innonate

Happy weekend!

My family has had so much fun sharing Wordle scores together. We are a competitive group when it comes to games and trivia.

So, a few weekends ago I made a fun app where we could challenge each other with a different word each day.

The app is built on trusty ol’ Ruby on Rails, uses Twilio for authentication and notifications, and deployed on Heroku (still the GOAT for weekend projects).

You are welcome to join and even play our/my words (my profile is here wordgame.wtf/innonate) but really it’s most fun just to assemble your own crew (family/friends) and get to challenging each other!

Thanks for the feedback. Firstly, Amy is very awesome indeed.

And as for the recommendation accept payment for the S3 service, it's something we've considered – likely a choose your own dollar amount thing. In the meantime, feel free to send any money you want to [email protected] :)

As for using other storage options – at this point we don't feel like we can provide as high quality a service using other storage systems. S3 works well because our architecture is oriented around it, and housed within the same network, allowing us to process, serve, and analyze photos efficiently. Using Dropbox, for instance, would introduce huge amounts of latency and instability in this process.

Fair enough. So perhaps not smart, but brave? When you have a lot invested in something like Google+ a smart call can be tough to make.

Would love to hang next time I come out to SF area.

Custom S3 buckets are great for us because they don't cost us a lot to support, not many people ever want them (relative to the general public), but it allows us to do something awesome for the people who do want them.

I'm curious about your experience about supporting other storage options as well – we only do S3 because we know we can give a really high quality experience with them and it fits in nicely with all our processing steps. Complexity aside, I'd be concerned that something like Dropbox, for instance, woudl have high latency with their API and then make Picturelife seem slow.

Very smart move by Google here. People don't trust Google+ as a repository for photos because it's inherently a social product and with social products there is always some confusion about privacy.

As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.

Nice post :) Yeah, I think the biggest misconception about the photo space, seeing how many of us cropped up at the same time, is that you can spend enough time on product rather than the hard tech stuff to make a dent in the world. We're 3 years in and just now starting to release the product stuff we're excited about because the tech challenges are so real.

Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never saw it back when you first posted it.

Very cool!

It's clear they are putting everything into Photos and so this makes sense. Big question is what they do with all the edits/metadata/etc that people have invested in Aperture.

This latest round of updates for Apple certainly is interesting, but when's the last time they got photos right? For me it was the first iPhoto version, and since then every "exciting" development has been a bust. Main reason we're super positive at Picturelife.

As someone who publicly fretted that my lovely Twitter was over in 2010, I totally agree with MG here.

Knowing you, you already know :D

Hoping they add Objective-C to the list soon! I'd really like to learn that next.

Thanks! We never "launched" -- just one day we had a website and our beta friends started inviting other friends, and then we just grew from there. Looking back, though, that was a dumb idea. We shoulda done a mega big PR launch :)

I am totally fine with this. I've been living on the Internet for a long time. I've always been comfortable saying exacting how I feel and what I believe and letting there be a permanent record of it. There are definitely comments on blogs from 7 years ago that I wish I never said, but I'd never dream of deleting them. It's part of being an open, honest person in the 21st Century.

As for what's "So easily," it's not just about money. What I mean is this... if something's not working, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. What you'll see from Picturelife in the next few months is us hustling like crazy, putting out major releases and taking risks. "So easily" to me is trying one thing, seeing that it's not working, and then taking someone's offer to make the pain go away. It's like watching someone get dunked underwater and not fight to get free. If someone wants to get free, you could tell, because you'd see a lot of splashing and fighting to survive.

So "so easily" to me means fighting. And that's what we're doing, and that's what you're going to see us do a lot of from now and into the future.

We have plans up to 1TB -- we need to update our marketing site. Check out https://picturelife.com/settings/subscription (once you're signed in).

We support Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. And then imports from Dropbox, Facebook, Smugmug, Flickr, Instagram, Foursquare, and a few more...

Totally not my sole decision. If there were an offer on the table it would be my fiduciary responsibility to let the Board know, and we as a group would vote along with other shareholders with voting rights.

It's a bit more complicated than that, though, and management always has the most control. For instance, it's because of this mentality we're not just shopping ourselves around for little exits -- and so offers like these never have to be decided on. We also chose Spark as a VC because we knew they wouldn't want a small outcome either. They invested in Twitter, Tumblr, and more. We, and they, are looking to build something big and meaningful. A VC like Spark is going to have a lot more patience than some other VCs -- and so it increases our chances of staying independent.

As for the OMGPOP question, I was never a part of it. My co-founder Charles Forman founded it and left the company a year before its sale... so he could start Picturelife with me and Jacob. As it turns out, 3 of our core team members were also at OMGPOP and later joined us at Picturelife, after the company sold to Zynga.

FYI Dropbox is one of the places you can import/sync from https://picturelife.com/settings/networks (need to login first)

Well, our company's PayPal address is linked to [email protected] -- if anyone wants to pay us for the custom S3 service they are already using, and we are giving away for free, they can feel free!

Like I said, as we take another look at pricing (we are in the middle of it now) we will think about what to do on a more formal level.

Thanks for the feedback.

Hi @enjo, see the reply I gave @pnathan to answer some of this.

But in general I can tell you that we really are driven by much more than money here. A few times we've gotten to consider the idea of having a small financial outcome, and we keep coming back to the same thing: if we all became millionaires and then went out to start another company, what would we do?

If we're being truthful with ourselves, it's still doing Picturelife. There's just not another idea we're passionate about, and working on something we're not passionate about sounds like a terrible, terrible time. So we're just not going to take any easy roads here. If it ever gets tough, we're going to toughen up. When things get really good, we're going to dream bigger.

Maybe it's that we've all been around the block a bit -- both of my co-founders have already had great companies (OMGPOP and Threadless) -- but we really don't want to be doing anything else.

We love our customers, we love our work, we love the challenge. Selling out for 10M to Dropbox frankly sounds like a shit time to us, and we wouldn't do it.

It's a good question and something I've thought about.

I have a half-written blog post from a few months ago (proof: http://note.io/1lde2HC ) that tries to address this. My idea was that every SAAS startup should start with an exit plan for its customers that would be legally viable in the case of acquisition, being shut down, or any other scenario. Basically a set of software tools and policies that are clear from the get-go, so you aren't waiting to see what they'd do in that case.

We're working on some pretty major releases here so I haven't gotten a chance to finish the post (and publish a plan ourselves) but it's something I think about a lot.

It's a SAAS problem beyond the photo space.

I would love to do an AMA sometime. To be honest, I've just been a long-time lurker on HN (6.7 years a member!), but I sorta wouldn't know the best way/time to go about doing one. Any tips?

Ha! Thanks -- love that you're asking to pay for it. For now our custom S3 support is a gift. In the future we may change that (and grandfather folks in). In any case, thanks for being a fan.

Thanks and great question. Picturelife is not yet profitable but is headed in that direction. If all goes to plan, we can get to profitability by the end of the year. Nothing is a done deal, but that's the plan and I have a very, very high degree of confidence, based on current and history growth trends, that we can pull it off. Hope this helps!

I'm sorry, but I think these startups just give other startups a bad name.

I'm the CEO of Picturelife and I wouldn't dream of rolling over like this so easily. We have thousands of customers and just killing our service would be such an assault on their trust.

All these services you mention are just taking the easy way out. There's a long road ahead for us and we'll going to keep making the product and experience better for people, no matter what.

They won't! We're in great shape and I think Everpix customers will help make us strong. Thanks for the kind words! Nate