around news and event photos. Send in your geo-tagged photos a political demonstration, an accident, a crime or a celebrity fling... Journalists could then search for hot spots around the world with a lot of activity right now... maybe something to think about. Good luck!
nicholaides
There are types of users you want to attract: buyers and sellers/submitters. It seems like the home page is geared towards the sellers, which makes sense because you need to get a bunch of photos for it to be useful to buyers.

The one thing I would note is that it's not quite obvious what the photos will be used for, which may make it hard to determine what type of pictures you want. I was able to infer that it's for stock photography, but I'm pretty sure I only know what that is because I do web development.

One more tip that's a little off-topic: If this takes off (and hopefully it will) you'll be getting a deluge of photos that will need categorization and moderation. You should check out http://houdinihq.com/ which offers an easy API for using Mechanical Turk. You can email me at mike@ablegray.com and I'll hook you up with the guy who runs it.

hellweaver666
Thanks - looks useful! I'm hoping to get users to do their own tagging after the photo has been approved, but I'll still need to approve tags which would likely become a bit of a bitch after a while - a way of automating will definitely be useful!
rezrovs
"As long as you can email them to us" - is this the only mechanism for sending the photos? I realise you might have written this to simplify the page, but my first reaction was that I'd rather be able to upload them. Then on the 'Photo Guide' I do read that I can upload them. Perhaps instead of that sentence on the home page it would be better to link to the Photo Guide.

Looks like a pretty good idea though :) Good luck with it!

hellweaver666
I wanted to make it easy for people to share the photos straight from their mobile device. I know a lot of phones don't have built in upload facilities (e.g. the iphone) so I wanted to make sure there was a mechanism to these people to get the photos to us. I had considered MMS but decided email would be the best solution in this day and age.

I definitely will allow browser based uploads at some point in the future.

fleitz
iPhone definitely has upload facilities. I share photos from my phone directly to Facebook. I know it's not supported in Mobile Safari, but it's possible. I'd implement something like swfupload so that it's easy to upload the photos on to your site.
simonk
Isn't swfupload flash?

But, anyways it won't work on something like the iPhone because there is not folder structure for it to look for something. You have to build a iphone app like Facebook did.

znt
It sounds like a good idea. Why don't you explain the revenue process using catchy graphics like: 1- Take photo 2- Submit 3- Profit!!!
hellweaver666
I definitely need to tart things up a bit, the homepage is currently a merge of what will be the final site (focused equally on buyers/sellers) and my test page to gather email addresses.

I might see if I can fit this in - perhaps where the current text blocks are at the moment.

DirtyAndy
I appreciate that initially you need photos and maybe that is why the site is geared as it is, but what you really need to be testing is if you can sell the photos, will people come to you to buy them.

I'd assume the "cell phone generation" is a slightly younger mix, one person telling someone else that they managed to top up their phone credit this month from the money made from selling cell phone pictures is going to be all the advertising you need, could be very viral in that regard.

But marketing those photos to potential buyers is probably where the hard work begins, and in my opinion your site says nothing to point me in the direction of buying photos, what I could use them for etc. iStockPhoto, Getty Images and the like don't target photographers on their homepage, they target people who use photos and you need to do that to.

Awesome idea though, I really like it, I can really see how you can make money from it and how people might find it useful. Being able to geotag and search against that would be amazing too - concerts, riots, natural disasters etc etc. Good luck. (Future feature, let Twitter trends create a list of "Photos we need now" so that when photographers come to your site they know what bloggers might be looking for).

simonsarris
I agree that finding buyers will be the big thing here.

I suspect a large, untapped market for this sort of thing for local newspapers as the buyers. Make sure there's good local search.

Photos of a fire in the town, or some store's opening, or any other impromptu news-worthy event will be captured via cameraphone before reporters hit the scene and these photos will be of good worth to the local papers.

dho
Why should local papers use your service when they can ask their readers to send them the photos directly? At least here in Switzerland there are already newspapers doing this.
DirtyAndy
News breaks, you write an article and you go to this site and find a photo for your article and post article with photo.

Or you post the article with a message (like BBC does too) saying "Are you there, send photos etc", go back update the article with someones photo etc.

Yes I know readers will automatically send some photos in, but a live stock library is a really good idea to complement readers photos (and whilst I might send a photo to the BBC, my local paper is pretty low down my list - I appreciate that differs on quality of local though).

mvalle
I suppose getting the GPS co-ordinates would help the local search. Most modern smart-phones have GPS nowadays, and I believe that they GPS co-ordinates are embedded into the images.
adamklein
Needs a better tagline than "Make easy money from the photos on your camera phone!" How about, "Profit From Your Pictures!"
hellweaver666
I'm currently reading a book that goes into detail about the psychology of writing great selling headlines and will improve it when I understand things a bit better.

