# Matthieu Rouif, PhotoRoom - Building, Refining, and Pricing a Top-Level App

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPxP3EeGcMA
Duration: 45 min
Language: English
Words: 9169
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/lPxP3EeGcMA

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[0:00] [Music] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david bernard and with me as always jacob eiding revenue cat ceo our guest today is matt wieff co-founder and ceo of photoroom the app for removing backgrounds and creating studio quality photos right from your phone on the podcast we talked with matt about how his time at gopro led to founding photo room how churn can actually be an asset and how being locked in apple's

[0:41] basement led to one of photo room's biggest marketing wins hey matt thanks for joining us on the podcast today how you doing great hey david hey jacob hi it's nice to uh it's nice to finally meet the internet virtual face-to-face we've known each other for a little while uh but uh but yeah it's it's been you've been one of these uh these people i've become fortunate to know kind of through revenue cap but not actually no no so it's nice to finally uh put a put a face to the name i was uh i was looking back to my email and i think the first i ever

[1:18] heard from you is through our mutual francisco if i said that correctly yeah francesco francisco uh who uh yeah shared me a blog post that i had seen that you wrote where you talked about revenue cat as part of your stack and then uh yeah since then i think we we talked as you were thinking about going into yc and then uh after yc i put in a little bit of money so this was a good opportunity to check in on my investment uh but yeah i'm super excited to to dive in because there's a lot of questions like i i kind of followed you guys i've kind of seen some of the stuff

[1:54] you've been doing but i don't know like the behind the scenes decision making processes and like uh and all that stuff so yeah i'm excited to to hear the story firsthand yeah but before we get into photo room um you've got quite a history in app development so i wanted to kind of go back to the beginning and uh talk more stories um you know a lot a lot of people weren't in the industry way back when jacob and i both started really early as well so so you got your start during the stanford class and you're actually um a teaching assistant at stanford at the time right i'm kind

[2:29] of stealing your story but yeah tell me tell me how you got into into app development yeah definitely i was actually i was a teaching assistant in physics i was doing a master in physics at stanford right at the moment of the first iphone class and uh i actually went to stanford like because i was fascinated by the entrepreneurship and and i had like this business idea of printing photos and sending them and that seemed a lot easier not to buy a hardware but just use the iphone that just started at that point so i was at stanford there was the iphone class i wanted to do a photo app so you

[3:03] see 12 years later 12 year overnight success you know yeah yeah that's what they say exactly and uh yeah i got i actually i got started programming i was uh doing physics before with this iphone cast i didn't know anything about programming before so i took a class with a friend that went to basic and i just wanted to push product on app and uh iphone development was the best at that point so that was how it gets started and actually the the iod photo app became something else uh the first company i started back uh still at grad school and it became like a ski resort app

[3:42] that i yeah i shipped we had all the major ski resorts like you know speed and uh and uh um yeah the shops that you have and i was like uh it was a great uh i did that for two years and with a major sticky resorts and yeah i started other apps company after that uh one called hey crowd around a social network so like we had a kind of a survey that you could answer too with uh polls like a bit like instagram stories now and that didn't work so well compared to the ski resort but uh yeah i got into iphone after right uh right

[4:17] since the beginning i remember the stanford course it was i was on itunes u right that that was mass disseminated or was it the later one yeah exactly no it was the one it wasn't straight for you there was a the guy from um flipboard doing the class yeah i don't know if he was doing that and uh the music uh app uh what's the name again because it's this yeah you could like it maybe yes giving one of the class yeah i remember um i remember it being like the moment when we were like when i i remember like oh this is gonna go mainstream right

[4:49] like because up to that point you had to learn ios by doing basically mac os right that was like the one point there was the big nerd ranch book you learned mac os and then the sdks came and you like tried to learn quickly like what worked and what didn't but if you were like me who came from no programming or not no programming but uh uh no mac programming right there was really no like iphone entry into it um and and then i remember the stanford course came out it was like one year too late for me because like at that point i had already done a lot of stuff but it

[5:19] was still really great i still watched the whole thing i remember remember um remember watching it um but that's interesting we have the same path i don't if we ever talked about this but i was a studied physics and undergrad as well i didn't know that yeah i didn't go to stanford because i didn't want to you know um but uh i went to a small state school instead just because you know uh but uh but yeah kind of similar story where like i was in i wasn't in grad school but i was physics undergrad didn't really know what i wanted to do i really loved

