Little Boomer
02-28-2008, 05:33 AM
Did everyone receive the email from the CEO of phanfare??
Phanfare is going through an important transition that I want to tell you more about. We started the business in 2004, with the goal of enabling and empowering families to share and preserve photos and videos. Mark Heinrich and I founded the company literally because we
had nowhere we wanted to put our photos and videos.
We knew that we were willing to pay to have high-quality photo and video hosting and we presumed that there were many other likeminded folks. We offered premium photo and video hosting with no ads, phone support and an orientation that made each Phanfare customer a
self-publisher with a direct URL, no branding and a simple email-based invitation system to see photos and videos. As you know, we invested heavily in technology, building innovative synchronizing desktop client software for Mac and PC.
Since 2004 we grew to 11,000 customers. And you all loved it. But the truth is that we were not getting to scale. The number of people willing to pay for online hosting of their photos and videos is too small. What's more, our size limited our ability to do the integrations that we all want: wireless integrations, camera integrations, and digital frame integrations.
At the same time, we looked at what we had created and realized it was not nearly collaborative enough. Phanfare was not exploiting the power of the Internet. Instead, we had built 11,000 little silos, each with its little audience.
We took a hard look at the business and decided to make some fairly radical changes while staying true to our original mission. Phanfare 2.0 is a result of that effort. I know that we pitched Phanfare 2.0 as a standard upgrade, but it is much more. I apologize for being overly breezy about the changes. I know you are all discerning Internet consumers, and I want to tell you how Phanfare is changing at a high level. The low-level details are well documented elsewhere (link at the end of this message).
We need your help to make Phanfare 2.0 a success; you are the foundation.
First, we brought together Phanfare as a social network rather than web hosting. There are some important reasons why this makes sense. It allows much more collaboration between creators and viewers, increases
the utility of Phanfare as it attracts more people, and is easier to use if you are connected with multiple people. It was quite cumbersome to remember the multiple URLs and passwords in Phanfare 1.0. Now everyone can login at www.phanfare.com (http://www.phanfare.com) and get an overview of their world. With everyone registered, there is natural growth as some of the viewers become content creators, spreading Phanfare. All that adds up to long term viability of the service.
Second, Phanfare now comes with 1GB of free storage. There is certainly a demand out there for high-quality photo and video sharing, but the mass market simply expects software to be delivered for free on the Internet. Long term, we will likely monetize through some sort of advertising on the Phanfare 2.0 dashboard. We have no intention to run ads on personal albums. They ruin the experience and don't work anyway. We don't intend to do any paid email marketing. We hate email marketing for third party products.
Having a free level of service fits well with turning Phanfare into a high-quality photo and video sharing social network for grownups. Your friends and family can register without paying.
We still charge for storage above 1GB (unlimited storage plan) because the day when the economics make sense for unlimited free photo
and video sharing supported by advertising is way off in the future. The last thing we want to do is put Phanfare at risk. We take the responsibility of keeping your photos and videos very seriously.
Today about 25% of our Phanfare 1.0 customers are on the 2.0 system. We estimate about 2,000 of you are businesses or consumers interested in sharing with an anonymous audience that will find the orientation of Phanfare 2.0 to be a showstopper. For those who don't want to move, we are offering pro-rated refunds in June and content back on DVD.
We have slowed down upgrading people to Phanfare 2.0 so that we can incorporate the feedback we have gotten from all of you. Since release
we already added back in the ability to turn off printing and downloading of fullsize originals and added control over suppressing content notifications to specific friends and family.
We make these changes from a position of strength. We raised a new round of capital and have the complete confidence of our investors. This was not forced on us. We made these changes to make Phanfare successful.
I am being candid about our strategy and our future because Phanfare
has always been a bit of a collective between all of you and us. We know when you give your photos and videos to a company and make a huge
investment in organizing them and uploading them, it is not just about the money you pay. It is about your investment in time. We get this.
Finally, we need your help. We need you to make Phanfare a success by
telling us what you do and don't like about this new collaborative network. We need Phanfare to spread to a larger audience while still being about person to person sharing. Within that basic goal, it can be whatever we all want it to be. Please don't tell me you want it to be simple web hosting for photos and videos though, because we have already made that choice and closed that door. Some of our former competitors are quite competent at offering simple web hosting and are good alternatives to the old Phanfare. If you find bugs in 2.0, please email them to bugs@phanfare.com.
We at Phanfare (there are 12 of us) all use the service for our own
personal photos and videos. We gave up our own Phanfare destination URLS and little vanity presses for a chance at doing something much bigger and more interesting. I can tell you as a devoted Phanfare 1.0 user that after two months of using Phanfare 2.0, I am enjoying photo and video sharing more than I have in a long time.
Some people have asked me if there is anything invariant about Phanfare, since this change seems so radical. I will share you with you our original mission statement from 2004.
"To empower and help people to share and archive their personally created digital media. To provide the fastest, most productive experience in manipulating that media and accessing that media. To create an open platform that enables people to use their personally created media however they desire."
To all of you who are staying with us to take this ride, thank you.
Here is a list of the changes in Phanfare 2.0.
http://help.phanfare.com/index.php/Changes_in_Phanfare (https://mail.assuranthealth.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://help.phanfare.com/index.php/Changes_in_Phanfare)
This message was sent from my personal email. If you want to correspond with me, then simply reply. To get help with 1.0 or 2.0,
please email support@phanfare.com.
