Elevator Pitch: Picli wants to be the home of great photography on the web

This article is more than 15 years old

Picli's creators think their is more creative and open than their photo-sharing site rivals, and they want to attract high-quality photos that invite comments and ratings.

The site was launched on 29 March by two friends, a graphic designer and a web developer who fund the site themselves and work from home in north London.

Co-founder Sean Miller explains why the pair are so dedicated they work on the site till 4am every night, and why the competition just isn't focused on quality photography.

Picli co-founders Sean Miller and Sam Street

Explain your business to my Mum
"Picli is a photo sharing website. You can upload your images and share them with others, but the big difference between us and other photo hosting sites is that rather than act as a massive hard drive. We aim to get your work seen by everyone who visits the site."

How does that work?
"Each published image can be voted on by other users. Our website uses these votes to automatically determine the highest rated new content, these images are then shown on the front page of the website - so if your a great photographer, people will see your work. There is no editorial control - everything is controlled by the voice of the people."

How do you make money?
"We currently use advertising as our main source of revenue. We will in the future introduce professional and club memberships for a fee, but these will not be launched until we have had feedback from the picli community."

What's your background?
"Sam Street works as a full-time web developer in central London. My background is in graphic design and multimedia, I've previously been involved with design and video work for Computacenter, Canon, Revlon and others."

How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"We already have just under 3000 users, with many more people who aren't photographers but come back every day to look at the showcase gallery. Within 12 months we hope to be at over 10,000 users."

Name your closest competitors
"The first site that comes to mind is Flickr, then there's also PhotoBucket, Smugmug and Zooomr. However, there is no other amateur photography site that is based around a voting system such as ours because they're all essentially acting as big virtual hard drives. Reddit and Digg do a similar thing but based around news articles. There are image voting sites out there butt they're filled with 'hot babes', 'lolcats' and the like - none of them are providing an outlet for quality photography as we are."

How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
"We have a friends system, customisable backgrounds, avatars and also personalised galleries. You can come back at any time and browse all the images you've previously voted on as well as images added to your favorites gallery."

How will you survive the downturn?
"As we're privately funded we're not too worried, but we will focus on keeping overheads as low as possible for as long as possible. The two of us have created this entire site working from home, as well as numerous cafes and pubs. It helps that we live very close to each other but regardless, we won't expand for the sake of it. We also make sure we're clued up as to the latest technology developments - if there's something out there that can help us, we'll use it. For example: we switched over our entire image database to use Amazon's S3 service, which is incredibly cheap and fully functional for our needs."

What's your biggest challenge?
"Marketing. Between us we have all the skills and technical know how to create a great website. However, as we're new on 'the scene' getting our name out there into the established press can be tricky. We're learning quickly."

Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
"We're really excited and inspired by what has been done with the Twitter API. We like to think of Twitter as not 'another social site' like a Facebook or a MySpace, but more of a tool, like Google. People are doing some really great things for Twitter and aswell as offering picli integration, we'll be jumping into that area some ideas of our own very soon."

Who's your mentor?
"In the technology world, Steve Jobs. Otherwise Mr Benjamin Linus."

How's you work/life balance?
"Well, we're both up to 4am nearly every night, but that's driven more by excitement and passion than need. This doesn't feel like work to us. It can sometimes be challenging getting enough sleep and most of our free time at weekends is spent working on Picli."

What's the most important piece of software or web tool that you use each day?
"Email on the go via the iPhone is an addiction."

Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"If you don't aim high, what is the point? We want to be up there, competing with Flickr and Smugmug as the best place to host your photographs. If our site could help amateur photographers break into the industry fulltime that would be a dream come true."

picli.com