Pictures Indeed Speak More Than Words!
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
–Henry Ward Beecher
At a time when clicking pictures and clicking some more pictures are becoming actively pursued hobbies, here comes one simple and fun way to interact and play with your friends using pictures. Does that ring a bell somewhere?
Well, here’s introducing PixDub– a mobile social network that makes it even more joyful to interact with your near and dear ones by initiating photo conversations, putting forth photo challenges and you ask what more? Well, you get a chance to join funny photo streams started by your friends. Imagine a simple picture of you with your dog being posted with a description of how much you love your pet and then imagine the kinds of pictures your really hilarious group of friends would follow it up with! *Wink wink* (Yes, I do realize how crazy they can get!)
We at Startoholics decided to get behind the scenes of this social network’s development process and that’s when we got in touch with the creator of PixDub, Mr.Dror. We managed to get some really inputs from the horse’s mouth for you.
Dror and his partner Shay are people with a lot of experience in the software industry and startups. This was going to be their first venture. While Dror comes from the field of Business Management, his partner Shay is the technical Guru.With both of them having their families abroad, they shared the same challenge of keeping in touch with them on a regular basis at a very personal level. Ofcourse there are many apps in the market today that has reduced the challenge to a great extent by giving an opportunity to chat and even share pictures of family gatherings to our special ones even though we are miles apart, they both felt that these products are all similar by means of functionality (read chat, photo sharing, etc) and it felt monotonous. To enhance the communication experience and to make more creative and enjoyable, they came up with PixDub; a new, fun, and simple way to interact with friends and family.
By using PixDub, the users can express themselves using visual tools (captions, stickers, speech bubbles), rather than standard textual tools. So instead of saying to someone how cute their newborn baby is by way of a text message, one can now express it by adding hearts and kisses to the photo, add funny captions that may express what’s on the baby’s mind, and so much more. Let your creativity run riots! With PixDub the options are many.
The Fundoo Funda
Using PixDub is simple – Take a snapshot of a picture to start a conversation or a challenge, post it to PixDub, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and sit back and watch as it gets funny and creative replies, drawings, captions, word balloons, and stickers from friends and the community.
In addition, users can rate the replies and also reward users by electing the best one according to them by choosing it as the ‘best reply’ for the effort invested in it and the creativity that went behind it.
While there are countless photo sharing and editing apps out there, what makes PixDub interesting and different is the use of crowd-sourcing to transform photos together with friends.
Overcoming Hurdles
According to them, one of the biggest hurdles that they have been facing is finding people that share the same vision and urge as they do. This makes it difficult to hire staff who can deliver on time with the standard of quality that they expect. This makes the process of hiring new staff long and painful.
PixDub competes in the mobile social network domain where we can find leaders such as Instagram, SnapChat, Tango, and Whatsapp. Its main advantage over its competitors is the use of crowdsourcing to be able to easily transform photos shared by others. When asked about their uniqueness in such a competitive scenario, this is what they had to say-
‘While Snapchat and Tango focus on personal photo sharing capabilities, PixDub is all about photo interaction and collaboration. It is all about unleashing your creativity by letting you edit and play with photos together with others (friends and others in the community) to create visual entertaining conversations. While Instagram is all about making you look good in photos and getting likes, PixDub’s intentions are to create entertaining and creative conversations. We don’t care how you look like in the photos as long as you have fun. In addition, in PixDub the only option to comment is within the photos using visual tools and graphics which encourage creativity among users.’
Feedback and Growth Chart
PixDub got very good feedback from users and they keep gathering this feedback and make changes accordingly to ensure that the app meets the users’ expectations down the road.
They always aim to improve and they want to let their users know that they have taken a lot of effort to ensure that their satisfaction levels continue to grow with the enhancements that they have planned to add.
Moreover, they are now beginning to invest more in the field of marketing to expand the app’s user base substantially in the coming months.
The Journey Ahead
They are planning the following in the next 12 months with regard to PixDub:
- Releasing the android and windows version.
- Releasing enhanced features and capabilities such as: group photo conversation, more filters and stickers, more effects such as cutting objects, photo enhancement capabilities and more exciting stuff.
The founders of PixDub are currently Bootstrapping and no external investment has been given. They plan to seek for external investment when the app reaches a milestone of 100,000 active users. This should be sufficient to prove to external investors that there is much potential in the app and it could generate substantial revenues.
From Founders to Entrepreneurs
“Never rush and approach external investors only when you really need the money. This should be at a point of time where the product you have developed has reached a certain milestone such as reaching a certain number of users or customers that shows continuous growth and that they are actively using the app and/or can provide positive feedback on its effectiveness (B2B) so investors have enough information to make a decision regarding the investment.”
With this, we could call it a day. Happy Click-clicking folks! You never know which snapshot becomes a full-fledged script idea for someone or before you even know it, you would be having a beautiful picture scrapbook infront of you. 😉
P.S. Show the world what you can do for it and then the world will show you what it can do for you. 🙂