PhotoDeck's Evolution: Empowering photographers with JF Maion

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society sits down with JF Maion, the entrepreneurial mind behind the family-owned PhotoDeck. Learn firsthand about the company's transformative leap from a stock photography niche to a sanctuary for photographers. PhotoDeck has carved out a unique space in the world of photography, offering everything from proofing galleries to robust e-commerce capabilities. Maion details the deliberate choices made to allow photographers to maintain full control and reap the full rewards of their sales, through a commission-free model that's as refreshing as it is rewarding.

Discover the core values steering this European family business: autonomy, transparency, and an unyielding commitment to customer satisfaction. 

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Photodeck

Erin Manning 0:12

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast , the photo imaging industry's leading news source . Here's your Gar y Pageau , The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip , Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers .

Gary Pageau 0:28

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast . I'm your host , gary Pegeau , and today we're joined by JF Maion , the founder of PhotoDeck , which is based in France . Hi , JF , how are you today ?

JF Maion 0:41

Hi Gary , Thanks for having me . I'm doing great .

Gary Pageau 0:44

Thank you so tell us about PhotoDeck . It's one of the many , many photographer-orientated websites to do portfolios and things , but it's more than that . So how did you get started ?

JF Maion 1:01

Absolutely so . PhotoDec k was . I mean , we've been running for a month , for about 12 years , I think . We started PhotoDeck in 2009 , so it's been quite a while already and the initial starting point was stock photography . The main objective was to provide photographers the ability to create their own stock website . There was a time where , when the stock business was still flourishing for photographers but we're still very concentrated with some major players and I myself played with building my own stock website and being quite successful with that . So from there came the idea that , hey , we should provide that as a platform , as a tool for independent photographers to cut the leash and become independent and have no middle man and take things into their own hands and have their own website . As time went on then we expanded a lot into portfolio building , into proofing , galleries and more general e-commerce features , allowing also fine art photographers , for instance , to sell prints , which is quite relevant to the topic we have today .

JF Maion 2:13

Today , PhotoDeck is , I think , known for being a tool that is extremely flexible , in the sense that we have very different kinds of photographers and even agencies using Fotodek .

JF Maion 2:26

We have people using Fotodek just for simple portfolios . We have wedding photographers using Fotodek for well selling to their clients , to private consumers , in the B2C context , distributing and selling images . We have stock photo agencies , we have commercial photo agencies , we have even photographers shooting thousands of images a day and selling them also to consumers , and we have many people doing different things . It's quite common in Europe , for instance , to have a photographer that does weddings , but also like on the weekends but during the week might be closer to commercial photography , working with so commercial , commercial clients and like advertising shots and that sort of thing , and the requirements for both kinds of customers and galleries and workflows are very different and our aim is to be able to support both on the same platform , so that photographer that changes specialty over his career or then just serves different kinds of customers and projects at any time , he's able to do everything on a single platform .

Gary Pageau 3:39

When you started out . I'm looking at stock photography and I think a lot of the portfolio companies have started that . Of course , the stock business has just radically changed over the last 10 , 12 years . It's exploded or imploded , or whatever . You want to talk to a general day of AI coming in there you can write to create your own stock . So it looks like you pivoted at a good time . Was that always your plan to go a stock ? Or did you realize , hey , listen , we're building this great platform that can do all these other things as well . And how long did that realization take , we know ? Before you said you know , start adding more stuff .

JF Maion 4:19

Yeah , so so , first of all , it's not . It wasn't really private in the sense that we are still doing . We're still doing this talk and we have a number of of both individual stock photographers but also stock agencies , using further they guys , their platform . I think , yeah , we took a couple of years before we realized that , yeah , we need to do something else on just this . So we need to expand and I think the I mean most of what we do doesn't come from us , in a sense that it's not necessarily us saying that , hey , it would be good , better for the company or better for the industry , if we went into that direction and did that thing .