Sincerely,
Andrew
They must have a lot of people leaving and not liking the 2.0!
Phanfare is going through an important transition that I want to tell you more about. We started the business in 2004, with the goal of enabling and empowering families to share and preserve photos and videos. Mark Heinrich and I founded the company literally because we
had nowhere we wanted to put our photos and videos.
We knew that we were willing to pay to have high-quality photo and video hosting and we presumed that there were many other likeminded folks. We offered premium photo and video hosting with no ads, phone support and an orientation that made each Phanfare customer a
self-publisher with a direct URL, no branding and a simple email-based invitation system to see photos and videos. As you know, we invested heavily in technology, building innovative synchronizing desktop client software for Mac and PC.
Since 2004 we grew to 11,000 customers. And you all loved it. But the truth is that we were not getting to scale. The number of people willing to pay for online hosting of their photos and videos is too small. What's more, our size limited our ability to do the integrations that we all want: wireless integrations, camera integrations, and digital frame integrations.
At the same time, we looked at what we had created and realized it was not nearly collaborative enough. Phanfare was not exploiting the power of the Internet. Instead, we had built 11,000 little silos, each with its little audience.
We took a hard look at the business and decided to make some fairly radical changes while staying true to our original mission. Phanfare 2.0 is a result of that effort. I know that we pitched Phanfare 2.0 as a standard upgrade, but it is much more. I apologize for being overly breezy about the changes. I know you are all discerning Internet consumers, and I want to tell you how Phanfare is changing at a high level. The low-level details are well documented elsewhere (link at the end of this message).
We need your help to make Phanfare 2.0 a success; you are the foundation.
First, we brought together Phanfare as a social network rather than web hosting. There are some important reasons why this makes sense. It allows much more collaboration between creators and viewers, increases
the utility of Phanfare as it attracts more people, and is easier to use if you are connected with multiple people. It was quite cumbersome to remember the multiple URLs and passwords in Phanfare 1.0. Now everyone can login at www.phanfare.com (http://www.phanfare.com) and get an overview of their world. With everyone registered, there is natural growth as some of the viewers become content creators, spreading Phanfare. All that adds up to long term viability of the service.
Second, Phanfare now comes with 1GB of free storage. There is certainly a demand out there for high-quality photo and video sharing, but the mass market simply expects software to be delivered for free on the Internet. Long term, we will likely monetize through some sort of advertising on the Phanfare 2.0 dashboard. We have no intention to run ads on personal albums. They ruin the experience and don't work anyway. We don't intend to do any paid email marketing. We hate email marketing for third party products.
Having a free level of service fits well with turning Phanfare into a high-quality photo and video sharing social network for grownups. Your friends and family can register without paying.
We still charge for storage above 1GB (unlimited storage plan) because the day when the economics make sense for unlimited free photo
and video sharing supported by advertising is way off in the future. The last thing we want to do is put Phanfare at risk. We take the responsibility of keeping your photos and videos very seriously.
Today about 25% of our Phanfare 1.0 customers are on the 2.0 system. We estimate about 2,000 of you are businesses or consumers interested in sharing with an anonymous audience that will find the orientation of Phanfare 2.0 to be a showstopper. For those who don't want to move, we are offering pro-rated refunds in June and content back on DVD.
We have slowed down upgrading people to Phanfare 2.0 so that we can incorporate the feedback we have gotten from all of you. Since release
we already added back in the ability to turn off printing and downloading of fullsize originals and added control over suppressing content notifications to specific friends and family.
We make these changes from a position of strength. We raised a new round of capital and have the complete confidence of our investors. This was not forced on us. We made these changes to make Phanfare successful.
I am being candid about our strategy and our future because Phanfare
has always been a bit of a collective between all of you and us. We know when you give your photos and videos to a company and make a huge
investment in organizing them and uploading them, it is not just about the money you pay. It is about your investment in time. We get this.
Finally, we need your help. We need you to make Phanfare a success by
telling us what you do and don't like about this new collaborative network. We need Phanfare to spread to a larger audience while still being about person to person sharing. Within that basic goal, it can be whatever we all want it to be. Please don't tell me you want it to be simple web hosting for photos and videos though, because we have already made that choice and closed that door. Some of our former competitors are quite competent at offering simple web hosting and are good alternatives to the old Phanfare. If you find bugs in 2.0, please email them to bugs@phanfare.com.
We at Phanfare (there are 12 of us) all use the service for our own
personal photos and videos. We gave up our own Phanfare destination URLS and little vanity presses for a chance at doing something much bigger and more interesting. I can tell you as a devoted Phanfare 1.0 user that after two months of using Phanfare 2.0, I am enjoying photo and video sharing more than I have in a long time.
Some people have asked me if there is anything invariant about Phanfare, since this change seems so radical. I will share you with you our original mission statement from 2004.
"To empower and help people to share and archive their personally created digital media. To provide the fastest, most productive experience in manipulating that media and accessing that media. To create an open platform that enables people to use their personally created media however they desire."
To all of you who are staying with us to take this ride, thank you.
Here is a list of the changes in Phanfare 2.0.
http://help.phanfare.com/index.php/Changes_in_Phanfare (https://mail.assuranthealth.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://help.phanfare.com/index.php/Changes_in_Phanfare)
This message was sent from my personal email. If you want to correspond with me, then simply reply. To get help with 1.0 or 2.0,
please email support@phanfare.com.
Sincerely,
Andrew
They must have a lot of people leaving and not liking the 2.0!