![]() ![]() As more and more people take photos with their smartphones, PicMonkey has seen demand for a mobile product. Conquergood wouldn’t get into specifics, but noted that the company is looking to expand past just photo editing. The company founders say there are plans in the works to move into different form factors and platforms. Paid advertising contributes additional revenue. PicMonkey offers its basic service for free, and makes most of its money through a subscription program, charging $4.99/month or $33/year for premium features. “Before, only people who could use Photoshop benefitted from photo editing, but now, it’s an important life skill. “There was a time when Word and Excel were new things, and everyone had to make that transition. We see photo editing as the same thing,” he said. ![]() The explosion in digital photography makes photo editing today similar to the early days of word-processing and spreadsheets. Sposato, the company’s CEO (or “chief monkey officer,” as he has called himself) points to another important success factor: timing. When users save a file, for example, they’re prompted to pick from settings of Roger “not great quality, tiny file size” Pierce “Great quality, good file size” and Sean, “Gorgeous, but large file size.” (James Bond fans, take note.) PicMonkey features a collage tool, something that was never introduced on Picnik. The brand is different, there are a bevy of new features - like the collage tool - and the founders say the platform is faster.īut there are more similarities than differences, especially when it comes to the secret sauce that helped Picnik become successful. At its core, PicMonkey helps people edit and customize their photos - while delivering a bit of personality along the way. ![]() PicMonkey isn’t an identical remake of Picnik. PicMonkey lets users edit photos, build collages and create visual designs. PicMonkey, which employs 15 people, has quickly risen up the GeekWire 200 index of privately-held startup companies in the Northwest, now ranking No. ![]() PicMonkey has nearly two million Facebook likes, representing a fan base that includes everyone from mommy bloggers to people simply looking for a quick way to edit photos without breaking the bank on Photoshop. Now approaching its two-year anniversary, PicMonkey has reclaimed a significant swath of former Picnik users, in addition to new fans. The online photo editor, collage maker and design tool is now attracting more than 13 million unique visitors per month with an average session time of 20 minutes. But in reality, Terry said, the open-sourcing of that code actually mattered “very little” to the development of the PicMonkey product. Here’s the twist: After shutting down the service, Google open-sourced Picnik’s source code, which was common practice for the company as it shut down services. So the pair, along with Whiton and Conquergood, launched PicMonkey as a brand new photo-editing service in April 2012. And after a stint at a big company, they had the startup itch. There were also all those Picnik users left without their favorite online photo editor. “We all left very amicably,” Terry added.īut Terry and Huff, another original Picnik engineer, still had tons of expertise in the photo-editing space. Terry, one of Picnik’s original engineers, said the shutdown was a “collaborative and amicable process done in partnership with other parts of Google.” In the weeks and months after that, the Picnik employees began to leave Google for various reasons. “It was a combination of the fact that, here’s a thing you created and now you’re being asked to put a bullet in its head and also the fact that every day we could see the delight in users’ voices when they told us how much they loved Picnik.” “While we understood why they asked us to do that, it was nevertheless a very painful thing for a lot of us,” Sposato said. Google announced the closure in January 2012 as part of a laundry list of “resolutions for the new year,” saying it was making the move “so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products.” Two years after acquiring Picnik, Google shut the photo-editing service down in 2012. While Picnik continued to operate as an independent service, the Picnik-turned-Google employees allocated more time to projects like photo-editing on Google+.Įventually, Google closed the lid on Picnik - part of a broader move by Google CEO Larry Page to focus the company on bigger priorities. But over the next two years, it became clear that the Picnik business was becoming an area of low priority for Google. ![]()
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