[5:49] physics and the math and all that stuff but like on you know there's a stronger economic pool let's put it that way to work on apps uh yeah and that was the same story for me like took a little bit of what i had learned writing code for experiments and things like this and then kind of started making apps and then yeah the rest was history yeah i think one of the interaction to physics is like how fast it applies to the real world from science to real world and you don't find that in uh like a physics job where you kind of find that back in like a

[6:18] software development where you like we solve a math problem a computer science problem and you can directly apply it to real users yeah or like even with business modeling and stuff too you know you think about how a business moves and like what number moves this number and there's no physics there you're not approximating a physical system but some of the same principles apply right you're like trying to find some laws that are underlying it and work from there so yeah i found it hasn't been terribly unrelevant but uh but yeah that's interesting what else what else do we have in common let's keep going yeah sure

[6:49] well actually i i want to jump in i want to get to photo room so we're actually going to skip over there you've done a lot now so after after that you went to replay and replay was like on stage at a keynote and you're the co-founders that you were working with you know as you joked before we started recording spent a month in the basement at apple as everyone does before a keynote but then you ended up at gopro working on imaging um so just tell me about that leaving gopro i mean you know great company done a lot of innovative stuff um but tell me

[7:22] about leaving to start uh a photo room and what the inspiration i guess we've heard part of it you 12 years of working on uh imaging and wanting to build a photo app but yeah tell me about the founding of uh of photo room yeah i um so gopro is like an amazing company but it's more marketing and hardware and i i don't really want to i grew a bit frustrated about like how we could uh do better software and uh yeah a few frustration from that i as a pro i was project manager by them so i i was like frustrated with the design tool

[7:55] like a photoshop and and uh you kind of have to move to at by that time you had to move to california to move the stuff and i was based in in paris and i decided to stay there with the family and and kind of we had an amazing machine learning team at gopro in paris but it's really difficult to to change the paradigm of a kind of a software like if it works from a kind of more deterministic way so i kind of realized that it's really tough to ship a new software with new paradigm and with machine learning inside so i thought there was a big opportunity with

[8:26] i mean the new new hardware coming on the iphone for machine learning the new the new uh yeah this new kind of way of thinking about software and i left a gopro to start a company and with these ideas in mind and i also at the time i realized that there was a lot of apps you know like after 10 years on the app store you kind of know the tricks of the app store and i knew there were a lot of apps in the top of the photo apps that were around razer and background eraser i realized like okay they're just kind of you know i i

[8:54] say scam but it's not really scam but all these apps that are built quickly there must be some demand around it and so that's uh i started with the background remover idea like i saw that there was a machine learning team at gopro that there was some background removal paper and all that and okay there must be some demand let's ship something quickly and see how it goes and that's kind of the nice thing of like 10 years of app development you know the right tool to go fast and just shipped prototype in yeah two weeks with actually refrigerant by then i have a blog post on like the

[9:26] 10 tools i use there and and yeah it was uh it went super fast super fast to the store and with some machine learning and on-device machine learning by then so it was a and it kind of got caught up like you tried a dozen ideas and some kind of stay on the wall and some like and this stayed on the wall so at the time it was called bg app background app right um was the focus initially did you have like a big scope for it or was that your entry you were like hey i know that there's these photo apps that kind of suck that are doing this background

[9:55] thing i think we can do it better and like let's see where it goes from there or did you have like uh bigger plans or longer term aspirations i think there was a an understanding that people kind of needed that and the tech was 10x better as they say so it was really interesting but i didn't i mean we didn't have the full plan for that like it's really a few months in if that were understood with elliot the kind of the market fit and we understood also like this idea of uh we call that like uh we translate pixels into concept that make it much easier to

[10:28] to to edit so photo room is the best photo editor for entrepreneurs and the idea is that instead of using masks and layers and pixels you just like the machine learning understand what are the the pixels and they just tell you okay it's a cat so we call it cat to catch tap on the cat and you should have action that are relevant to to a cat like changing the fur color uh if it's a if it's a piece of clothing it should be the texture of the clothing if it's uh if it's a kind of graphic change the color you know kind of it makes it much

