Photo printing as an advertising vehicle

Manish Agarwal & Rahul Agrawal- Founders, JustKapture

These days, many people do not go for photo printing as it can be expensive or time consuming. Identifying this pocket of opportunity, JustKapture was founded by two by IIIT — Hyderabad alumni which provided a brilliant printing solution as well as an effective medium for advertising.

JustKapture takes pride in providing non-intrusive and highly innovative form of advertising. The photo prints are free for JustKapture users, because the relevant advertisements are placed behind the photos from their brand partners. This allows them to make the good quality photo prints, and deliver it to their users, for no cost.

With a count of more than 30,000 registered users, the duo share their experience and thoughts on Ideas That Matter for Startup Networkz.

What is JustKapture? What is the issue that the venture is trying to address and what makes you confident that it is a winning proposition.

“At JustKapture, we believe in great ideas. Any great idea is successful when it solves a problem. Here we are trying to solve two problems together.

Problem 1) Advertising: No one likes advertising, because these days ads are intrusive. Ads come in between our favourite movies/TV-shows. Most of the ads are not targeted and personalized. Overall ads are not delightful and we believe ads can be good.

Problem 2) Photo Printing: Life is all about making memories and photo are great way to connect with memories. But these days we are clicking so many photos but how many of us are looking those photos again? So one solution is to print few special memories in regular interval but if you want to print few memories in regular interval it’s a hassle or an expensive task. Printing offline is a hassle and online printing medium are really expensive.

Solution: We print and deliver 6 photos to our users every month for FREE. Why FREE? Because we print targeted ads behind the photos, which space was empty and wasted before.”

What was the key factor/s that led you to take the plunge?

“Just like Facebook or Twitter, we are providing our users a totally free service which they are appreciating big time and giving targeted and personalized ads with various discount offers.”

Where did you meet your other co-founders / business partners? Please describe each one briefly.

“I am Manish Agarwal and my co-founder is Rahul Agrawal. We both are batch mates from IIIT-Hyderabad. We have done Btech and Masters by research together in 2012.”

How did you manage the initial capital?

“We needed INR 400,000 to start with, so we both arranged INR 200,000 each initially.”

What were the first 90 days like?

“Rahul and I both are hardworking. We are confident in our ideas and efforts. We got really good traction since the beginning only. Having said that, we faced mainly one challenge in the beginning. People didn’t believe in us that we are actually giving free photographs. Then we worked on our marketing plans again, and got it sorted. It was a very good learning for us to overcome with that barrier.”

Have you managed to raise any funding — angel / seed, etc?

“Yes, we have got first round (seed) of funding.”

What is the revenue stream & profitability?

“We are easily covering our printing cost through our revenues. Currently we are 8 member team and we need money for team’s salary and for further expansions.”

Where do you see yourself 3 years from now?

“Although it looks like people are not printing photos these days, but statics says photo printing market is 100 billion market in India (2010) and it’s increasing every month by 12%. So we want to be the most favoured photo printing service in India. As well as a best print media advertising service.”