An Engineer

I am pleased to announce that we have relaunched Phanfare as a Photo and Video sharing network for families. Here is the press release.

I co-founded Phanfare with Mark Heinrich in 2004 as a way to share photos and videos privately with friends and family. We both had young kids. Before Phanfare, we both maintained private websites of photos. These were fairly simple sites, protected with a single password. We would maintain these sites by generating HTML locally on our computers and then FTPing the content up to the server. The sites had web-resolution only, no slideshows, no video and no collaboration features.

Phanfare 1.0 was created in the model of our personal sites. We knew the issues around workflow with digital photography and the clunkiness of web-based tools to manage photos and videos, so we created full featured downloadable clients that would keep the Phanfare websites up to date.

Phanfare grew nicely over the first two years. We hired employees, raised money and continued to evolve the product. As an insider, it was great to see the whole Phanfare system grow, to watch our aggregate storage numbers increase (over 70TB), and to scale the system.

In the third year, Phanfare’s growth slowed considerably. We still were not profitable and had a long way to go to get there. At the same time, we realized that from the perspective of a user Phanfare had become a bunch of content silos, each one unaware of the larger network. We also have a strong vision for wireless integration with Phanfare. We want wireless display frames and wireless cameras to integrate with Phanfare. But we were too small to accomplish those goals.

We took a hard look at the business plan and what Phanfare had become, thought about the target user, and designed a new version, Phanfare 2.0, which we released to the world yesterday.

Phanfare 2.0 is a photo and video sharing network for families. Each person connects with their friends and family within Phanfare. Your friends and family are allowed access to your content. People not connected with you are kept out. Your friends and family can use Phanfare for free. Each account includes 1GB of free storage and 20 free prints to get them started. You get a dashboard where you can see the new albums created by friends and family in a glance.

We feel this new version of Phanfare is much more collaborative than the old version while remaining focused on the family oriented photo and video shooter. The web albums and web slideshows are still high quality. You can still add your own music from iTunes.

While we feel Phanfare 2.0 better addresses the needs of the target market, we know that there is a significantly different flavor to the new system and that not all of our 1.0 customers will come along for the ride. But we feel that Phanfare will emerge stronger than before and able to serve more people than before.

Phanfare 1.0 was really web hosting optimized for photos and videos. It certainly found a devoted following, but not a huge one relative to the scale of our planet (we have around 11,000 customers right now). In Phanfare 1.0, the company’s strength grew linearly with the number of subscribers we had. But there were nearly no network effects. Phanfare was not more valuable to the millionth new user because for the 999,999 users already on the platform before they arrived.

Phanfare 2.0 is a true network, and as such, its value to an incremental user is proportional to the number of people already on the platform when he or she arrives.

Phanfare 2.0 includes integrating Kodak printing, because we realize that no system for families is complete without printed output.

Finally, Phanfare 2.0 is free in its basic form, which allows everyone to use it and enjoy it. We will be aggressively increasing the amount of free storage we can offer the community as other revenue streams come online for us and the cost of online storage decreases.

We hope everyone loves the new Phanfare and we want to reaffirm our commitment to empower people to celebrate life through photos and videos.

TAGS: Phanfare, Photosharing, Videosharing