[10:57] more accessible than what exists like 10 years of 20 years software that exists by by photo editing so so yeah i mean i think that sounds like a very much a pitch and a story that somebody would be taught at y combinator so i'm curious like i'm curious like how did that evolve like so you you you guys launched the app it and i remember us talking in like the spring of 2019 yeah like may 2019 exactly and then you started yc in the fall or in the winter i guess no we actually so we started yc in the following summer we were supposed to do the winter batch

[11:32] after that so seven months later and uh we we couldn't because of visa issues uh like at some with the family i couldn't move to to tell you there's one way to solve that problem [Laughter] exactly yeah that's exactly so we so how did it evolve i think we shipped super fast with eliot my co-founder who was like like a machine learning genius and we follow early on the yc the startup school which is kind of the first step to to yc and um and so what does it help you it kind of uh you measure the yeah your progress so uh how much customer are you talking to

[12:16] uh how many uh how much money you made and how happy you are doing what you do and so that's kind of how we re iterated for you you were doing that during during start of school or yeah that starts up school kind of ask you every every week uh uh this question and you make sure you make progress on that and i think these are the right questions to make progress yeah business and it was kind of kind of natural uh like three months later so we started in may june on that uh application for yc where probably in september yeah so so we did like all

[12:45] summer we did the startup school scheme and framework and made some progress on that and we got the yc application in september and the interviews actually in paris uh in uh in uh i think november and then uh had you i guess like uh your your aspirations or your reasons for applying i guess are in some way self-evident to somebody who's you know obviously you don't need to convince me but for the listeners like what was your yeah what were your motivations like why did you well i guess for one there's you know i don't know i always hear there's a couple reasons right like sometimes

[13:20] it's prestige like people wanna the prestige of yc sometimes it's it's the help which i honestly think is the the best reason because i you know it was honestly really good for us but then there's also like you know it's it's a great way to springboard a venture-backed thing right as well so like did you have like strong reasons was it all of the above or what was the motivation for for getting on the the venture uh roller coaster yeah that's a good question um so i think number one reason was a ambition uh i think like a lot of european startups is changing but are

[13:54] not can be not ambitious enough and i think if you're ambitious like yc is really a way of taking the ambitious path like they how to make a like a a business and a product that has a strong impact like on a very large number of people so that was that would be my number one reason um i think then it's kind of the learning uh we're at the beginning of the company we sit with eliot and what's what kind of is the most important you know of other culture we talked about it also and uh one thing we really value is learning fast and i think yc kind of

[14:26] helps you leapfrog a lot of like you learn so much faster because you have the right contact so it's i mean it's from the it's from the partners like every time we have a office hour almost every time like we are wow blown away uh there is like also airplanes that get the right investors uh i mean on the revenue uh on like mobile subscription uh like yeah like you like olga from blinkist like uh someone from uh john from spotify so that's really helpful and also extra connection like we have in ai we have the vp of ai and we can have facebook and i don't think we could

[14:59] reach this network with uh without yc yeah the network thing is depends on you know what your background is obviously you had been in the peninsula but still it's hard to be really deeply networked and still it's hard to like invest in your engineering skills right and like your ic skills and invest in a network at the same time which was kind of my world like i had an okay network but like it wasn't super well networked so yc was like a big like boost to that right you could get interest to people you could get a little bit of it's still a who you know game silicon valley is

[15:30] still some in a lot of ways or the broader concept before we move on i wanted to talk just a little bit more about the about the ambition of photo room because and this is something i think is would be really relevant to a lot of our our listeners who are uh are building apps in the space and and i as an indie developer for 12 13 years feel like i've i've i've worked too much with with blinders on not thinking about the bigger opportunity so like the first app i launched was trip cubby it was a mileage log tracking app um to get reimbursements for from

[16:06] taxes or get reimbursed from your company for your mileage and i just i treated it like a little tiny indie business lifestyle business and everything else meanwhile um mile iq mal iq built a huge business probably launched about the same time right i would think uh no they launched much later actually even again it's like i had a multi-year lead as kind of the app to do that assuming the market was there like my like you probably came when the market was finally there was starting to grow yeah but what's so cool is that i think there's so many opportunities in the app store that people overlook

