Interview with PicApp’s Eyal Gura
Business Pundit got the chance to sit down with PicScout co-founder Eyal Guru to discuss their latest product called PicApp. Going into this interview, I hoped to get some first-hand information on the process of building an Internet business (all the way from concept to execution).
Eyal Gura is a graduate of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program of IDC Herzliya and he earned his MBA from the Wharton Business School.
Tell us a bit about how you came up with the idea for creating PicApp.
While working hand in hand with content owners in the last 5 years and helping them fight online piracy, we realized together with them that the majority of online piracy is on blogs and small websites. 90% of the copyrighted images used online are used in a way the infringe the owners rights, however only the commercial usages are cost effective to enforce. On the other hand , blogger and online publishers that might not be able to licenses the content are still tremendously benefiting from the use of this professional content that creates traffic and readership.
How long did it take to go from concept to production? In our experience, actual development normally doubles initial expectations;-)
This is a good question! The fact that I am the inventor of the product really put a lot of stress on my team as for me the product was already ready in my mind a second after I invented it. The development took over a year, right after a period of defining the IP and filing the necessary patent applications to protect the idea. When we launched out of closed beta we were, from my perspective, behind schedule, but the good news is that the overall offering was much more comprehensive and the time to market was still within the window of opportunity.
What needs are being met with PicApp that aren’t met with standard image formats?
Standard image formats and business models do not work for the majority of online publishers. First , the price is not affordable for an individual blogger, second , the regular format enables people to just copy-paste the image without tracking it or linking it to the content owner thus infringing the content owner rights even if unintentionally. The result of these two factors is a 90% of online piracy rate for images. Other bloggers often compromise the appearance of their blogs by settling on low resolution and/or watermarked images.
And here comes picapp: Each party in Picapp’s ecosystem sees different added values:
Publishers: get high-end legal content with zero fixed cost, all in one place, high resolution imagery from the best resources , search options and image captions to describe the content better and many other features that are aimed to ease the publishing workflow (i.e. RSS feeds and lightboxes). The offerings for loyal publishers will increase gradually to include more and more cool features and tools.
Content owners get: new safe, high volume, distribution channel for images , ability to control and see where their content appear , reduction in piracy , lead generation (i.e. people who see the images and can use picapp to link to the content owners for proper licensing for brochures for example) and a new revenue source that is an incremental added value.
Advertisers that will utilize the ads space near the image will enjoy the benefit of being associated with publishers that respect copyrights and use legal content. In addition, and this is very important to realize - the best advertising out there (even in offline world) is using the exact same high quality images in order to attract people attention to the promote products and messages.
Who is your target audience with PicApp?
We would like to see picapp images on the majority of the 2 million new blog posts being published every day by the new journalists\editors of the world – online publishers and bloggers.
Have you worked on any Internet projects before PicApp? If so, did those experiences prepare you for the current challenges that you face?
That’s really depends on what you define as an internet project . Our Image Tracking product is the world most comprehensive monitoring service for online images, however it is focuses on service businesses (B2B) . Before PicScout I founded a online recruiting hub that aimed to help professional scouts meet the right professional athletes – it was in those days when you had to showcase the service in certain hotels as they were the only ones that had broadband internet. We were a bit early for the online \video streaming market and eventually crashed with the Nasdaq and were left with good business experience and lessons which were put for good use in our next ventures like Picscout and Picapp.
What has been the biggest challenge thus far with PicApp?
Convincing the world’s most prestigious content owners to give it a shot and provide bloggers and online publishers with free legal access to their content , while utilizing an advertising B-model.
In an ideal world, what’s your vision for PicApp adoption rates? Do you foresee it replacing standard image formats? Or is the target niche more narrow?
In an ideal world , content is king , and content owners revenues will correlate to the appearance of the content and their content is being used. The better looking the article is (that included the image), the more traffic it will get and more revenues will be generated to all parties. Therefore, we do not limit picapp vision just to a niche target market and do aim to have all online publishers enjoy this new image format , and will launch more new formats as we go. In terms of adoption rates, our market survey showed us that bloggers\online publishers do not actually need to use a stock photo image in every post (i.e. some posts might include a Youtube video or a personal photo they took ) however , the number of daily posts published that do need and use stock photos to emphasis and enrich their text is huge and this is where the picapp images are going to be.
Do you have advice for aspiring Internet entrepreneurs who have a solid, but as of yet unexecuted, concept?
Solve a problem (does not need to be a huge one) , then focus on the product and user experience – get as much help you can from friends and advisors , listen to beta users and create a community . Progress as much as you can without external funding. And last but not least , I believe that yes , you do need to have a solid business model.