I had thought about using the phrase "profit" but was concerned it sounded a bit too business-oriented for the target market which is teens and those in their early twenties.

tsbaron
I would also mention somewhere that this is a marketplace for photos. There is a heavy focus on selling photos but almost none on buying them until the third box at the bottom.
hellweaver666
that's deliberate. At the moment, we don't have any users in either category - we have to get the photos in before we can start selling them, so that's my priority to start with.
apowell
How are you going to handle gathering model releases for the individuals in the photos? For example, iStockPhoto has detailed requirements on which photos require a model release (http://www.istockphoto.com/tutorial_9.0_modelrelease.php).
hellweaver666
That's a good point. I'm not sure if this will fly, but as I understand it, getting a model release is the photographers responsibility. I will simply require them to "agree" to a statement that declares they have the permission of all people in the photo.
andrewjshults
While you can probably indemnify yourself against legal responsibility of a photographer not getting a model release, based on your target photographers (teens and twenty somethings taking photos with camera phones i.e. in a hurry), this is something that could quickly kill your reputation if someone uses one of your images and gets sued because the photographer never got a model release. One suggestion on this would be to have something in your mobile app that would allow the user to collect the model release at the time of capture. I'm sure there are a lot of legal issues with what would be considered an appropriate signature.

One of the reasons people feel comfortable using crowd sourced stock photo sites like ShutterStock and iStockPhoto is that they are willing to take up to a certain $ amount of the legal responsibility you get sued for using an image (as long as you use it within their guidelines). If your target buyers are news outlets (who are allowed to use images more liberally than for commercial use) this might not be a huge issue, but I'd be kind of wary about using a stock photo site that basically took the stance that I had to counter sue the photographer. Not a idea killer, but it's worth looking at what the established players do to see if it makes sense from your business perspective.

d4ft
Getty images bought a company like this in the mid 2000's. They did current-event photography from phones. Might be something worth looking into.
jkent
That company was iStockPhoto.com, if anyone is curious.
raquo
Is a photo of Virgin balloon really copyright infringement, or is it just you taking the safe side? (referring to Photo Guide)
binarymax
On the Photo-Guide it might be a good idea to provide 'What to send' examples to contrast your 'what not to send'.
jkent
This is a neat concept - if you have indexed, up to date content, then people will pay for it - particularly the news outlets. They buy images all the time.

Can you tag images as they arrive in near real time?

A twitter for real-time photos, perhaps?

WesleyJohnson
Using IE8 at work and there is an IE conditional showing through on the page just above the photo header:

<!--[if IE lt 9]> <![endif]-->

jawns
Based solely on the domain name, I assumed your site had to do with financial stocks, rather than stock photos.

If you want a descriptive domain name, it looks like these are available:

* STOCKMOBILEPHOTOS.COM * STOCKCELLPHOTOS.COM * CAMSTOCKPHOTOS.COM

treeface
On the other hand, I might actually click on a domain called "stockyoo.com" out of curiosity, whereas I would assume something called "camstockphotos.com" is probably a scam site or the poor product of a domain squatter.

Then again, I never buy stock photos.

hellweaver666
That's what I was thinking... I'm looking to build a memorable brand name (more like digg, reddit, google etc) and a domain packed with keywords isn't the best way to achieve that.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
patorjk
Have you done any research into how to price the photos and who the buyers would be? $1 seems a little low. If news agencies would be the target, I would assume they'd be willing to pay more. You may also want to allow people to put up Creative Commons licensed photos. It could get you more users, which would lead to more people looking at the photos.
fleitz
Concept is great, copy is ok. I'd be more concerned about finding buyers for the photos than getting the photos.

Tailor your homepage towards the buyers and run Facebook ads along the lines of 'Pizza for your cell phone pics'. Instead of buying FB ads, why not spam the craigslist gigs section?

Where are you planning on advertising for buyers?

ig1
I think it's pretty hard to break into this market as most of the big players are already over-saturated with photographs in most standard categories. It might make more sense to focus on a specific subset of the market that's under-represented (shots of people doing activities, etc.) or local news events.

Also given your audience you might need to be extra careful with model releases, because if the people in the photographs are minors their parents will have to sign a model release and not the subjects themselves.

The pricing seems off as well, if someones going to pay for a photo they'll probably be willing to pay more than $1. Also if the photographers are only earning $0.50/cents and only a tiny fraction of photos are actually sold, I'm guessing your photographers will get frustrated with not earning money quickly and leave your service.

guiseppecalzone
This is really interesting. For people trying to make money, the barrier to entry is minimal. Moreover, since people can upload right after you take a picture, you get rid of the bulk upload headache.

People are dying to make money on the fly. Think about the popularity of Mechanical Turk and other work at home sites.

One thought: Because it's so easy to post images, you may end up with a lot of subpar photos.