[16:44] that seem really niche like you just started out replacing backgrounds and photos and now you're going to be the next generation photoshop is that a good one is that a good pitch i don't know what the official pitch is that's a good one yeah what what's the ambition that went that took you from okay we can replace background images to this is could be a huge business because we're unbundling one of the like key parts of photoshop which is a massive business so what what what is the what was the ambition and what is the ambition that you feel that this this can be such a

[17:20] big business yeah how did you how did you convince yourself of that the ability to do that yeah yeah i mean it's amazing i i think it's um well first like working on photo video editor like i realized that i mean video is big like we got i think we free play then name quick by gopro we got to 100 million downloads it's kind of tell you like and most people they were still using like photo collage so everyone's working on photo and video is too complex for most people so like if you get 100 million for a video then it's probably like any good like uh

[17:54] product improvement like 10x product improvement on photo you must get like 1 billion users and i think it's like that's one of the yc motor but it was really starting from a pain point of myself like creating the assets for actually for the app store like you have to create a psd and i was like you spend so much time on non-creative tasks and i was like uh i i want to make that much simpler and i think the big ha moment was kind of talking to the user so uh and also like talking yeah talking to people like we kind of built in the open and people

[18:23] told us like yeah it's uh it's like actually it's like programming like you instead of you're doing like a object-oriented um editing like you understand what kind of object you have and you make actions that are relevant to that and that's that's kind of blown myself like i really run myself away like it's much simpler like you have an object and you you offer to the user what's logic for the subject lines photoshop is such a pain to learn like i think everyone remembers kind of the blown away part of photoshop but also the pain it is to understand and it hasn't gotten easier in 20 years like

[18:53] the only now you can paint on a sphere or something like there's nothing like new i i still open it and it's comforting because i learned in cs2 or whatever and it's all still the same but like i don't think it's necessarily like i think i think there's even a broader narrative i'm gonna make your your 10 billion dollar company a trillionaire company but i think there's an even broader narrative there around just like the future of software and how machine learning furthers like narrows the gap between like in software like programming not in the traditional sense but like telling a computer what to do and the computer

[19:25] telling like asking us or like bringing us like the the things it can do and you see this in like varying degrees of it working well right like um like gmail like suggesting like absolutely insane sounding replies that i would never say like that's kind of that but but i think that's all maybe a little bit too far but i think what you guys are doing is really great you know like segmenting photos like giving people those tools like taking especially for a tool like email it's like writing like i don't need an ai assistant to like say thanks like i got that thank you computer but for for first yeah like

[19:57] fiddly stuff like cutting backgrounds out and like setting up yeah just building like um things that to a human because we're so visual in the way we think seem really basic right like i want the cat in front of a blue background right like that seems like just tell the computer and it can do that right now with existing tooling it's like very manual and very skills driven and you guys are bridging that gap so like yeah who knows i don't know maybe photos aren't the end of it for you guys maybe next you just start tackling the next software domain right uh you know i don't know and we'll get

[20:25] to 10 billion first and then we'll worry about the trillion dollars and that's one really magical thing about your app and your onboarding that i wanted to to ask you about so exactly what jacob was saying when i think of removing a background and i've worked in photoshop literally since the 90s uh late 90s i'm old um but it's it i've tried that like a hundred different times and even in the most modern photoshop i don't even know how to do it i expect it to be a chore i downloaded photo room and in like three taps your onboarding is magical because you don't get in the way of the

[21:02] person having a desire to get something done and then seeing it happen so in like three taps from opening the app i see a background removed and it was just like instant like mind-blowing experience of this thing that like i know is so hard and i think of needing professional tools and needing to be a professional to even figure it out it just happens magically after three or four taps in your app like was that i assume that was very intentional did you have different onboardings before and kind of iterate to that point or what led you to just such a focused get the person to that

[21:44] moment yeah that's a good question so we did a lot of user interview i think uh we like every especially in the beginning every week we would go to mcdonald's and pay a meal to student or anyone like the tagline for mcdonald in france's come everyone can come in and come as you are so we really met like tourists students professionals and like doing user interview we got so frustrated i think that people didn't get to the step of removing background that's kind of like oh so you would give them actually unlocked out like a brand new device and like watch them go through onboarding we would like pay the

