Buying prints of your digital photos ‘still mostly sucks’: Piccolo cofounder Nicholas Hall

Piccolo is a subscription service that will send you physical prints of photos that you post to Facebook and Instagram. The theory here is that one day you may have little ones and it’s a lot more fun for them to dig through a shoe box full of photos than it is to scroll through all your old Facebook updates looking for photos.

It was created by two North Brooklynites (though one of them has recently abandoned our borough), and most of their business partners on the design and dev side are based there as well.

Plans start at $10 per month.

We first learned about it after Kate Oppenheim, one of the cofounders, spoke at the recent Northside Meetup. We sent a few questions to Piccolo’s other cofounder, Nicholas Hall, about the service and where it’s headed.

Here’s what he sent back.

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Where did you get the idea?

Kate originally came to me with the idea for a service that would back up your photos from all of your different social media accounts, and send you prints of all of them on a regular basis. We were both frustrated with how the photos we shared disappeared down the timeline, and decided to make another way to experience them.

How long has the project been going? How many people are on the team? How many cofounders?

We launched Piccolo just about exactly one year ago. We’re a bootstrapped company focused on building a real business with profits and everything. The Piccolo robots pretty much run on autopilot, so we don’t need any full-time staff.

What local companies have you worked with?

Sure! The branding and illustration work (like the robots) were all done by Dark Igloo. The site was designed by an amazing designer named Chris Meisner. Parts of the site were built by Oka Tai-Lee. Our lawyer is Vivek Boray. Lots of other Brooklyn friends kicked in on a freelance basis.

What can you tell us about the evolution of the mechanical work flow? Like, the printing and mailing and all that? 

The printing and mailing is actually all handled by an outside vendor. We went that route in order to focus on the digital product and to avoid the need to raise venture capital. As I mentioned, we bootstrapped Piccolo from the beginning. Neither of us were interested in jumping off the VC cliff because we believe it can undermine the creative work of bringing a product into the world and it wasn’t necessary in this case. Photo prints are a commodity, but trying to buy them still mostly sucks. The value is in the experience of creating them, and how it connects to your existing behaviors as a user.

How many users do you have so far?

I’ll say that we have many hundreds of paying subscribers. For a bootstrapped business making a real profit by providing a physical product, that’s pretty good. We plan to push more on growth with our next product and marketing phase that we’re developing now.

Are you going to add photos from other services?

Yes! We will be adding Twitter, Flickr, Google+, 500px and others in the future. Twitter and Flickr are the top priorities.

There are also lots of other products that would make a lot of sense for us to offer as part of the Piccolo photo experience. Frames, boxes, books, anything that gives people more ways to use and connect with their prints. We’re also working on some additions to the product experience that aim to bring the social way we take photos now into the physical world. We’ll be releasing more info on that in the coming months.

Where’s the project headed? 

Kate has an awesome job, and I’m a technology consultant for The Wall Street Journal by day. We plan to keep iterating on the product as our schedules allow. It’s already turning a profit, which we’re reinvesting in it. Basically, if we get up into the thousands of subscribers, then we’ll have the kind of customer service needs, and operating revenue, to want to start hiring additional people to run it day-to-day. We both love our day jobs right now, and have built Piccolo so that we can run it as a sideline up to a pretty big scale.