JF Maion 4:57

Everything we do mostly everything we do is based on customer feedback . When we started to have more members saying they have a stock site , it would be nice if we could also distribute images to private clients for commission work . I have a stock site , but I'd like to have a portfolio as well . Can you improve that so that my stock site but yeah , I'd like to have a portfolio as well and can you improve that so that my stock site looks a bit better and could use that ? So gathering all this feedback on a continuous basis is really what directs our development and our direction . Of course we have some safety guards . We try not to do anything stupid for the long term for ourselves . But yeah , it's really the feedback we get from members that direct what we do .

Gary Pageau 5:43

So I think it's kind of interesting how you have the proofing component side of it . Yeah , you know , because I think you know there are sites who are like have that but it's not a major , you know feature of that . How is that developed ? Because I think it's interesting because you almost have , like this public face , you know , where people can have their portfolio , but then there's sort of this private space and how is that ?

JF Maion 6:07

Yeah , so well . Basically , it's fairly easy to integrate them into the same website , as long as you have the capability to display the images of the galleries in different ways . So that's for the presentation part . We have a way to display portfolio galleries in a way that there are no distractions , we let the work talk , the images are big and there are not too many buttons and so on . But you can also have separate galleries where the settings are dedicated for proofing , and so there you can have more advanced features . And again , that depends very much as well on what kind of final customer the photographer or the agency is serving .

JF Maion 6:50

For B2C photographers , it means having simple , password-protected galleries , having a way to add images to favorites and just being able to view them and order them easily , but without going into too much complexity . For B2B business cases , then , we need to go one step further . So it means that security needs to be higher , so that it is more granular . You need to be able to give permissions , not just with a generic password . We need to give permission to specific individuals or to groups . You need to make sure that people can make light boxes , share them within a team in their company and work together in a collaborative fashion on those light boxes . So the features evolve , or I mean features are available to everybody but can be used in a different way depending on who the customer is , and it all integrates into the same website .

Gary Pageau 7:46

So I think it's kind of interesting because you have this photographer , but we also have this digital asset management . That's right . Which is , you know , you could have a business store . Their company's image is there and we do the brand ? Assets and corporate head and all that fun stuff . So that's kind of interesting as well , because I haven't heard a lot of photographer and I'm doing air quotes photographer sites do that kind of approach .

JF Maion 8:13

Yeah , absolutely Absolutely , and I think it goes a long way into showing how flexible the platform is , because it's not something we wanted to do ourselves .

JF Maion 8:23

But we realized at some point hey , we have some companies and we actually have some big companies and big names who are using Fotodeck as a digital asset management system , even though it wasn't marketed at that time in any way as a digital asset management system , even though it wasn't marketed at that time in any way as a digital asset management system . But talking to those people , we realized that actually the platform is , at its core , a digital asset management system , the website being just a front-end part of it . So now we are a bit more not aggressive , but we have kept improving the product for that kind of scenario . And again , the same features are basically available also to agencies and to individual photographers if they want to , and that's mostly about , for instance , like multi-user backend accesses and , while there are some more specifics around search and so on , but the same platform can be used and is useful for that as well . Um , yeah , and you're .

Gary Pageau 9:18

You're in multilingual , you're in a bunch of different countries um . Are you adding more ?

JF Maion 9:23

that's right so we are , um , I mean , photography has been , uh , the front end side , um , so what ? What ? The uh websites ? Basically , photographers and companies , companies . They have been multilingual since . Well , potentially one you know we are european with . We actually launched in the US and the UK before launching in France . So the multilingual aspect on the front end was essentially from day one . The backend was initially launched in English . We launched French a few years later because well , we're from France , we would have been stupid not to .

JF Maion 9:54

And we launched French a few years later , because we're from France we would have been stupid not to and we launched in Germany this year . So we serve all members , the photographers , in three languages , but we have a dozen more languages that are available for them to use for their clients . So , for instance , we have people like in Italy , Italian photographers using Photodek in English , but their own website is obviously in Italian , which is very important for their own customers .

