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Forum: General Photography
06-28-2015, 05:26 PM
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Hi thanks!@Murfy
We would initially start in the UK but expanding to overseas is always on the plan.
In the US there's a site called smartshoot.com.They're doing something similar and have been pretty successful. However we're still quite different from them as they target on professionals and Perfocal focus a bit more on medium-end market and semi-pro photographers.
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Forum: General Photography
06-28-2015, 03:01 PM
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and by the way I'm a pentax fan too! I did registered this fresh account to reply but actually I've been on the forum for a couple of years (although rarely post stuff). I owned several Pextax cameras, and still have a Pentax LX film SLR. Now waiting for the Pentax full-frame! :D
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Forum: General Photography
06-28-2015, 02:56 PM
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Hi guys
It's kind of surprising and actually a pleasure to see people talking about your own business, either good or bad...you feel like you're really doing something :P
Having that said, I'm the founder of Perfocal, Tony Xu, as @rawr has already dug up....
@rawr was right, we're a micro-startup at a very early stage. We were based in Manchester before, but recently we just moved to London to join a startup accelerator MassChallenge (the world's biggest startup accelerating programme actually, see masschallenge.org). We're still at very early stage and I'm really sorry that the product is not ready to launch yet. But we're definitely a real company lol. And we've always been upfront about our contact details actually (you can easily message us on the landing page or find our email: hello@perfocal.com) and even though we don't have a customer manager yet, we reply every single email received.
The vision of the company is to create a better and different marketplace for all photographers including quality amateurs, helping them get paid jobs and manage jobs more easily. Also for the clients we hope we're making the process of finding the best suit photographer more convenient.
As a photographer, if you already get loads of high-pay jobs without much worry about promoting yourself, that's good. But the thing is there're still many photographers don't have a good way to get known by potential customers (mostly in medium-end market that customers don't necessarily hire a top-end pro but not satisfied by phone selfies), and many clients struggle in finding their perfect photographer. At Perfocal we'll match availability, price range, categories and locations for the two sides so both of them save some time. Simply think it as "Airbnb or Uber for photographers". "Reasonable prices" never means cheap, photographers can charge the amount they want as long as they're good enough.
Sorry again, we really should have had something operating out there but the development process wasn't as smooth as we thought. Good news is we're looking to privately test a beta version very soon (very likely in late July or early August this year). We're also busy raising investment to ensure a high-quality public launch. Although we're not launched yet, we think being active on social media is a good way to get some traction as well as obtain potential users. Please note that we never tag the others' photos on Instagram. Those pictures were hashtagged by those photographers so we're able to find them. We select some best ones to feature on our own page. Actually the newest number is just below 30,000 pics are tagged #perfocal now by photography lovers form all around the world.
It'll be really great to know what you guys think about Perfocal. Feel free to tell me anything. :) Thank you guys!!
Best wishes
Tony
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