[22:18] meal in exchange for downloading the app we would like first ask a three four question about their photo usage on their on their phone and then kind of ask them to download the app and yeah blindly test yeah and uh and we were kind of thinking we just we were just ios at the beginning so try to find people with iphones and not under it but yeah you i mean people usually stop before and they don't understand something and like to build trust with them we figure out like the best is to show our tech so how can we get to the point where we actually like have all these people

[22:50] we that try the app that actually see the magic effect of photon and like so like uh taking a white sheet of paper with elliot microphone and like thinking how can we do that and it got to like having that as early as possible in the onboarding i think that's that's that's what happened uh i think i remember now reading about the mcdonald's testing and your um your uh yc application and being like yeah that's the moment i knew these guys were going to make it it's brilliant right like i don't know how much user testing like real good user testing is if you do it in some

[23:22] sort of like professional context it's probably really weird and like expensive and like hard and this is dead simple super scrappy and like people don't do it because i don't know nerds don't like talking to people like we don't like you know it's it's tough to put your your app in front of somebody and see them not it's one thing to read like bad retention numbers on amplitude it's another thing to like see somebody actually turn and like but honestly that's the best way to learn like it's the best way to like get really actionable feedback so um i'm sure that was that was super beneficial yeah it's a it's a trick from

[23:54] zenli so the uh social network on maps like that really is a one of the best app in in paris and they and we apply that and it yeah it requires some it's not easy i must say but uh you really you learn so much and the pain today is more like we have more qualified users so it's really easy in the beginning when you're in a photo apps and people just test the app and everyone has photos so it's easy to explain then you want to like talk to your kind of retained user it's much difficult to get them at the mcdonald but now we're friends with all the

[24:25] vintage shops around the block so in paris so we're good so that yeah that was kind of my question i wanted to ask and i'll just slide it in now but like i've noticed i don't know if you had this intention initially but it seems like you've found a niche even amongst these apps in something i would say commerce or even e-commerce it seems like a lot of people use these use your app to take photos of objects to use as like advertising or go on shopify is that is that true in statement or am i just like misreading investors no it's totally true and actually it's

[24:58] not i mean the interesting thing is it came from a personal lead like using as you say photoshop and uh wanted it much easier for me but i wasn't clear who was using this era's background apps and talking to like user at mcdonald we realized like there was all these reselling apps especially in europe and the u.s where people um yeah they just like sell in poshmark on vintage in europe and they there is no app that's focusing on their photo need like everyone's doing like selfies or i don't know whatever lens on video you can make here but no one's in helping them and it

[25:31] actually came from the user interview like oh that some user told us like oh my girlfriend would love that she's selling on depop and and we kind of like after multiple users asking us in support uh asking us uh i mean talking at the user interview at mcdonald we realized that oh that's a niche that we should kind of focus on so that's how he came was that pre yc like pretty early in the process but it was i mean it came in a few just not in one day but i think early after being taken a twice a year okay like early 2020. so then my next

[26:05] question i guess is like how do you decide then so you have a core strong product you might have like varying this is and i think this is very common for a lot of apps and companies is like you have probably different levels of product market fit depending on the market right so like maybe broadly across all uses of iphone your market fit may not be as strong but then when you look at this one niche like maybe it's really strong and then i think some founders end up in a situation where you have to kind of decide like do i want to go for this

[26:33] maybe less fit broader market or maybe a tighter market with a stronger fit than i'm starting out with did you have that internal conversation and then did you make an active decision like we're going to focus on this and then yeah and then what's the plan after that like or is that the forever plan no it's uh i think we the easy part is as a product guy i'm really convinced that our usage is uh really deep like we're starting from a different lego brick like okay you don't edit mask or square pixels you edit like objects so i mean any app that kind of want to copy that as like it has

[27:06] to stop doing what it does today so it's kind of the thing that relates to the machine learning understanding pixels in the beginning so we were confident like digging into this usage and this project paradigm and like product basic block is interesting and then we decided to focus on the pro usage and and it's difficult as a founder you want to serve everyone at the beginning we were even doing a video plus photo like in december 2019 we dropped the video just for animation and then we dropped kind of the casual use case to focus on the pro and uh and it's uh it's been helpful