Gary Pageau 10:24

Sure , and speaking of Germany , you've recently become a partner with a German company that we're going to talk about in a little bit Whitewall . Did you have a print partner before that ?

JF Maion 10:36

Yeah , so we are integrated already in the US with WHEC , which is quite a well-known and respected lab . We have another integration in the UK with a company called One Vision Imaging . We used to have an integration as well with a lab in France called Picto , but that integration was now put out of , I mean decommissioned , so that we now are integrated with Wall and very , very excited about this . You mentioned Wall being a German company . Well , they're not more German , we are French , they are based in Germany , like we are based in France , not more .

Gary Pageau 11:14

German , we are French .

Erin Manning 11:14

They are based in .

JF Maion 11:15

Germany , like we are based in France , but I think that is one of the great things about this collaboration is that there is a great match , I think , in terms of strategy and many common points , and one being that Whitewall is truly an international company .

Gary Pageau 11:28

Yeah , oh , exactly , yeah . No , I mean , I've gotten Whitewall friendship , you know , here in America , so it's not a joke . But it's just funny how you know European companies kind of have sort of this pan-European and global outlook , right yeah .

JF Maion 11:44

In the case of WhiteWall , it was quite obvious and , as I mentioned , we launched in Germany and WhiteWall is based in Germany , and WhiteWall is based in Germany .

JF Maion 11:57

So of course there was some high interest for us in working with Whitewall to help us reaching or better serve the German markets , and we were certainly expecting to have a very good response as well from our members , for instance , in France and in other European countries , because Whitewall is very well known in Europe overall . But we've been amazed by the response as well from our US members and noticed that , yeah , whitewall is extremely recognized and appreciated in the US as well and we have a lot of traction from our US members on this new integration

Photography Platform Focuses on Fairness

JF Maion 12:28

.

Gary Pageau 12:29

Now , is your output now exclusively Whitewall , or do you have other products that they don't make because they don't make everything ?

JF Maion 12:38

Yeah , we don't do exclusivity and I think , uh , that's one of one of the uh , um how do I say um differentiating thing with it , with a with a photo deck . We try to . We don't make decisions on behalf of our photographers , and at the very core of our philosophy is providing photographers with choices and control . So we provide them with the option to use white wall . If they want to sell white wall products and have everything automated and benefited , there's a true benefit for them , obviously , in using this integration . If they want to sell something that World War doesn't provide , then it's up to them really to either fulfill themselves using another partner that we have , or then we even provide some kind of semi-automation if they want to work with a local lab . So here our role really is to we're here to serve photographers and provide them with the control and flexibility , and that precludes very much any sort of exclusivity in the solutions we provide .

Gary Pageau 13:44

Tell me more about that . Working with a local lab piece . So I mean , how does that work ? Do they just like be able to download a bundle ? Or , if the lab has an api , kind of do it themselves , or how ?

JF Maion 13:56

yeah , so the uh . I can see in europe the few labs have an api and if they do , it's , it's never standards , it's never the kind of integration that is ready made , like we have a whiteboard , but it's . It's a it's . What it provides is a fairly simple way for photographers to automatically send orders by email to local labs . So it means that lab indeed usually needs to be small to be able to accept this kind of ad hoc orders , but there is a template that a photographer can change and that is being sent then to the lab , but it could be term-sensitive .

Gary Pageau 14:34

For example , like you know , they may need something right away for whatever reason , and the local lab by email is a great idea .

JF Maion 14:43

Exactly , and we see photographers using that for themselves , because photographers who have their own or even small agencies that have their own in-house lab use that feature to send automatically the customer orders to that people . But I have to say that it's not a feature that is widely used . I think I mean photographers have better things to do than building this kind of ad hoc integration . Some people do so . It's nice . Again , it is an option , but for most people the integration integrations we have with white wall and with other labs is vastly more convenient and an effective use of their time .

Gary Pageau 15:23

I just find that very interesting because most people kind of build their closed garden approach right . Exactly these are approved printer partners and these are the ones you use and you're kind of asked if you want to do something else .

