It takes an excessive amount of time to find the right photo. As an image buyer, you are effectively limited in what you are able to find because of the vast volumes of photos on stock photo sites, and eventually, you often compromise and retrofit your creative vision into a ‘canned look’. On Snapwire, you don’t have to settle. You can request a custom photo that matches your brand story and have it delivered to right to you.

Our founding team has been in the stock photography game for almost two decades, starting at companies like Getty Images before they were even online. DSLR cameras made it possible for every photographer to become a professional photographer. We also founded a company in 2001 called Media Bakery, which is one of North America's largest independent aggregate stock photos sites. It's a boutique, but it has 10 million images and it's still in operation today.

In 2013, we waited for the iPhone 5s to come out. That was when the camera that everybody had in their pocket (the one on their phone), had the ability to produce high quality photos that could potentially be sold in traditional stock photo archives. At the same time, there was this massive influx of talented Instagram photographers maxing out on the number of like and followers. We thought to give them the ultimate validation when one of their photos sold commercially to a brand they cared about. That's how Snapwire started.

When Snapwire came out of beta in 2014, we were 60,000 photographers deep. We had to have enough high quality photographers so that customers received a successful, meaningful experience. We had to also make sure there were enough buyers on the platform to ensure photographers got to sell their photos. It was a carefully measured roll-out strategy to make sure Snapwire didn't tip one way or the other.

Public relations and marketing were critical. We built an early beta sign-up gauge and distributed that through a series of influencers in the Instagram community. We tried to create as much buzz as possible. We worked with highly influential photographers on Instagram with lots of followers. We strategically stayed in private beta to build this list of people who would distribute early invites to our iOS app and web app.

We want authentic content that doesn't look like a canned stock photo. Even the highest, top of the triangle type clients, use stock photography. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s an opportunity for that Squarespace designer who thought he could never afford an assignment, and now he can launch a Snapwire request for $25. Alternatively, he can go to the marketplace and buy something that has already been shot.

We keep a percentage of each transaction. In every quick flow, a photographer keeps 70%, Snapwire keeps 30%. For the marketplace, Snapwire keeps 50%, users 50%.

In other marketplaces like Getty or Shutterstock, photographers earn 17% and 23% respectively. When I sell a photo on Shutterstock, or Fotalia, or Adobe Stock, I get $1.60. On Snapwire, the average photographer pay out is in the $40 range per sale.

My plan is to target the East Coast and start doing special acquisitions through a very traditional stock photo sale cycle.

We also have some unique, strategic partnerships developing. Getty Images uses Snapwire to source content for its archive. We have our own collection on Getty Images. It looks like Shutterstock will be doing the same thing with us. Agencies you think would be in competition with us are using Snapwire to build collections for their own agencies. That's another big strategic move for us.

We also want to give more tools to our photographers so they can upload photos to our platform in volume. The more high quality images we have on the platform, the more frequent successful searches we will have. That ultimately means more sales.

The largest incumbents are Getty Images, which owns iStock; Shutterstock, which owns Offset; and Adobe Stock, which is a new player to the game that recently acquired Fotolia. Those people are in a traditional marketplace library format. They won't necessarily get into the assignment model anytime soon, until we validate it . Their inventory is either sold on an a-la-carte basis or in a subscription basis and they continue to focus and double-down on that.

The other competition is this new generation of stock photo agencies, or user generated agencies. Those would be IM, 500px, and perhaps even Twenty20. Nobody's leading the space like Snapwire with assignments. I think with over 5,000 assignments launched on their platform in two years, we are the number one leading platform for a scalable assignment platform.

We have a web app for both photographers and buyers. Buyers use the web app to launch their request. Photographers use the web app to upload photos from the desktop or cloud, to answer those requests.

Then we have three mobile apps. We have two mobile apps that are exclusively for photographers. I think we're first in class on design when it comes to our mobile apps, and I think we will continue to be that way.

When you're a platform builder, development must be agile. You work while you're listening to your customers, getting that feedback then do sprints. We practice sprints and agile scrambler flow at Snapwire. We're constantly building to create more features to service the buyers and the photographers. We have a new set of tools coming out for photographers that will help them sell their work and enhance their work as they sell it.

We have yet to look at monetizing our photographer community. I think there's a big opportunity to do that on Snapwire. On the buyer's side we launched through these creative briefs, and this extension of custom stock photography, but it's quickly moving into localized content. I can see a path to servicing the demand for weddings and localized consumer based photography needs. I think that's going to be on the horizon in the future.

One of our early founding team members left the company very early in our life cycle. That was a huge blow—but instead of running around with our hair on fire, we were diligent about offloading the responsibility. We hit the ground running and picked it back up. Oftentimes, those huge events that seem so dangerous and detrimental are blessings in disguise. They force you to recover, rebound, and soon you realize the company is now in a stronger position.

Funding was also a challenge in 2015. The company's runway was short. It takes a bit of tenacity and insanity to make it work.

Snapwire's been incubated inside the walls of Media Bakery which is a traditional stock photo agency, and a lot the developers who work on Snapwire are veterans in the space. The core team of Ryan, Dwayne, and I (Chad) do social marketing, Ryan does creative direction and relations, and photographer relationships as well. These are people that have a strong grasp of the Instagram community. They're photographers by trade. They have great visual eyes as well as aesthetics for brand. Then there’s me who has the most experience and knows the buyer relationships well.

I have always been a stock photo junkie. After graduating college, I went to work for a company called the Image Bank, which was acquired by Getty Images as they brought all the stock photo industry online. In the early days, I was shipping transparencies to art directors via FedEx before stock photos lived on the web. Later, I worked at an agency called Adventure Photo and Film and helped that business get acquired, where I later became the chief operating officer of that business. In 2001, my wife and I started Media Bakery, which gave us the background and confidence to launch Snapwire.

Snapwire is healthy financially, with a net cash in per month of around $50-180K, depending on seasonality. Expenses per month average around 10K, but are projected to increase to around $20K by Q1 2017.

As of December 2016, Snapwire's cash position was $64,446.37. Snapwire has approximately $135,000.00 of Account Receivables which we expect to receive no later than January 17, 2017, exclusively from our relationship with Google, Inc.