[27:37] like you're not like giving up on the other users yeah i mean some of the features they're still going to use it the other the casual the people doing memes from from the app but you just like when you build features you think about them and i around that i think yc is helpful because they tell you like if you reach local maxima from one vertical like product market fit then you're investing so much on the deck it gets better than the all the local maximas are adjacent like you can reach them after and it's not not a big deal and kind of believe and believing and

[28:07] trusting that helps you on on like okay we're going to focus on this one for let's say three months and we say uci goes yeah i mean i think that's a really good point in that i think can trip up people early in the process is that you think that making an active choice to close yourself off to part of the market is a mistake because you're like well i want to serve everybody or well i want to you know i want to have the most broad appeal i can because it does it feels wrong right to not serve a use case um but often tactically it's a bad choice because

[28:38] yeah in the early days anything that you have and find any users that love your product even if it's a small group there's it's a it's a closer step to like get your foot on to that than it is to try to get sustainability on like mediocre product market fit across the broad market um because then also it makes yeah it makes your mcdonald's discussions easier well maybe you don't have mcdonald's discussions anymore it makes your product discussions easier because you can say like okay these are pile we're not going to do all this stuff we're going to focus on this stuff which gives you more velocity

[29:08] it's all about like i just really feel there's so much to getting that velocity early right like getting something that's like moving and growing and getting fast and i think that's one of the things i mean i don't know we i won't i won't dox you guys on retention numbers and stuff but you know when you have i'll just say that when you have a pro user base that's using it for something non-casual retention gets easier right like have a reason to come back and so if you i mean there's not that many apps like that that that on it's hard it's hard it's rare to find

[29:41] mobile apps that have that opportunity right so when it's there you need to take it yeah definitely how do you think about pricing for that value creation since since those that kind of pro segment really probably gets a lot more value than you're even currently charging um because they're actually making money with your product like how did you think through your current pricing and did you iterate to this point from a more kind of consumer pricing to them to a i mean to me it feels like you're in the middle still of somewhat consumer friendly and really honestly probably cheap for a professional use case so how did you

[30:22] land on on your current pricing yeah to be honest it's like most of the photo apps i mean when we started maybe it's different they are like uh uh or pricing like 10 bucks a month and that's kind of given by i guess but spotify netflix like it's kind of the the glass ceiling of the price of the subscription even for prosumer and uh and we kind of iterated on the on the yearly from 40 bucks to 69 bucks in in the us so we didn't like we kind of landed on that quite early uh you you don't want to alienate the user especially if you put

[30:58] the upsell in the onboarding like uh to be too expensive i think we have a major opportunity though to like address the more advanced business and the more than one person in a shop it's just it's really difficult to build this b2b case in in-app like you they're not that many apps that use that in the upsell of the phone so you probably have to show it like the the first price uh to every user and on the pro you probably can upgrade them after uh i think it's something we can do later uh like focusing on the product for now and making it simple is much

[31:28] easier like if you start with two prices like the support could basically is going to go crazy we still do the support of the user so not something we try to maximize for simplicity here yeah i mean it's a good point to make especially too it depends on um depends on your cash flow constraints as well just like how much how extractive you want to be how much you want to push it right um because you know when you have good retention like there's an argued argument to be made to not mess that up by because you're raising your price will will hurt your attention right like it's

[31:59] kind of at least unpaid right like more expensive it is just people are going to churn more um and if you're compounding your total like paying subscribers that might be more important than extracting an incremental two dollars or ten dollars or whatever from each user right it might be better off just to keep them happy and long term and that's what makes it i don't know pricing just so complicated it's about finding that equilibrium to maximize like the long-term area under the curve and not just not just like the individual ltvs yeah exactly i think there was one yeah you want to talk like you don't want to

[32:32] be expensive at the beginning if you're too expensive like one of the really sources of feedback was also our support and like if you're too expensive you get less pro and the goal i mean the reason we launched after two weeks with uh with revenue cat was like the feedback from pros is so much more valuable than the feedback from free users and i mean you still want people to pay like you start at 100 bucks a month it's going to be like there's no way people are going to pay for that so uh i was actually talking on twitter that like we actually put forth first the monthly

