Great idea; it's a bit unclear to me how to become a user (rather than advertiser), there's reference to an app but I couldn't find anything. I wouldn't mind getting photos printed for free with ads on the back. Still in beta?
I'm also curious to see what the auction prices end up being - they may start at $0.01, but I doubt you'll stay in business long printing+shipping at that price.
I also wonder - if an advertiser bids for 1000 ads, are those spread among 1000 different people, or 50 people x 20 photos (or whatever)? As a user, would I upload all the photos I want printed and then sit back and wait for a bundle to come in the mail?
The service hasn't actually launched yet, per their Kickstarter updates and comments. It makes sense, you have to line up advertisers before you start letting people print, but I think that could have been made vastly more clear on the site.
For years, I've been expecting someone to come out with free printers. Every once in a while, they print an ad. Nobody seems to have done this. Instead, there are plenty of free printer deals; all you have to pay for is the overpriced ink.
A fantastic idea with lots of opportunities to upsell. For consumers:
* Pay an extra $n to receive the prints without ads.
* Pay an extra $n to add an invitation/birthday greeting/etc. to the back of the photos.
* Pay an extra $n to upload the mailing addresses of m contacts and we'll mail the photos to them.
* Pay an extra $n and we'll send you a framed copy of the photo.
etc.
For advertisers, price can go up as:
* the customer targeting gets more specific.
* the size/quality of ad improves
etc.
Now they just need to get everybody using it...
(edit: formatting)
(edit: Killer quote about another business, Sincerely, that did something similar and then was bought by Provide Commerce:
"The Sincerely suite of applications was approaching 3.5 million registered users at the time of the acquisition, and had seen 6.5 million app downloads. It had also shipped products to over 1% of American households (1.5 million unique households. http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/provide-commerce-acquires-m...
My point is that there is a market there.)
Pictures don't lack demographic targeting. You can make a lot of demographic assumptions from the content inside of a picture.
Example: facial recognition says that this blob with eyes in the photo is a child. Flag may have signed up Babies R Us as an advertiser. Based on the notion that it's a baby on the front of the photo the back as should be for formula, college funds, or diapers.
The tricky part is building up the tooling to automate that process. But hey, most of that exists in the wild already.
actually, I don't think their business model relies on the ads.
They mentioned a bunch of other features, I think this is a pretty clear-cut freemium SaaS model. They send you the 20 pics a month, and try to upsell you with nicer ones. They'll probably say "only $5 a month and your 20 prints can have rounded edges, $10 a month and you get 40!"
The ads on the back of pictures seems almost like a ruse to convince people that this is a real business (because upselling is a lot harder to explain to people than "ads")
In retrospect the biggest issue was the in-person pitch.
At first I was actually intrigued. But when I started to ask serious questions, like what's the unit cost? How do you scale? How many do you need to sell to break even? etc, the business model got vaguer and vaguer, and he started to get defensive and fight the questions with wishful thinking instead of realistic answers. (I hear lots of pitches, this is pretty common).
That said, it was just one encounter w/ one member of the team. I don't want to be negative and unfair. Entrepreneurs have enough challenges.
Wish them the best of luck and sincerely hope they prove me wrong!
This has to be a joke. You cannot tell me a single person is actually interested in allowing a business to print their advertising on their keep-for-life pictures. If I opened my photo album from my childhood and found advertising on the back of each photo... what a joke.
Photo printing is already cheap. If you can't afford to print photos, you probably also can't afford to buy the camera or the memory card (or the film and development for you old-schoolers).
This is a sad world we live in. Advertising in every place imaginable. You want to know where I'd be okay with your visual spam? On toilet paper. Print your advertising on my free toilet paper so I can wipe my ass with it.
"On July 1st 1885, the day the service was introduced, sending a first-class letter cost 2¢. 129 years later Flag can print and deliver your ads by first class mail, for just 1¢. That’s progress."
Total vaporware.. consumers vastly overestimate the value of their own attention and assume it can fund expensive things like this. If it can be ad supported why do you need to pay $10 for the "app" via kickstarter?
Will the users ability to print be limited by the demand for advertising? In other words, can I print 1,000 photos as an individual? If you can only fill 100 of those ad slots, do I pay for the rest out of pocket?
There are tons of questions here. I'll do my best to provide some answers.