JF Maion 15:38

And there's a reason for that . It has to do with philosophy , it has to do with business . I think one of the reasons many companies are closed is that they have business agreements with the labs and they take commissions from the photographers and , I suspect , have some special agreements with the lab . And , as I said , we try to work in a different way . We really put photographic control and the photographer's interest at the center , provide them with responsibility , so that we don't take commission , for instance , and that's a huge differentiator .

Gary Pageau 16:12

Right , I was going to ask you about that . Tell me about that ?

JF Maion 16:16

Yeah , so I mean , we see ourselves really as a technology enabler , as a technology partner for independent photographers , not as a middleman .

JF Maion 16:25

So we don't market , we don't have a portal where we sell our photographers' images , for instance , and normally website companies don't have that , but still , for some reason , they feel that they have the right to take a , a commission on , uh , the photographers own sales and , and we don't think that that's that's really fair and we prefer photographers to be involved , I mean to to take their business into their own hands . It comes uh with , uh , obviously , a bit of responsibility and and work . Uh , for instance , photographers need to connect their account with their own Stripe or their own PayPal account , so that the money doesn't even go through us . It goes directly to the photographer . What the original commission , so that's an easy thing to do , but it means that the photographer needs to have a payment account , what most do , and they're certainly very happy to to hear that they keep everything . Um , but , yeah , they are a quite important um like , yes , pretty different uh approach to most providers in uh in .

Gary Pageau 17:31

Yeah , because I mean , and you just charge a fee to the photographer and it's , you know , the under 10 fee . It's substantial . I mean it's not crazy , it's . I want like 29 or something . So it's not , it's not that's a blow up , yeah , but it's fine yeah yeah , but you're not doing the model where you know we're going to go in low price and make it up on commission sales on prints or services or whatever you're just saying . We're providing a value for this amount of our website .

JF Maion 17:59

Exactly .

Gary Pageau 18:00

And it's up to you to make the most of it .

JF Maion 18:01

on the other side , yeah , I think we're all about fairness as well , and I feel this money is very clear and very fair because I mean , you know why would a photographer , I mean , lose a percentage on sales ? It would be like a camera camera maker making , like taking commission every time you hit on the click button .

JF Maion 18:25

It doesn't . It doesn't make sense because it doesn't really . Of course it has an impact . How many , how many times you take a picture and how many pictures you put on a website has an impact down the road on how much you sell . But it's not . You know , there's no marketing , marketing , promotion effort in there .

JF Maion 18:41

So , yeah , we , we like things to be to be clear and I think the the relationship with it , with a white wall , also goes in um , I mean , follows very much that that direction , with that integration photographers , still has a direct relationship with a white wall . Here again , we're not in an , we're not a middleman , we're not an intermediary . So if the customer has something to ask white wall , wants to negotiate prices with a white wall , or has a support question , they can contact white wall directly . They know what order number is at white wall . It's all connected to their own account . There . Things stay very clear , very , very clean .

JF Maion 19:18

Anybody has its own clear role in this model . And something that is also important when you think about the European market is the customer ownership and the privacy thing . Right , because here it means that with this model , it is very clear who is a customer of whom and who owns the customer data . So it is very clear that when somebody purchases from a photographer a print or a download or whatever they purchase from the photographer directly , there is no intermediates , or even legally , in terms of privacy , there is no question to be asked okay , what is going to happen to my data if I put it on that website ? And it's a question that photographers sometimes ask , and rightfully so , and here the answer is very clear . I mean , the customer buys directly from the photographer . It doesn't go through a payment , don't go through our platforms .

Gary Pageau 20:17

The database is… Because you may not even know the customer information is buying the print at all ? Yeah , exactly .

JF Maion 20:24

So , yeah , it's very clean . I think that's something we appreciate . It's different from when you purchase something on eBay , for instance . You're not quite sure whether you purchase from eBay or from the eBay seller or who does what . So you see , what I mean and in the European context is it's something that has its own weight and that is becoming more and more important .

