[numakerg]

I really have to applaud your courage to start in a space that's already occupied. I know I couldn't do something that wasn't absolutely novel because the marketing chops aren't there.

EDIT: Absolutely brilliant. Your service is the top result on Google for "send photos to grandparent" and you snuck an ad into the featured result listicle. Not to mention this very "informative post" that doubles as an ad.

How did you develop your marketing skills?

[aacook]

There are some giants in the space for sure: Walmart, Amazon, CVS, Walgreens, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and many more. None of them did what I needed: Nag all my siblings on a regular basis to send photos to my elderly grandparents. Print quality in the industry is surprisingly varied: https://nanagram.co/photoprintingnearme

[numakerg]

Here's a concern I'd have investing in this space. What percent of the population* prefers receiving physical photos from loved ones instead of digital ones, and how do you expect that group to change within the next few decades?

* Within the geographic area that you plan to serve, e.g. USA and potentially Canada, West Europe

[aacook]

We ship worldwide. This is a good question. To be honest, I'm not thinking decades out.

My siblings and I tried to set my grandparents up with devices which never worked. People often tell me the same when signing up for NanaGram. Products like digital photo frames are great but require set up and internet. An envelope of 10 prints can be mailed in a couple minutes and provide joy in several places throughout the home; after delivering the first set of photos to my grandparents, I came back the next week and my grandmother taped photos across her entire kitchen. :)

There's also something about printed photos that a glowing pixel can't beat. The closest analogy is vinyl records.

[JoshTriplett]

All businesses need to adapt to their customer's changing needs as time goes on; some know that in advance and some don't. I think you've built something incredible here: you've taken the lowest-friction way your customers want to share photos (texting them), and made that your primary interface.

You took a real-world impedance mismatch, and you serve as the interface between people so that all of them can interact in the way they most want to interact. There are a lot of potential businesses there, and I'm sure you'd be well positioned to grow into future such adaptation layers; I can imagine a brand built around a family of such inter-generational adaptations, in both directions.

[thaumaturgy]

A close relative of my partner's just passed away and one of the first things the family did was dump out a couple of boxes of photos and spread them out so they could go through a bunch of memories together. Then they picked out a bunch of the photos and attached them to some posterboard today for tomorrow's small service.

These people aren't luddites. It's just easier to do this stuff with physical photos. The tech-obsessed might forget about that sometimes.

[codingdave]

Which problem is harder? Texting photos and converting them to physical delivery, or texting them and just picking the delivery address?

If they have already solved the harder problem, a future potential pivot to digital delivery hardly feels like a roadblock to me.

[exolymph]

> I know I couldn't do something that wasn't absolutely novel because the marketing chops aren't there.

You actually need more marketing chops if you're doing something absolutely novel.