Are we there yet? How many times must I have put this question to my very talented partners in crime, Derek (co-founder and CTO) and Kain (Creative and Marketing Director)? Wind back the clock to September 2007. It was two years ago when Derek and I met at my home to discuss a number of start up ideas. After some discussion we settled on pursuing two opportunities. Opportunity one was to develop an online sales tool for photographers, a project Derek had been toying with for almost a year, and opportunity number two isn’t even worth mentioning as it lasted a mere three weeks. We learned very quickly that a) you need focus and b) things generally require a lot more time and effort than you think.

I won’t tell you what our initial time line for the project was as it is a tad embarrassing, but suffice say, we expected a sprint and found ourselves running an ultra marathon.

So what took us so long? Well, there are probably three key factors that turned this little project into a two year nose to the grind stone kind of endeavor.

1. PhotoMerchant is a turnkey online business system for photographers, and as such, the application turned out to be a complex beast of 2.5m lines of code and counting.
Yes, Guy (Kawasaki) and all you other smart people out there, we know, good enough is good enough, start small and iterate etc., etc. That all makes sense and we thought we understood the meaning of your words. But what do you do if you’re a delusional perfectionist? We thought what we were planning to build was bare bones (delusional!). We didn’t realize we were little perfectionists (delusional!). We thought we were using superior technology (not delusional) and as such, this was surely only going to take a couple of months or so (delusional!). Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. We’ve learned a lot and at the end of the day, we don’t regret the past for two reasons. Firstly, some things you just have to experience for yourself. Secondly, what we ended with is a very well thought out and executed solution, designed from the ground up to let you be more effective at what you do and ultimately run a more profitable photography business. But don’t take my word for it. I encourage you to see for yourself and be the judge of that.

2. Until recently, all of us were working full time in our respective day jobs, hence software development and business planning was a night time and weekend effort only.
As independence and total control over the direction and integrity of the product was important to us, we made the decision to self-fund the venture. Clearly development would have been much quicker had we raised external funding but with that would have come a loss of control, larger overheads from the get go, commercial pressures and considerations that would not necessarily have been in the best interest of the business/product, and last but not least a compromised vision and, no doubt, a different company culture to the one we’ve shaped over the last 24 months. That said, we have recently raised a small amount of cash from an investor who not only presents a great strategic fit for us, but also is culturally aligned with us. The decision to raise funds on the eve of launching PhotoMerchant was motivated by our desire to work full time in the business so we can provide the best possible support to our customers.

3. Had we known back then what we know now, we would have been considerably quicker.
If you work as intensively as we have on a project, you can’t help but learn a lot. Clearly, if we had to start all over again but with the experience of hindsight, the technical knowledge we have amassed over time and the technological developments that have occurred in the last couple of years, we would be significantly quicker now. No doubt about it. However, we believe there is a clear benefit of us having taken some extra time with getting PhotoMerchant to launch. The last couple of years allowed us to look at our business and the PhotoMerchant application from many different angles. What you see now is what be believe to be a well considered solution which should help you considerably with running your photography business online. We know there’s lots of room for improvement, because there always is, but all things considered we’re pretty confident you’ll be impressed with the functionality, ease of use and overall usability the inaugural version of PhotoMerchant offers.

So, are we there yet? You bet we are! And we have big things, very big things, planned for PhototMerchant.

The PhotoMerchant crew and I hope you will take advantage of our free 14 day trial and we hope you will enjoy using PhotoMerchant as much as we enjoyed making it!

The new guy

I’ve been hazed and initiated into PhotoMerchant over the past couple of months and am now an accepted member of the PMCrew. Now that the emotional scars have healed and the physical ones are less visible,  I can begin to get stuck into my role as the Creative and Marketing Director.

To date i’ve been working on the “Member Interface”, and without giving too much away, it’s going to look similar to the PhotoMerchant registration page. The Member Interface is where you can manage your online photography business, and within half an hour of registering, you’ll be able to sell your photo’s online. But i’m getting ahead of myself – we’ll be posting details of the product feature set in another post coming soon.

I’m also going to be working pretty heavily on the blog, starting up the photographic tumblr blog, twitting and working on the new PhotoMerchant website, template designs and the next revisions of the member interface. You can read a little more about my background in the bio section, but to give you a quick sampler; you could say that i’m an amateur photographer with grand ambitions of selling my photographic art online. My digital camera is a Cannon EOS450D but my real photographic passion is my Lomography.

So, our apologies for not having posted to the blog much of late. We’re bursting at the seams with some exciting news which we’ll share soon and you should expect more posts that will detail our development progress, our beta testing phase and our ongoing discussions about managing and marketing your photographic business. In the meantime, make sure you register to join our mailing list and to join our beta program.

Our blog’s been quiet for a while, but over at the PhotoMerchant offices, it’s anything but quiet.

