Atkins Labcast
Hosted by Kate and Paul Atkins, the third generation owners of the oldest photo lab in Australia. A podcast about living with and loving photography. From philosophy to technicalities, for amateurs, artists and professionals, we talk about it all.
Atkins Labcast
BONUS Atkins Labcast - Instaproofs
In our first of the series with our Web Gallery Partners, Paul speaks with Adam the founder of Instaproofs. Instaproofs is an elegant integrated gallery system for photographers that suits many applications.
Instaproofs
Adam Ellis co founder
https://www.instaproofs.com
Jonathan Canlas
https://jonathan.instaproofs.com
Video of show
https://youtu.be/v7Bjc9pFJXk
This is
SPEAKER_03:for bonus episode number one, which is with Adam
SPEAKER_01:from Instaproofs.
SPEAKER_03:Adam from Instaproofs and Instaproofs, they're very different from the other two.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the other three.
SPEAKER_03:They're little and they're kind of... More customer, like super customer focused, super feedback focused. They can shift really quickly and they're nimble, you know, because they're small and they're the people, the clients that recommended them to us are like devoted to them. You know, that I find often with smaller software companies, people are, latch on and they're like, this is it, this is everything I've ever wanted. And they're really, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's lovely when our clients propose ideas for us and then connect us with people and then they become businesses that we work with. And all three of these, you know, that are coming up in these episodes, Instapruce, Picked Up Shipproof, have all come around that way and Photo Merchant too, have all come around that way. So it's cool. So Adam's based in the US, which you'll hear him describe. Yeah. He's more over towards the west coast, but he's on mountain time, whatever the hell that is.
SPEAKER_03:What is mountain
SPEAKER_01:time? Apparently, you see, the taller you go up, the quads run faster. No, there's no banjos. And he comes from a nice small town. So, hey, enjoy Adam from Instaproofs. Definitely check out Instapriest's website, see what they have to offer, look at their videos and all that kind of stuff. It's a pretty cool little product.
SPEAKER_03:And they've got a nice, they do this little, they've got this lovely little font.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm online here with Adam from Instapriest. Hi, Adam. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It's great to have you.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks, Paul. It's great to be here too.
SPEAKER_01:So Adam, where are you based?
SPEAKER_00:We are based out of southern Utah in the USA. We're just in a little city called Santa Clara. We've got about 7,000 people that live here, so we're pretty small over here.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that is a small place, but of course your business is all web-based, so it's probably perfect.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's really nice. We just have a little bit bigger city. It's got like 100,000 people. It's just 10 minutes away. Then we have Las Vegas. It's about two hours away also.
SPEAKER_01:Cool. So your time zone, are you central US time zone or is it?
SPEAKER_00:We're in Mountain.
SPEAKER_01:West Coast time zone.
SPEAKER_00:It's Mountain time zone.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yep. Righto. Cool. So that's really handy, I suppose, for support in the US to be there.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. It gives us an extra hour in the morning and doesn't cut us off quite as early as if we were based in California for the people on the East Coast.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how's your little city coping with the coronavirus lockdown and all that stuff? Is everything okay there?
SPEAKER_00:well the city's okay i don't think we have a single case here in santa clara we don't have a single case of the coronavirus but they've locked down like the city parks they've closed off all the playgrounds they've closed the restaurants and in the city next to us you know they have all the libraries are closed and the stores are all shut down after like 8 p.m and people are wearing masks All the churches are closed down, so everybody's staying at home most of the time.
SPEAKER_01:That's cool to hear that people are doing that. I think it's the way forward. And there's no resentment in that respect? They're just getting on with life?
SPEAKER_00:People are getting on with life, but... You know, a lot of people have to put a pause on their jobs. So that's really hard for a lot of people. People are getting tired of it, like our children, especially. They don't want to just sit at home with no friends and with no school because they shut down all the schools as well. So, yeah, a lot of times they'll want to go out and play. But for the most part, people are pretty understanding of it. They stay six feet apart when they have to go to a grocery store. Yeah, for the most part, everybody's all right with it.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, I think we're the same here in Australia. It sounds like you guys are right on it. My teenagers are climbing the walls. My eldest has a boyfriend in... uh, boyfriend in Virginia. And she, she talks to him on the, on the, you know, on the, all the chat options that they have online now. So she's happy. She's likes talking and chatting with people around the world. Whereas my youngest, who's she's 15, she just wants to get out. And she begged me to take her to pick up some takeaway last night just to get out the house. She was hanging out for it. So yeah, I understand that. That's, that's tough. Now tell me about your clients. So, um, you, your business is called Insta proofs. Um, Tell me, you're servicing generally wedding portrait, fine art photographers. What's your client base?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, our photographers are, I guess, our standard or typical client is a wedding photographer or a family photographer, event photographers, things like that. People that have a built-in client base already. Not a built-in client base, but a built-in. Um, audience. So for example, if they'll go shoot a wedding, they might have all the grandparents and parents and everybody that are going to be available to come and look at the pictures and purchase the pictures. And so it's not like a photographer, a stock photography type of a business where they have to advertise a lot to bring people in, but they have their built in audiences already based on the different events that they're doing.