1. No - Flag is not a joke.
2. The visibility of the ad should be compared to a web ad or a piece of junk mail. There's metadata on the back of each print. A caption you write, a secondary photo and some Exif data. That's a reason to look at the back of each photo. I have hundreds of photos taken by my parents during my childhood which I know nothing about. Where were we? When was it? Who's in this photo? Flag wants to make archiving images robust and simple. You'll be able to look at your prints in a few decades and know something about them.
We also make it simple to send your free prints to family and friends. That information allows you to explain each image to the person you're sharing it with.
If you look at the metadata once it's already once more than you view the majority of junk mail. If it's a picture you cherish and show to a friend when they see the ad beside your caption we've already out-performed junk mail by 100%. The most effective pieces of print advertising, catalogues, last in people's homes a year at best. People keep photos forever.
3. You get a pack of 20 photos per month free with ads. More than 20 prints in a month and you pay for them. This is both for reasons of cost but also for convenience. Most people would be daunted by having to find 100 photos to print. 20 keeps it simple and means advertisers know the prints people order are things they actually care about. If we printed an unlimited number of images free many people would simply dump their entire photo archive to paper but never look at the prints, or ads, when they received them.
4. Freeprintsapp.co.uk has never shipped a free print "Postage and packing starts at £1.49,
never more than £3.99!". Flag ships for free. No credit card, no subscription, no shipping or handling.
5. The Sandwich video is pretty awesome. So awesome in fact it's something we should probably update...
6. The reason for the Kickstarter was to fund development and to prove to advertisers there's a demand for a free print product. Surprisingly you can't just say "Of course people want free stuff" and expect advertisers and investors to take your word for it. People paying for early access and special service from a free product was fantastic proof of the concept.
7. Beyond being free Flag's prints are laser-cut. That means we can deliver WYSIWYG prints for the first time at no additional charge. Print an iPhone photo with any other company–including Apple–and you have to crop it to 3:2, 5:7, 5:4 or 1:1. Flag can deliver 4:3 prints, 1:1, 16:9 and any other aspect ratio in one pack with no additional fee. On top of that we can offer border treatments and finishes which simply aren't available. We provide the same flexibility for finishing that other apps offer for image manipulation.
8. I'm not sure who "joedevon" is although I do remember one rough conversation which could qualify for this "pitch".
There's nothing vague about our numbers but some people with little established interest want to have complete and detailed conversations without an NDA. We've spoken to many people outside an NDA but a decision always has to be made about seriousness of intent. All the advantage lies with the person receiving information and it's entirely possible they want details to share with our competitors or to enable them to do something other than help us.
We know how we scale and we know our product cost to fractions of a penny. Unlike many startups we deal in paper and postage. Out fixed costs per customer are higher than Instagram or Facebook. That said our revenue per customer blows them away too.
If joedevon wants to discuss things again I'd welcome a chance to correct the record.
9. We're not reliant on ads. We will also make revenue for regular print services. The ad-free prints will be sold. Ad supported prints are something entirely new and for the first time will be truly free.
10. The ads on our prints are optional. If you want to pay for your prints and have them ad free you can. Flag's prints are better than anything currently in the market at any price. We use better printing technology which offers more dynamic range and color depth than silver-halide lab prints. We can print any aspect ratio or shape and deliver those prints in a single package (normally printing squares means ordering a complete pack of square prints, with Flag you can order a single square print, three panoramas and a round one for no additional charge). We're using the best German photo paper and using Korean UV laminates which give our prints much longer life than the 15-19 years of traditional prints.
11. The difference between cheap and free is effectively infinite.
12. Describing the ad purchase system is a challenge we're still working on. It's not that complicated but we've as yet failed at expressing it as simply as we need to.
The ad prices at auction will vary. Depending on whom you want to target they could stay low or rise significantly. The average cost per bid for Google Adwords is now $1.50. Flag works very well and generates significant profit at less than half of that.
Unlike web advertising properties Flag has genuinely limited inventory. Google can always put up another page. We can only deliver as many ads as we do prints. Buying 1,000 ads means reaching 1,000 people unless you were to specify otherwise. We wouldn't send duplicate ads to a single person, it serves little purpose.
The app is launching very soon as an alpha (feature incomplete and running on 80% of our final infrastructure).
Thanks for the kind and insightful comments. Feel free to email me for more information. sam@tryflag.com
I'm also curious to see what the auction prices end up being - they may start at $0.01, but I doubt you'll stay in business long printing+shipping at that price.
I also wonder - if an advertiser bids for 1000 ads, are those spread among 1000 different people, or 50 people x 20 photos (or whatever)? As a user, would I upload all the photos I want printed and then sit back and wait for a bundle to come in the mail?