[33:02] plan because we wanted people to churn and be able to talk to them so there was really a focus on learning from the approach interesting in the early yeah i've always really smart yeah the the short i think long the the annual subscriptions obviously have a bunch of benefits to app developers but you do end up flying blind for a very long time right until you really know what those numbers look like so if you're on monthly purely it does kind of simplify things early on um which is another case to be made for just not overthinking your pricing like initially right like you guys launched

[33:34] just with the monthly and it was fine you added i don't know when you added an annual product but you brought it in when the time was right i think the logic also learning from like gopro and replay days is the pricing is quite elastic so you double your price you divide by two the number of pros like minus plus 10 and so so it doesn't i mean it's i mean when you get bigger it's worth doing experiments on pricing but in the early days it's worth no it's not worth like taking too much time on that i think yeah i mean it's good to know if

[34:02] you have an elastic curve it means you're pretty close to to the optimum already right so did you start from day one at that ten dollar a month price point i think we were at eight or nine uh that's pretty much like every pro photo pro apps and like not selfies was that that on the photo and it's uh and i i think the the i mean it comes from spotify and netflix like everyone's yeah it's like comparing in the support they tell you are comparing you to spotify on netflix anyway so it's a it's a good like way to start and as they increase the price

[34:34] they increase kind of the time of all the i mean the possible ltv of all the apps which is really good thank you if if they don't take care of it inflation will don't worry that's just amazing two weeks to an mvp that you could charge eight dollars a month for and people actually paid it well 12 12 years in two weeks david well right right no that's a great point but but the point being that there are still opportunities that when you have experience and domain knowledge that it's not the the programming it's not the it's not such a monumental task to build something that's really valuable to people in this

[35:12] space on mobile yeah that you can build something good quickly with that experience the first app was really crappy though like i think we waited for a few weeks before having all paid first paid users i did want to talk a little bit about your marketing so yeah what did you do at launch did you get a little press did you you know talk to apple how did you get that initial cohort so yeah we were super i mean apple has been super supportive to us i think so before gopro gopro acquired replay so replay was uh app of the year same year as a elevate so were you guys happy

[35:47] here in france is that what the deal was no so i have an account in the us which so we didn't yeah we didn't get the us we we didn't get the us and north america and it's kind of a territory but we got like most of the europe and and asia there and uh yeah and i i was saying like they have it before the store that elevate which are these guys they're they're taking the all the u.s and we should get that it was good for you that we hadn't localized maybe yeah that was the thing we were like only english at the time

[36:22] well elevate is such a difficult business to localize so i think it's uh like photo video is easy to localize here yeah yeah and uh and so we got like we got the keynote so and we kind of i mean the app was really good at marketing through uh using the latest technology of uh apple in uh like the metal and using the lasers gpu i kind of build the relationship from there with the apple team and also like learning all that's kind of the narrative of apple like to showcase apps that are leveraging the latest technology they do their marketing through developers and that's awesome

[36:55] for us like it's super opportunity and so what was that when we started it was well we're using uh carmel to do the background removal and we did use like really early on in september of 2019 we use our arkit apis to remove the background to do some live preview of the photo and so we got into there is an accelerator inference in the biggest like stationary is one of the biggest accelerator and apple has a program there and we got in there and they helped us on like marketing and uh and business uh during the summer and we and some tech workshop and in september

[37:29] we got massive uh marketing from the using air key three i think apis so i think our early days was marketing through using the latest tech software and hardware from from apple and then where did it go from there yeah so after after you've you've gotten some traction and some of those early customers um did you jump into paid user acquisition and what's your balance of paid to uh organic growth these days yeah so we we got into we didn't do paid until like we really got traction on market fit so early 2020 and we started like to have some uh we got garyvee tweeting about us like a video from us

[38:10] so that was like a viral video demoing the app and we kind of in the thinking was if some videos of demoing photo room are viral it probably works also as ads so we kind of use these viral videos and try ads on that and we started ramping up i think before yc facebook ads so in april of last year and it kind of yeah it was a good channel of acquisition for us and we always had in mind like we don't want to spend too much we wanted to have it under control but the payback was really good so we we kind of had a mix like i don't know it was 30 70

