Streetography CEO: ” We Are The Online Mapping Market Leader In Place Discovery”

How would you describe Streetography in a few words?

Streetography powers photo-enhanced maps for websites and apps.

What inspired you to create the startup? How did it all start?

I started thinking deeply about the quality of life and aesthetics of neighborhoods when I created Playborhood, a movement to make vibrant and livable neighborhoods for children and their families.

Then, one day in late 2015, I grew increasingly frustrated searching for an Airbnb for my family’s vacation in Amsterdam. I found thousands of photos showing the insides of hundreds of apartments, but I wasn’t thinking of going to Amsterdam to stay inside an apartment. I wanted us to be out and about, in the neighborhood. Airbnb failed to show me the vibe of the immediate neighborhood surrounding any of the apartments I was considering, so they lost a sale.

The idea for Streetography was born, and by late 2016, we had a full-fledged iOS app, closely followed by desktop and Android support.

Are you using Streetography internally? How does that affect the viewpoints of the development team?

Absolutely! We all love using our apps when we visit a new city, to learn about the neighborhoods around where we’re staying. Once a year, we pull our worldwide team together in one city, and one of our activities is to do a photo walk around a city, post our photos in our Streetography apps, and compete to get the most Likes on our photos. Last year, we did this in Paris. This year in April, we’ll do it in San Francisco.

Posting our favorite photos and soliciting Likes forces us to think more deeply about what makes a great photo of a city, and it also gets us thinking more deeply about particular features of our user interface.

How do you make sure you are focused on your company’s current needs and don’t lose track?

We decided long ago to not act like a B2C company. Yes, we have apps available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, but we don’t do anything to pump our numbers up. Our business is in powering websites and apps other than our own. We earn a SaaS fee – based on the number of users per month – for doing this. Our second, but no less important business model, is to provide a map-based advertising platform.

Apart from travel, your solution is also applied in the areas of real estate and urban planning. Where do you see another potential for Streetography? 

Local e-commerce is a very attractive market for us. Streetography can show users photos of products where they’re sold. An example is Yelp  – we’ve created a prototype of Yelp restaurants in San Francisco. We think browsing a Photo Map like this is a more appealing way to shop for a restaurant than the current Yelp user interface, in which a user has to type in a place and a category, then wade through a list.

What is the biggest challenge that the company has faced so far and what are your biggest learning points?

Our biggest challenge is gaining marquee B2B customers, and then earning significant revenue from them. We’ve encountered three dynamics that have slowed our early sales:

1. most of our potential customers move very slowly,
2. these potential customers are very metrics-driven, and we have very little data to show right now, and
3. we have yet to release an API, which is the preferred way for the largest potential customers to integrate a technology like ours.

In summary, it’s still early for us to achieve “customer traction.” We need to keep our heads down and continue to execute well. I think we’ve been doing that. 2018 should prove me right or wrong.

You were recently featured in our Breakdown on Startup Driven Innovation in the travel industry. From your perspective, what are the most impactful innovations this sector will experience in the near future?

I believe that online mapping is poised for a major disruption. All major online mapping providers, led by Google Maps, are obsessed with navigation. They emphasize roads, and how to get from “Point A to Point B” using them. So, they don’t pay much attention to how they enable “place discovery.” However, most of the money in online mapping is in place discovery.

The competition in the travel industry is rising – a fact that especially influences the work of travel agents. What will it take for these companies to stay on top of their game?

We’re particularly focused on the segment of travel consumers who want to gather their own information about their destinations online. They like vacation rentals rather than hotels. They’d rather check out Yelp reviews than ask a concierge for his/her recommendations.

Before the Internet, this segment of travelers didn’t exist. Today, it’s increasing rapidly – witness the growth of Airbnb. Many savvy travel agents recognize that their job is to enable their customers to discover everything they can about their destinations. The days of simply saying, “trust us, we’ll take care of you” are dwindling.

What’s next for Streetography?

2018 looks to be a very exciting year for us! We’re pitching a lot of large potential customers like Yelp. Think of the many other online companies that sell things at many different locations, and have photos as part of their selling process. We’ll be talking to many of them this year. So, if all goes well, you’ll be using Streetography Photo Maps on the website or apps of at least one major online brand by the end of 2018.

In addition, we’ll release many very exciting technologies. We’ll launch our APIs – both for our own maps and as an add-on to existing Google Maps API customers. We’ll make a major architectural change that will increase the speed of our Photo Maps by at least 3x.

What’s one piece of advice you can give to fellow founders for their startup?

1. Try to avoid raising money from professional investors early. Most professionals provide far less help than they claim they do, but they put severe limitations on how you can grow your business.
2. Figure out how to allocate your attention and time. Doing this very well is one of the keys to success.
3. Focus on product early. Great products are really the only way to establish long-term value, especially in a crowded marketplace.

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