Gary Pageau 20:51

Yeah , yeah . No , I think that's interesting , Cause you said the privacy piece is a big deal . It's becoming a bigger deal , right ? And who's responsible for that ? You know , because if you're a photographer and the lab has a breach , you know you may be exposed because of the . You know the , your , their customer data may be exposed because of that , and that's right and that's interesting . So was that a conscious choice you had ? I mean , you've mentioned kind of a couple of times philosophy and kind of your business ethos . You know what is that ? How would you summarize that sort of your business ethos , your ethics , I guess , is the word .

JF Maion 21:31

I mean just stepping back , perhaps and explaining how we're founded

Family Company Focuses on Customer Satisfaction

JF Maion 21:35

. We are a small family company . That's how we're founded . We are a small family company . That's how we started and perhaps it's because we are European .

JF Maion 21:44

We're not really interested , for instance , in things like market share , or I mean taking the word being the leader , and especially not interested into how much money we might raise from investors .

JF Maion 21:58

We want to stay independent , a small company , and what is important for us as a market share , what is important for us , is making sure that we help our customers and we make them happy , and through that being a small company , we know that our personal success is we don't need to be a leader to be said personally successful or successful as a company profitable , and we think that it frees us of many things , of many constraints , and we can spend that time on making , iterating and making product better . So yeah , it's a bit of kind of perhaps an old-fashioned way of saying business . It's perhaps like the small restaurant in the corner Just make sure you provide , you provide great food and have happy customers and be happy yourself , right , but it's it's , I think it's also , I mean , kind of way of saying business which is becoming more and more popular perhaps , and it's something I think we feel good about going to bed each , each night , and also we don't have investors breathing on our neck .

Gary Pageau 23:01

Well , that is a great point is you know when you take on the outside money and you take on , you know , equity or partners or whatnot ? You know you're now serving two masters in some sense right , exactly . You're serving these , these other folks who may be well intentioned and they believe in your business . They want you to grow , but maybe they want you to do things that are , you know , conflict with you know . You know , I think we need to start taking three percent off those print sales .

Erin Manning 23:28

Right .

Gary Pageau 23:28

Yeah exactly .

JF Maion 23:29

Yeah , so we are . I mean to summarize , I think we are . We work a bit like a like a boutique company , but even on a global , geographically global basis , and working this way is also what allows us to make very , very fast decisions in terms of product development and very fast implementations as well , and I think that is also one of the key reasons why we're so proud of the technology we have , because we don't have endless meetings around . Okay , what kind of features should we build ? How should we build them ? We just do the features based on what we know our customers have been , our members have been asking for and so on , and that allows us to have not only very fast , very fast go-to-market times , but also very , very robust and fast platform .

JF Maion 24:24

It's pretty routine for us to have people coming to us and say , hey , I was on this and this large platform , and well , it just slow , it breaks down and have too many issues with it , and so I'm trying , you guys . And then sometimes we have people going away from us because , well , they were missing some features or whatever , and they're coming back after a few months or a couple of years . Well , I tried a lot of the big platform , I mean yours is so much like just works and it's faster , more robust , and this can't happen if you have like a huge , or at least much more difficult to do if you have a huge team , both in terms of development and in terms of decision-making .

Gary Pageau 25:06

And I imagine you also can refine what you want your offering to be , because I think what happens in some software development companies you get developers who want to add a bunch of features . Yeah , you know they , they're , they're . You know we want to add a bunch of features . Yeah , you know they're . You know we need . I'm a programmer , I need to add stuff . It would be very cool if we could add blankety , blankety , blank . But when you look through the photo deck experience , I'm going to say it's restrained but it's refined right . Yeah , we're not trying to be every possible solution for this .

JF Maion 25:39

Well , yes , yes , yes and no , and one of the difficulties we are facing here is that with flexibility comes complexity , and it's always easier to be on the website or to build a platform that is specialized to doing one thing . So I'm very glad you're saying that it doesn't look like we're trying to do everything , because the range of features we have in Flexibility means that it is a platform that has many more options .