SPEAKER_01:And are they, how are they doing? I mean, event photographers, obviously, and wedding is, it's just, they'd be decimated. Um, as far as their work.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, yep. So beginning at about the first of March, we started having a lot of stay at home orders come through the US where people weren't even allowed to get together even if they wanted to. And so most of our photographers have lost most of their work since the beginning of March. And now it's getting close to the end of April. And I think most people still People haven't rebooked. Weddings have been cancelled. Family gatherings were cancelled. School photos were cancelled. And so most of our photographers are really struggling right now just because all their stuff is cancelled. And they don't know when it's going to be able to come back. And so they don't know if their clients are going to rebook with them afterwards. They don't know anything. Everything's just up in the air for them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's tough. I mean, I get a feeling that these times... I certainly feel in Australia people are going to value photography more after having it all taken away from them, this side of it. And I feel like there are some really impressive times ahead. But we've got to get there first. Are your clients finding much luck in showing their back catalogue and marketing perhaps to their clients that have used them in the past and keeping in contact with them in that way?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's about the only way that they're able to do things right now to make any money is actually through their Instaproof storefronts. Since they're not having new stuff come on, they're just able to repost, like you said, like their back catalogs, their back galleries, put on sales, try to get people interested in their galleries once again. And we are seeing some success with it. Obviously not as high as if they had new clients already. new gallery galleries being put on but we're running at about maybe about 70 or 80 percent of normal and so they're not but but then again they also have some galleries that were kind of being worked on and hadn't been pushed out yet at the beginning of march and those have been pushed out and so they have some sales coming through those but the older galleries yeah those are where where the bread and butter is for them right now and so if they can offer sales or like an anniversary sale for somebody that had a year ago, maybe people will come back for that. Or if they offer, they might offer albums or things like that at this point where they didn't have them before. They're just trying, people are getting creative with what they're offering and they're finding some success, but obviously it's not enough to take over for all the sessions that they've lost and all the new sales that they would have got.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. But, you know, out of that, you know, the innovation that they're going to get in thinking this way, it will really set them in a good stead going forward. Once they get back, if they keep practising this art, you said 60% to 70% of your typical print sale, I gather, or reorder revenues... it's actually not too bad considering nothing's happening.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Right now it's not. You know, I can see like in a month it might be down less because after you already did your sales once, the same people aren't probably going to come back and make another purchase in another month. And so I can see things continuing to go down for another month or two before they're able to get back out, shoot new events and get things in. But for this current month, They're about 60, 70% overall. I'm not saying an individual photographer, but overall, that's where they are. But it's scary, but you're right. If they can make email templates and they can introduce new products and things right now, then that will be able to be carried forward even after they're able to go and shoot new sessions again.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. So tell me, your clients, they're majority U.S. based? Because I know we look after you here in Australia, but you've got a presence in other parts of the world as well?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So most of our clients are in the United States. And then after the United States, the U.K. is next. And then we've got Canada, Australia, and then Europe. So yeah, most of the U.S., We got probably 90% is the US and then 10% throughout the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's such a great business name and your offering is simple and it's quick for people to get involved with. How's your growth been before? We kind of ignore this current time. You can't ignore it, but you've got to not think about it as part of your business. Where were you at heading into March? Was business good and growing? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, business is good and growing. I looked up just before our interview here, I was looking at some stats so I could know more specifically what we were doing. You know, we have a couple of different statistics and some is based on the number of galleries being pushed out and obviously that's gone down quite a bit for example in march we had a 19 decline from 2019 and then in april so far it's been about a 45 decline since 2019 but before that in january it was a 40 increase from 2019 february was a 50 increase from 2019 and so it was going up until the Coronavirus came and kind of put a stop on things for us.
