The Business Plan

In this post I want to capture my thoughts on the how Picutive will operate, where I currently am and the next steps.


The Plan
Picutive is intended to be a solution for the busy business traveler who needs passport or visa photos.  The goal is to make obtaining a high-quality pass photo nearly effortless. Although it is probably impossible to fully reach this goal the strategy will be based on keeping the site as simple as possible, a la 37 Signals.  This means only features that reduce the effort required to do the job will be considered.  User Interface design should be clean and intuitive.  Important decisions will be made for the customer. In short, it should just work.  Finally, the solution should be a good value for the customer.

High quality pass photos must first meet the requirements for a particular document (passport, visa, etc).  This includes the dimensioning and composition.  Second, the print must be of acceptable quality - good colors, printed on professional paper.  I rely on the user to import a  picture that is in focus with acceptable lighting.

The two major pain points with creating visa a pass photos are to first find the photo requirements and second to properly scale, crop and print the picture.  I will create a listing of document photo requirements that I will keep up-to-date via automatically checking the relevant web-site on a periodic basis. Any changes that are detected will be flagged and personally investigated. Any document that has been changed will have a status of 'unsure' until it has been checked and updated if required.  The application will automatically scale, crop and layout the photos for printing. It will also check that the photo has sufficient resolution for a good quality print.  The customer will have the option to have the digital print emailed, with a list of printing tips or to purchase prints to be delivered at their address. These printing tips will actually be a relatively long list of all the ways to mess up while self-printing, which will hopefully induce some of the users to just pay for the prints to be delivered.  There are three major hurdles for first time users.

1. Uploading a print: They have to take a suitable picture and upload it. The app will check that the pictures resolution and dimensions are acceptable and give feedback on what needs to be improved.
2. Entering a shipping address: This will only be done once the user has decided to purchase prints to keep friction low.
3. Entering payment details: This will be the last step in the process. Options will be to use paypal and amazon. Amazon is interesting because the user can use the info in his Amazon account.

Once these are completed, subsequent prints can be ordered without re-entering the details.

A typical work flow will be that the user selects a document, uploads a picture*, orders the prints, enters an address* and gives payment information*.  This still seems like too much for me, but I don't know how to reduce it further other than eliminating the * marked steps for follow-on photos.  Despite this being quite a lot of steps, it should still be a good option compared to going to the photographer's shop and having prints made, which takes about 45 minutes and costs 30-40 CHF.  A further optimization, that will come at a later stage, is to allow an assistant to manage the process for the traveler.  She can create and account, upload a photo, add and address and give payment info. She can even have the photos shipped to her or directly to the traveler.  I think this will be useful feature.

Marketing

1. SEO: I will make a 'Country' page that will act as SEO bait. It will include usefull travel tips, links to recommended sites and books for further info and of course links to the photo requirements for passports and visas.
2. Pay-per-click (Google Addwords):  There were not many competitors for relevant keywords, so hopefully this will be a viable channel.
3. Viral:  This one is not obvious, but at the very least, there can be a 'Recommend this service' button. Also, I think that there are some possibilities to reward Assistants for promoting this to their colleauges and getting their team to use the service. Either offer gift certificates or donations based on orders from their team or through people they have brought on to the service.

Where I am

Currently the web site is a work in progress.

• Picture upload, checking, formatting and layout is now more or less working. Some more tests should be created, but this will come.
• File handling for the images is implemented, but I am not super happy. Currently full resolution images are created and stored in a publicly accessible location.  I think it would be better to save the base images in a database and create thumbs and doc-versions on the fly. Smart caching would minimize the server load.
• The request print by email is not implemented yet.
• The 'Order' creation is being implemented. I would like to optimize the address acquisition process.
• Show the last used existing address
• Edit option will replace this div with a form to edit the current address
• Create option will replace this div with a blank form to create a new address
• Next/Previous buttons will switch to other available addresses.
• If no address exists, show the form to create a new address.
• The payment flow is not yet implemented.
• Start with PayPal
• Follow with Amazon
• Others
• Need to make a customer support email address
• use google apps for that.
• Find out why it is broken (probably the dns server settings...)

 What to do next

1. The Order creation
2. First payment option
3. Customer support email address
4. Get it online.