Gary Pageau 26:09

Oh , yeah , I'm not saying it doesn't have features , but you're just not killing people with it . When you're looking setting it up , you're not throwing in . I mean , you have editing tools and all these other things that people are kind of glomming on right Like everyone's glomming on . You know some sort of AI function on there or something . That's right . You know what I mean , and I'm not saying you don't have access to the technology but you're not beating people over the head with it .

JF Maion 26:35

No , no , exactly . And when you mentioned AI , I'm beating people over the head with it and that kind of resonates , because we do have some AI integration . We obviously use AI ourselves , but it's also a good example of us doing things a bit differently . We don't like to hype things , right , right . So , yeah , it would be fairly easy technically , I guess , to add more AI into things and have AI mentioned all over our website .

Gary Pageau 27:03

If you were looking for investors , you certainly would .

JF Maion 27:08

Exactly . I think you hit right on the nail here . We prefer providing real value and things that work . Sometimes it means just sticking with the basics , as long as the basics are well-made , and not falling for the hype and things that , down the road , are actually not so trustful .

Gary Pageau 27:28

Sure , so what are some of the things on the back end that you may help a photographer grow their business ? You know , let's say I'm a wedding photographer , I do some commercial shoots during the week and I shoot weddings on the weekends and you know they're very typical photographer . Uh , in terms of like , like back-end seo services or anything like that , is there anything you offer there ?

JF Maion 28:12

well , yeah , we have . We obviously have a lot of uh , a lot of tools , ranging from the from how the galleries are presented and structured and protected , to the SEO . We also have SEO parameters so that people can optimize their site . Seo is another good example of not overselling things we do provide . We are very upfront saying , okay , well , we feel today you can customize your SEO , you can customize this and this title . We have an extensive guide on SEO for photographers . But we're not saying that , yeah , we make your SEO explode or go 10 times , because everybody recognizes SEO down the road is mostly about popularity . It's mostly about content . It's not something that website providers control themselves and we try to be very upfront with that and using that as a sales argument . Again back to the philosophy . But to your question , yeah , so we mentioned I talked a bit about the flexibility of the proofing galleries and all the proofing features we have .

JF Maion 29:16

Then , obviously , we also have an e-commerce site . A lot of things are available there . So people have been able to license and to sell

PhotoDeck Offers E-Commerce Solutions for Photographers

JF Maion 29:25

digital downloads from day one , and that's not limited to images , by the way . We support videos and some other kinds of files , just like we support images , and that's obviously quite becoming more and more important , especially when it comes to videos . Sure , so . So , for when people can sell the downloads , and in different formats , obviously they can sell prints , either prints through integrated labs or prints that they fulfill themselves and to have them with their , with the marketing , what we have that have them , for instance , provide discounts based on quantities or packages , cup and coats . We also have a newsletter facility . I mean the sort of things that you would find on e-commerce platform .

Gary Pageau 30:23

It seems to me , like some of the other , there's a lot of photographer platforms out there and a lot of them are great , that's right , but they also almost are turning into customer uh relationship management systems , crm systems , right , yeah . Yeah . Yeah , that's right , you know , and you do some of that , but that's not really your main focus no , it's not , and exactly , you're right .

JF Maion 30:43

so we , we do some of it and I think the new , the other news enterprise , is a good example . We haven't used newsletter facility and it's being used quite extensively . On the other hand , our aim is not to compete with or to . I mean , yeah , it's not to compete or to rebuild the mail chain . Yeah , so , yeah , exactly . And well again , whatever we do is mostly based on our customer feedback and we see that our current user base is happy with what we have , sometimes more . I mean , we get requests every day for improvements and we know very clearly where we are going to improve and what we're going to improve over the next month , and that's on a continuous basis . But I have to say the CRM part is not so much used , at least with our current members . How would I say people are happy with what we have , even though I'm sure we are nowhere near a real CRM solution .

