interview with thomas r. koll about his photostre.am project

photostre.am is a portfolio service for photographers using flickr. recently i had the opportunity to interview the creator of photostre.am, thomas r. koll.

every photographer wanting to present her photo work without using technical skills while remaining on flickr at the same time is in the target audience. no double uploading necessary.

photostre.am is jumping right into a crowded market. competing with hosting one´s own website, using widely available templates, specialised services for photographers or with services form fluidr, viewbook, pullfolio, deviantart or alternative approaches like flickroom, using adobe air.

at the barcamp 2010 in vienna, i had the opportunity to sit together with thomas for a founders interview about his motivations behind the project. (photo by thomas r. koll, view his photostre.am here)

start.up: thomas, what´s motivating you to work on photostre.am?
thomas: to learn, that´s my top motivation. and the pleasure to interact with users of photostre.am.

start.up: what are the most difficult things working on photostre.am?
thomas: photostre.am is taking a lot of time and therefore competing with the "bread" jobs i have to do in order to make a living. being a one-man show, it is furthermore tricky to cover areas like interface design, which is an art by itself. finally to prioritize features is always a challenge.

start.up: how will you make money with your service?
thomas: through pro accounts and a white label b2b service. pro accounts will cost between 10 to 300 euros, depending on the features. compared with creating one´s own portfolio websites, that is rather valuable.

start.up: what would you recommend new startups, considering that you are already work on this project for around one and a half year?
thomas: first, make your to-do lists and prioritize in order to focus. secondly, choose your "bread" jobs - which finance your startup project - based on how much money you can earn on them.

start.up: finally, what´s the technical background, behind photostre.am?
thomas: i am using rails3, mongo db - which has nice horizontal scaling, two virtual servers - one for the app, one for the database and rackspace cloud.

start.up: thomas, thank you for the interview.

ray ozzie´s two start.ups documents

jessica livingstones´ interview of ray ozzie shows how two documents can be essential for start.ups.

the complete interview with ray ozzie is part of the book "founders at work". this highly recommended reading shows what for more or less successful founders worked and what did not.
ray ozzie got famous for his lotus notes history. he had numerous moderately successful start.ups with groove being the last one. after groove got acquired by microsoft he became microsoft´ chief software architect.

so how does ray ozzi starts his companies? he sits down an writes two documents:

founding document 1: outside view
describe the challenges/problems solved for the end user.

founding document 2: inside view
describe on a technical basis how to solve scenarios described in document 1

this approach gives founders a structured way to organize their thoughts. without being afraid of having to write an "executive summary" or even a "business plan".
having done that, he collects the core team of people he already worked together. to do that, the above docs show their first payback. future team members get the main start.up idea and can decide fast, if they are interested to join in or not.
he get’s a big open office and a whiteboard. together with the team he works out the technical details on how to solve the challenges, the toolchain, languages used, architecture. then the coding starts.

p.s.: looks like the business guys are left out for quite a while.

sun zi, moltke & douglas adams für start.ups 2/3

frei nach moltke:

"kein businessplan überlebt den erstkontakt mit dem kunden."

es ist ein grenzgang zwischen unbeirrt seine ziele zu verfolgen und auf marktfeedback zu hören. darum einmal pro monat einen realitäts-check zu machen hilft. wo bin ich?, wo will ich hin?, was sagen mir meine kunden?, welche konsequenzen ziehe ich?

interessant dazu: "founders at work", wo sich für mich als ein wesentlicher erfolgsfaktor für erfolgreiche high tech start ups herauskristallisiert, flexibel zu bleiben: hinsichtlich produkt und geschäftsmodell.