[38:48] maybe at that point and between uh between paid 30 paid and 70 on uh organic and uh yeah organic and so that we ramped that up and i think it was a good time to test marketing and we kind of fastened that at that point because there was the covered the beginning of the covey then all marketing was going down so it was super cheap to try stuff there yeah so try to be opportunistic on that an influencer had like a lot of time so like all that we were at the right time and at the right moment for that i guess so how much like are you balancing i

[39:19] mean obviously there's always so much you're balancing as a founder um but you know how much are you thinking about investing back in the app and like broadening your appeal making it better new markets like new platforms versus like the scaled approach like how can we scale marketing and and and continue to grow or is it like 50 50 like do you have a top priority right now or or how is the like how is your your mind thinking about like your biggest growth levels yeah we try to try to have a higher level kind of a priority so let's focus on retention or let's focus on this

[39:56] specific kind of user so in the us for just three months and we try to align product and growth uh on like for three months of that and so that's kind of uh that's yeah that's how we think about it with elliot and uh and try to have it on growth and on product and kind of put us to talk more to this kind of users so to improve on for this kind of user this uh this niche for instance and i don't know people selling on this marketplace for a month and then we'll see uh maybe another niche and another country but still improve the experience for every

[40:28] everyone i guess and are you thinking about marketing in terms of like specific people selling on specifics like marketplaces like you're actually going like channel by channel that that that closely and does that inform like features or is that informed creative or how does that feed back into your process yeah we're good we're getting into that like we try to understand better by uh persona and use case what's the ltv and what the retention is and i think we are at the scale where we start to do that but before it was like a general general creative for everyone and kind of demo the value of the app and we were super

[40:59] lucky that all creative were working for that and i think like now like the way marketing works it's uh like uh facebook or google or doing most of the optimization and you're more into like what how can i add up my creative so that it fit the focus i want to do for it i don't know for the us so i'll be make sure you're in english or make sure if you're like looking at multiple countries try not to be too localized i think there is a netflix called that neutralize or i they have a specific wording on making the the the artwork or the creative not to

[41:30] localize not to english for instance like to use content that's good for everyone so it's kind of uh that dictates kind of what we try to do with growth and marketing that's great well i have a million more questions but we do need to uh to wrap up um we're going to put links into the uh into the show notes to find you on twitter and linkedin and and photo room is such a great name easy to easy to google easy to find on the app store but you're also hiring uh what what positions you have open you want to make a quick pitch to our uh the audience

[42:02] listeners yeah sure yeah yeah we're hiring a lot uh we're hiring on uh growth and paid acquisition uh we're hiring a project designer ios developer android developer and the way we think about the team is really to have a queer 10 and we have a strong impact to millions of users so really leverage like a small team high impact and that's i think it's possible because of apps so we're looking for really senior people for that and mostly in europe so we have like a two three days a month uh in the paris hq but uh you can work from anywhere in europe time zone yeah and i'll second that the i think

[42:39] working on this product would be really interesting based purely based on my insider knowledge as an investor and your friend uh but but but but for real i mean a lot of apps don't you know get to this point you've got a lot of tailwinds and i think actually the the upsides are go far beyond the app store right and and the future's very very very big and you guys are ambitious so uh take these jobs thank you yeah yeah we're like thinking be everywhere we start for mobile but we're not like we're mobile first not mobile only and we have the web app web tool

[43:11] that we launched last week we have an api for any developer that wants to remove the background with photo attribution and we already have the mojo folks using it so it's really i think we want to be close to the entrepreneurs like doing photos and we want to communicate through do pro images that sell and so sometimes it's not an app it's just a photo and button and and so you can use the api for that and so yeah it's pretty it's pretty great when you have when you have a good product market fit it just gets really fun yeah and we have the kind of now that we have money

[43:40] we kind of we have like super smart people in the machine learning team so we have the best tech on market to do that and that's super exciting like we're shipping like new machinery next i think next week and it's going to be awesome like i can't wait to see the result on the analytics that's amazing and 10 people i i thought you were bigger i guess you want to be you want to be 15 or 20 with all the postings you have that's why i'm really bullish on this market david a small team can do a lot of stuff in this space it's crazy yeah

[44:07] it's amazing it is crazy well thank you so much for being on the podcast uh it was great chatting and thanks for sharing your insights matt yeah we'll have to catch up again in two years see how see how it's going yeah of course my pleasure thank you guys to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time

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