Gary Pageau 31:38

Yeah , yeah , but again , it's almost like the AI speak . Right , it's like people are taking in outside money or investor money or VC money . Yeah , that's right . That's a buzzword too right . The CRM is almost as big of a buzzword as AI .

JF Maion 31:53

No , you're right , Absolutely yeah , absolutely , yeah , you're right . Well , luckily , we are a bit isolated from that and well , if it doesn't come from a real need and it doesn't provide real value to our members , we don't need to waste time .

Gary Pageau 32:10

Yeah , so yeah so I mean I was looking through your uh you know , kind of your pricing levels . Uh , you know people get baseline storage but you know if they get too big they have to buy more storage and all that . But it sounds like yeah , I mean it's . It's all very reasonably accessible to most people in terms of a pricing standpoint . Is that sort of the family business ethos coming through ?

JF Maion 32:32

Yeah , well , yes , it is , and it's interesting that we have not changed our prices since we launched 12 years ago . So the offers have been evolved . We have increased storage space progressively , but basically the price point has pretty much stayed where they are . I mean , they are not taken out of the blue . There is obviously a bit of competitive analysis that have been done behind the line , at least in terms of pricing . Again , we don't have to look too much at what our competitors do . We don't really need to . But , yeah , the intent is that prices are fair , in a sense that probably not the cheapest . You can go cheaper , especially if you are willing to have commissions taken out of fewer sales , but again , we don't take commissions .

JF Maion 33:27

And the storage is also something that is , uh , is interesting because we have limited storage .

JF Maion 33:32

It's , uh , it's , it is uh , well , relatively affordable , but it is , it is . It is limited because we don't think that , within our nature , nothing is is unlimited , uh , it's , like you know , we have a company , um , company , house , uh , providing free water for everybody , or you have the water bill split equally among everybody . Then it opens the door to abuses and so on , or we are also very eco-conscious . So so storage is not unlimited , but we provide it as a price , which is which is reasonable for the quality it provides and actually storage from something we really make money from . So , yeah , we try to stay affordable , but we're certainly not cutting down the prices , because we see that it is also in everybody's interest that we as a company have a healthy profit margin so that we can be here for the long term Absolutely and we can continue to invest in improving the product . And we've been following the exact same business model , without any change , really , for over 10 years . It's been working very well , so hopefully we'll be talking in 10 years and with the same model .

Gary Pageau 34:44

Where would people go for more information to learn about PhotoDeck and its offerings and looking at it over ? Where do people go for more information to learn about PhotoDeck and its offerings and looking at it over ? Where do people go for more information ?

JF Maion 34:54

Well , the obvious first stop is our website , photodeckcom , and well , there's a lot of information on there already .

JF Maion 35:03

But I think the real way to get to know PhotoDeck because , again , it's a fairly deep platform , there's a lot to it , it can be used in many different ways , a lot of flexibility , getting it right and kicking the tires , as you guys say , is probably the best way .

JF Maion 35:19

So we offer a two-week free trial , no streaming attached , no credit card needed , just open and just enter your email address and you can start working on your own platform . And we're always here to help with the initial steps , to make sure that the direction is correct . We obviously have some onboarding help , so we ask you what kind of photographers you are , what is your specialty , even though we understand that not everyone has a very clear specialty . But at least to help smoothen a bit the first setup . And when it comes to larger agencies so we have agencies with dozens of photographers and or even corporates working with larger collections and using Photoligasi as a dam then we are also we still work on a very affordable social service basis , but obviously we are trying to be a bit more available to guide initial steps and help with the initial structure .

Gary Pageau 36:23

Well , great , jeff , it's been great to meet you and looking forward to hearing more in the future and the future success and growth of Photodeck , the quiet family company

Future Success of Photodeck Company

Gary Pageau 36:32

that is in service .

JF Maion 36:36

Thank you so much , Gary . I'm sure you'll hear again from us and it's been a pleasure to be on the podcast today .

Erin Manning 36:42

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