SPEAKER_01:That's huge growth. That's really impressive. So why do you think you got that growth? Is it that people were starting to hunt for that? Were these new clients being acquired or was this work going through your system?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's probably a little bit of both. We put a lot of effort in 2019 into, well, expanding out of the US, but also... introducing, doing different types of marketing. For example, we have now a brand strategist, which we didn't have in the past, and we have a woman that does social media things for us, which we didn't have throughout a lot of the time. And then we also have, I think it's just word of mouth. We do really good with our customer service, and I think photographers really appreciate that, and they tell their clients, And then we also try to emphasize sales. And I think right now that's where photographers are trying to go is in sales and not just display.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. There's ways of– you've got to move the stuff, don't you? You can't just sit back there. I would think the opportunity for photographers who have made a business through their personal connections and in-person sales and that kind of stuff, I would think your ability to acquire new clients, now people are looking at it going– wow, is this for me? What's going ahead? You know, if you can get your name in front of more photographers, I would think you could potentially grow your customer base, you know, quite significantly over these next few months.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I hope so. You know, even right now with the coronavirus things going around, we're actually seeing quite a bit of growth compared to what we were in 2019, not just in the galleries that, like I said before, but in the number of new photographers that are signing up. Like in... So in January, we had a 20% increase in new photographers compared to January of 2019. And then in February, it was 15%. In March, we were at 35% increase just in the number of new signups, not the total number of clients. And then April so far, we're also at a 35% increase over 2019. So even though people are down and not shooting a lot, we are actually having quite a bit of interest in our service and it's growing. So that's been great.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's good because in many ways that's a sign of people wanting to be in this industry, wanting to do this kind of work and working on their business when it's quiet. Because not everyone is sitting there worried about paying the food bill. There are people who have a job or a partner that's employed and they're active and it's great to see that they're at least thinking about this stuff. So have you changed your offering at all during this period? You know, are you working on new features for Instaproofs?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're always working on new features for Instaproofs. So we've actually been around since 2005. And so... We have quite a history with our users, and we have continual comments and suggestions coming in for the last 15 years. We actually just celebrated our 15th anniversary just in March, so that was a fun thing to celebrate. During the coronavirus time so far, as soon as we heard about the lockdowns, like the first week in March, we sent out an email to all of our users and said, we realize that everyone's being impacted by this. If you need any help, shoot us an email. We'll help you with your subscriptions so you don't have to worry about your subscriptions canceling or anything like that just because they don't have anything going on. And so we have had a lot of people contact us and ask for reductions for a month or two months or different things like that so that they can keep their subscriptions open and running without having to worry about cost being an issue for them right now. And so I'm assuming that after a few months things settle down then we'll be able to go back to everybody just having their regular subscriptions and hopefully everybody will be happy with it at that point because we try to keep our costs pretty low and our lowest plan is free and then it's just 10 bucks a month, 25 a month and so forth. So we try to keep it pretty low but we'll help other people or we'll help the photographers as much as we can anyway.
SPEAKER_01:That's really cool. That's exactly what has to happen. You can't have your customer base disappear over the... the next few months. We need them all. We all need them all to come out the other side, you know, excited and energised and, you know, because, frankly, they're just getting bored, a lot of them now. So, you know, they can start using some of that energy and, yeah, that's great news. And what do you think, like, let's think, again, ignoring the coronavirus, you're obviously seeing good growth going forward for Instaproofs and, you know, you've got some good plans for it, do you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we do have some good plans for it. We actually have a really exciting announcement that we're going to push out to all of our users in not too long, but I might as well just tell you here as we have one of our... longtime photographers, Jonathan Kamis is his name. He's a wedding and family photographer. He's been with us for the 15 years. He was one of our first people to start using us. But he actually recently purchased a part of the business. And so he's now a new business partner with us. And we're really excited to have him with us to see what he can bring and, you know, to see the growth and things coming from him as well.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, great. Great. So were you a photographer originally?
UNKNOWN:No.
SPEAKER_00:I wasn't a photographer. The way that the company started was me and a buddy of mine were both going to college, and we'd both recently been married. We had our first kid, each about the same time, and we each went to a photographer to get our family portraits taken. So she took our family portraits, and at that time there was no... digital images you don't go online to view the images so what we had to do is we had to go to her house or her to her studio and flip through a bunch of four by six proofs in order to look at the images and pick what we wanted to purchase and it was pretty hard to find a time that was good for all of us with school and work and everything else going on and so i was in computer science as my degree my buddy was in visual technologies And so we just put our heads together, came up with a website for that specific photographer. And then, she stopped doing photography before we had the site done. And so we had our site. So yeah, we had our site ready, but we didn't have anybody to use it. And so then we started reaching out to other photographers, just manually emailing photographers that we found, offering them to come and do beta testing on our site. And from there, that's kind of how it grew. So it grew because we wanted it to be easier for the photographers and their customers to come together, view the images, and make purchases. And that really was what it was. From day one, the slogan was, it was Instaproofs, sell more prints. And that was the whole purpose, was to help the photographer sell more prints. And that's the purpose that we've pulled forward till today. It's never been just display your prints prettily. It's always been make money by selling through our system.