We’re still powering away on PhotoMerchant and looking forward to release. Our alpha-testers have given us some truly valuable feedback, and we’ve also been busy meeting and talking to people about PhotoMerchant. We’re looking forward to releasing PhotoMerchant in the near future, slowly at first… we’ll get some more feedback from our Alpha group and see what you think.

Here are a few hints about the features we’re currently working on:

• Print-shop integration in Australia and US (with more to come…) – this means that when your customers order prints, PhotoMerchant can automatically send the order to your local print house and the prints will be delivered direct to your customers!
• International currency support: you – and your customers – can carry out your transactions in your local currency.
• Usability testing our member interface: exciting stuff! Our latest interface designs are being tested for usability and we’re looking forward to offering you a sleek, simple interface.
• Bigger selection of web-store design templates: we’re creating a selection of templates so you can customise the look of your web store.

We’ll keep updating you with the latest developments at PhotoMerchant – each day, we’re a step closer to sharing the product with you, and we’re looking forward to it!

The blog’s been quiet, but things have been non-stop action over at PhotoMerchant since I last posted! So, time for an update…

Thanks to all the readers who agreed to be Alpha testers for PhotoMerchant. Over the last few weeks, our testing team has been working their way through PhotoMerchant’s features and giving us feedback. We’ve been responding quickly, and we’ve released 2 ‘alpha test’ upgrades, each with new and extended features.

Some of the exciting features we’re looking forward to releasing:

• Templates that give you display options for your photo-selling website;
• An ‘at-a-glance’ dashboard that lets you see what action’s been happening on your site;
• Integration with PayPal and print houses – your customers order prints, and that order is sent directly to the printers.

As well as Alpha-testing, we’ve been working with some of Australia’s top photographers, ensuring that PhotoMerchant will meet the needs of high-end photographers and those starting up their business. So far, we’re delighted with the feedback we’ve had from both ends of the market – overwhelmingly, we’re being told we’re on the right track.

We’re into final stages of development now, so we’ll be keeping up the pace over the next few weeks. We’re on track for release very soon, so we’ll attempt to keep you posted more frequently and whet your appetite for some of the neat features you can look forward to when we release.

We’d welcome your comments – especially our Alpha-testers – and feel free to ask questions about PhotoMerchant’s features!

I hope by now you’ve all had the chance to read my last long post about PhotoMerchant alpha testing.  We’re still accepting alpha-testers, so if you’re interested, drop me an email.

Since then, we’ve been pretty busy working on the development of PhotoMerchant. The last post gave you a good outline of the features you can expect to see in the application. Right now, we’ve got the core structure and functionality working, and we’re focusing on some of the advanced features and the interface development as well as printing house integration for 4 countries.

To give you some more context around the application, PhotoMerchant is Read the full story

Welcome to the first post of the PhotoMerchant Blog.

PhotoMerchant’s first appearance online is not quite the beginning, for me – it’s… well, somewhere in the middle. I’ve been working on Project PhotoMerchant for a while now, and getting the blog online is an exciting step, but there’s more to come. Let me give you a brief profile of PhotoMerchant…

Who we are

I’m Derek and PhotoMerchant is my brain-child. I’m a software developer with a keen interest in photography. Through my own experiences and my involvement with the photographic community, I’ve recognised that photographers today also need to know a lot about computing and digital technology to be able to work efficiently and produce high-quality images. But no-one wants the technology getting in the way of what you can do – it needs to be transparent and easy, and it needs to add something that wasn’t available before.

My specialty is the development of web applications. After spending a lot of time participating in online forums, talking with other photographers, and working through my own challenges, I’m keen to contribute to the photographic community by helping other photographers to take advantage of the opportunities that web technologies offer.

PhotoMerchant is more than just me. I work with a very talented team and hopefully through this blog, you’ll get to meet some of the other developers and designers working on the project with me.

What’s the project?

PhotoMerchant’s first foray into the web is via this blog. This blog will be a discussion of the ways photography, the web, and software intersect. Some of the topics I’m planning to look at in the first few weeks include:

• Workflow challenges - the challenges are many, but there are ways technology can help photographers.
• Sales – generating income from your work – how do you get customers to purchase? How do you make buying and selling easy (for you and the customer)?
• Presentation – using the web to showcase and sell your images.
• Time management – improving the way you work with customers and suppliers (print houses, couriers, etc.)
• Web – you’ve probably heard the term Web 2.0? There are some interesting developments here that may be useful to photographers.

But, as I said, the blog is ’somewhere in the middle’. I’ve got a lot to say about these topics, but I’ve also been working on developing some solutions to these problems. I’m not going to say much about that now, but will be revealing more in the weeks ahead.

I’d also be interested to get your thoughts on a number of different topics. I’ve placed a poll to the right of the page. Don’t hesitate to answer it, it takes 2 seconds!

I’m planning to post about three times a week. I hope you’ll stick with me – I’m really excited about what I’ve got to offer in the way of advice and solutions and I hope you find it valuable. To make sure you don’t miss a post, subscribe via the RSS feed and your comments are welcome.