Spottah aiming for photo-sharing sweet spot
Tuesday Jun 26, 2012 by Brendan Lynch - Contributor, VentureFizz
Cambridge mobile photo-sharing startup Spottah wants to add a new perspective, or two or three, to the online photo album.
Spottah's iOS app allows you to store and share photos, but also lets you invite friends to upload their own photos to share their views of a wedding or other event.
Spottah CEO Jonathan Steiman said he saw an opportunity in the space between bulk sharing on services like Facebook or Twitter, and multimedia messaging services or email, which he said weren't built for sharing media.
"It's either share with absolutely everyone on Facebook or share with one-off texts, or it's buried in an email," he said.
Steiman just moved back to Boston after living in New York for eight years, where he got his MBA at New York University. It was at NYU the idea for Spottah grew from a class project.
Co-founder Nolan Lindeke had an idea for an app for travel photos.
"I said, 'Why limit it?'" Steiman said. "It can be for every weekend, every party."
Five co-founders are working nights and weekends on the bootstrapped startup, spread among Cambridge, New York and California. Steiman is spending the summer helping out at a local VC shop.
The app launched quietly last month, and the Spottah team has been taking feedback to fix bugs and make improvements. For example, an early version's Facebook Connect login appeared in Norweigan.
"It confused the hell out of people," Steiman said. "You learn so much. It's all about learning."
The app has been downloaded 2,000 times, and Steiman said it has a "couple hundred" active users a day. For now, it's only available on iOS.
The Spottah team started working on the app in November 2011, had a minimum viable product by December, a beta in March, and an approved product in the App Store in May.
The app isn't generating revenue yet, but the team has its eyes on several options, among them sponsored albums, or upsells for paper postcards of the uploaded photos.
"This game is all product," Steiman said. "Get the product beautiful and get users tied tightly to the product."
Check out the video below to learn more about Spottah. Interested in checking out their app? Click here to download.
Brendan Lynch is a journalist and contributor to VentureFizz. You can follow him on Twitter (@bmolynch) by clicking here.
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