SPEAKER_01:That's cool. And you guys, with your client base, have you found people... combining it with in-person sales or pre-purchases as a part of it? Or have you had people that go, no, I just sell this way? Or have you got a good mix?
SPEAKER_00:I think most photographers that use our system, most of them, I think, do primarily online sales. Yeah. But it's actually a little bit easier, I think, for some of them to do in-person sales to sell some of the bigger wall products and things because you get more of a wow factor if you can actually show somebody something on their wall and you can handhold them through the whole process. And so we do have some that do that type of in-person sales first and then use the online stuff for the grandmas and the aunts and for extended families and things that aren't going to be there for in-person sales.
SPEAKER_01:Cool. Cool. And tell me... With the technology, if I've gone and done a, let's say I've done an event, a strange thing right now, but let's say I've taken a thousand pictures, the process of putting it through Instapruce, how does that work?
SPEAKER_00:It's pretty easy. Somebody will just come on, they'll create an account with us. And then our system is really, really flexible, where you can either just run with the default everything and get your pictures up and running in a few minutes, or you can spend as much time as you want. You can spend even hours looking through all the different settings and getting everything the way you want it. But once you've got your gallery shot, you just upload your images to our server, either through Lightroom or through any FTP application or through our website. You upload all the pictures. You can organize them beforehand or you can organize them after they're already on the site. And then you just set your prices and your products that you want to offer. And so you're not limited, for example, to offer just products from one lab. But if you have a bunch of different labs with a bunch of different products you like, you can offer everything and then manually fulfill your orders or let the orders be fulfilled to our site. but but that's what it is they just upload their pictures we send out automated emails to their clients as an invitation to view the images when sales are happening we send out automated emails for the beginning of the sales for the end of the sales things like that so that their clients know what's happening and are a little bit excited to to see them and to to view the pictures some photographers will go and if you're a film photographer for example you might not get your images back for a few weeks after the wedding has been shot, for example. But you might have a few of the images that you can shoot at as kind of a sneak peek. So they'll create a mobile app, put 50 images into it, send it out to their people, and then they can view the mobile app that they create through our site just as 50 sneak peek images and they can send them around to their friends and family. And some people do it that way just to get the interest higher on the galleries. And then as the gallery progresses and moves forward Then before it expires, we also will send out automated emails to let people know the gallery is expiring. And then you'll see a spike in sales at that point as well. So at the beginning, you'll see the sales. In the middle, if you have like, for example, Memorial Day sale, then you'll get some print orders. And then as the gallery expires, you'll also see your sales come in there.
SPEAKER_01:So you find that expiry thing is an important feature. Do you think there is a concern at this time that if you are re-showing previous galleries that you might be messing with that idea that the expiry date, you know, just kidding, no, it hasn't actually expired. We'll bring it back again when things are tough. You know, there's that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's possible, but I don't think that anybody's too concerned about that. I think it's more like, surprise, we have your gallery up for another month. This is your last chance to make it work or to get a sale or to make a purchase before it's gone for good. And I don't think anybody's heard any complaints about putting somebody's images back online again for another little bit of time. No,
SPEAKER_01:I'm being cynical.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It's the Australian way sometimes to take
SPEAKER_00:that. Yeah. So the gallery expiration actually is really important. So a lot of photographers will come in and if they don't have any experience with online sales so far, they might put an expiration like three years or 10 years into the future. And it actually hurts them a little bit when they do that because there's no push for their client to actually make a purchase. They just think they can go on for the next 10 years and look at these images. Whereas if they put the expiration date up in like 60 days or 120 days later, then their client feels a little bit of a pressure to make a purchase before they're gone. And it's better for the photographer if they do actually put a little bit of pressure on them through an expiration date.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, look, it's reality. You know, storing things, like storage is cheap now, yes, but it just gets more complicated the more stuff you put through to storage. And I think it's logical and sensible to put an expiration date on there. Tell me, with your plans with your clients, Does that involve sort of like storage that goes on and on and on, or how do you cap all of that?
