10/08/10

Blurring The Boundaries Of The Photography Industry│Technology Entrepreneur

Paul | Entrepreneurs

Elena Alexseeva, Co-Founder & CEO at PhotoHand.com, has more than 15 years of experience in IT services, having previously held IT strategy consulting and product development positions. In this latest Innovatrs interview, Elena talks about her first steps in the IT industry and how she decided to start-up her own company- aimed at filling the gap in the Digital Imaging ecosystem by changing industry rules at a time where the borderline between professional and amateur photographers has been blurred. Innovatrs: What made you do it? Why did you take the plunge, give up that cosy corporate job and become an entrepreneur? Elena: Never set foot in a corporation – always worked in small companies and start-ups where people were hired on merit and where you had to wear many hats. And I always knew that one day I would start my own business. It was the matter of time and the right opportunity. I value the experience – positive and negative – that I gained when working with the founders of these companies. What is interesting is that they all had the same colorful personality. Then in 2003 at a networking event, I stumbled upon Mr. Iospa – my current business partner who sounded exactly like all of them put together – an unbridled entrepreneur. Coming from the Finance industry, he seriously needed help with his IT offshore outsourcing business and offered me co-ownership. Innovatrs: What was the original @ha Idea and how has it evolved? Elena: PhotoHand.com organically grew from our outsourcing business. The idea came from a photographer client and originally the site was a photo editing and photo book design service to photographers. Then, as we got our feet wet in the Digital Imaging industry that was emerging from the former Photography industry, we noticed that it’s focus was shifting towards serving consumers because the lines separating professional photographers from semi-professionals and semi-professionals from amateurs were blurring. A much bigger market was opening to PhotoHand raising it’s potential to at least 100 Million a year in annual revenue. With this in mind, PhotoHand.com was rebuilt in 2008 to speak the language of consumers. Innovatrs: What was your first crisis or hurdle? Elena:Seeing the lucrative revenue potential but realizing the detrimental costs associated with handling large numbers of micro orders, we set out to design a technology platform that would simplify and automate most of the steps in sales, order management, staff management, and customer care. The first version of the PhotoHand platform was designed to cater to photographers and was rebuilt in 2008 to speak the language of consumers.

Innovatrs: How do you think the support for women entrepreneurs has developed? What (if any) gap still exists between men and women in technological entrepreneurialism? Elena: Being a woman-owned business that predominantly serves women and mostly hires women, we do feel like an outcast. Today’s tech start-up world is a boys’ world: Boys creating toys for boys like themselves financed by the same boys in the hopes of selling the company to bigger boys, preferably Google. No difference from the 90s when a bunch of start-ups were working on a “smart” refrigerator that would alert you when your milk is past the expiration date. No one consulted moms – the targeted buyers – about the practicality of such an invention. Women’s opinions don’t count much in this environment because we tend to be practical and thus critical. Neither do we like gadgets with manuals. We like one-button solutions that will save us time and effort. Women are crazy busy and grounded in the real world: We don’t waste any time online. I may sound pretty bitter about it. We got turned down for financing by a VC company based on the opinion of the executives from one of their portfolio companies presumably an expert in our field. In actuality, that company has a gadget that lets you upload your photo and then paste clothing and accessories on top of it to try them on virtually – a “solution” in search of a problem obviously developed by men probably for the times when robots inhabit the Earth. Innovatrs: It´s true, sometimes VC funding decisions can seem really arbitrary. So, how that kind of experiences in the past have helped you get to where you are today? Elena: The experience I gained working in a series of start-ups in the 90s taught me a lot. Before we got serious about PhotoHand, I did detailed calculations in Excel to verify if this idea was viable. We still do periodic market research and always listen to our customers. Being an online business, we don’t get too many phone calls, and each interaction is gold. We learned more about our industry from moms, aunties, newlyweds, fledgling fashion designers, beauty professionals, actors, models, musicians, pet owners, serial daters – all our clients more than from any business analyst. My mantra is “always listen to your client and always watch the competition”.