SPEAKER_00:Well, each of our plans have a different amount of storage that we allow our photographers to use. So the free plan is just a small, like three gigabytes. You can try it out, see if it's going to work for you. And if it is, great. You'll bump up to the$10 plan, and that gives you, I think, 50 gigabytes of space. And that can be used any way you want it. So you can either upload your images that are already pre-resized, so you might upload in just a web-sized files and that'll save you a lot of space. Or you can upload like your full size files and that'll use up a lot. But it's up to you how you use it. And then once your gallery expires, you can choose to automatically have it delete the images or you can just have it just basically go offline but still keep all of your images on there. And what most people do is they'll start with the free, they'll move up to the$10 plan, then as soon as they use more than the 50 gigs, they'll bump up to the next one which gives them 250 gigs, which is quite a bit for Family photographers. For wedding photographers, it might only be six months worth of weddings. But for family photographers, it could be multiple years worth of family shoots. And then it goes up from there. I think our highest tier plan gives them like three terabytes or four terabytes or something like that, which not a lot of people need because after six months to a year, they're not going to get a lot of sales through their existing galleries. And so there's no reason to keep them up. longer than that, unless they really want to.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we all think our work's going to be important forever. And, you know, to the families, in some ways it is. So I think there's real value in a photographer, you know, personally archiving stuff and remaining contactable. I think there's real value in that. But, yeah, it's a different story. Your job as Instaproofs is to compete with every other, you know, why people spend money with their screens. You're providing a great retail space and you're not providing the Library of Congress. You've got a different job that you have to perform.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and photographers definitely need to keep it backed up like in their own system or they'll have like, for example, through Backblaze or through Amazon, they'll have all their images backed up someplace. And so they can use us and it's really convenient to download their images from us, but we're not generally their primary backup or primary storage. And so there's not a lot of reason to keep things more than. you know, a couple of years since people aren't going to be purchasing from those galleries too much after that point. And then they can always re-upload if they need to. If the client comes back and says, we need these images for whatever reason, they just re-upload them and then away they go.
SPEAKER_01:That's fabulous. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Adam. It's been really interesting and I'm so glad to hear about the strength of your business and also that people are taking it up. I think it's a no-brainer these days that you should have this, whether in-person sales is the most important thing in your business, which I think is a great opportunity to make money there. But if you don't have a web version, like what would you do now? You know, are you going to be on the phone describing pictures to people? It's brilliant. So is there anything else before we sign off that you wanted to mention or bring up? Actually, if you could send me the link to Jonathan and it would be great that the listeners, if they want to find more about, you know, Jonathan's photography and that kind of stuff it would be kind of cool any other links you want to share with us stand through but is there anything else you want to bring up
SPEAKER_00:well Well, for Jonathan, I'll send you the link, but it's just jonathan.instaproofs.com, and it'll show you what his galleries look like. He's done over$3.5 million in sales since he's been with us. So, yeah, he's really good. He pushes and he encourages everyone to do it because he can see the value in Instaproofs and in online sales. But some of the changes that we have coming up. You asked us what kind of changes are coming or what kind of new functionality and things like that, and we have a lot coming. We have redesign of our galleries, redesign of our administrative area. We have much more customizations coming that are available for people's galleries where they can change things all in real time like their fonts and their colors and their buttons and everything else just all in real time. There's just so much that we're always working on that it's hard to nail it down to just a couple of things. But needless to say, we have a lot coming down the pipeline and we hope throughout this year, every month, we'll be able to push out something big for our photographers and they'll be able to make use of it to help them make more money.
SPEAKER_01:That's fantastic. I mean, our job is to not stop that innovation. And right now, we've at least got a bit of a breather from the personal experience demands on us, the physical demands on us. Yes, our family, our home, and that's the best investment you can make. But I've found at least the amount of things I need to go to and people I need to see and attend is just wonderful. And now's the time to be really thinking. Congratulations for doing such a great job of jumping to that and making such a cool little product. I think it's such a neat packaged little system, Instapruce, that I highly recommend it to anyone out there. So well done on that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I appreciate it. And we're happy to be with you guys. You guys have been a great lab partner and orders are shipped quickly and we haven't had a single complaint. So it's been great.
SPEAKER_01:Yay. Yay to everybody. That sounds good. Well, look, thanks again and all the best. Keep in contact. And I hope to hear good news from your clients. And I really feel for you guys in the US. I know it's been... particularly difficult uh with confusing messages from you know from your government and from people who are not interested in in following what the scientists have to say and i know that's really challenging and it's so wonderful to hear and to frankly every time i talk to an american i never hear that stuff from them it's you know you guys are just like we are you just you've got some loud people in different quarters of your country and you're a massive country and i'm i'm so pleased to always hear good news and i just wish for the best for all your your photographers and your family and friends around you and um and we'll see you on the other side of all of this and it'll be better place it'll be a better world won't it
SPEAKER_00:yep i think so all right well i appreciate the time
SPEAKER_01:yeah stay safe
SPEAKER_00:okay you too
SPEAKER_01:thanks