Copenhagen startup PhotoPitch were briefly intercepted during their recent launch party by Trendsonline. Founder and CEO Linisha Palm was interviewed about how the new creative marketplace has come about. The crowdsourcing platform matches photo buyers with photographers. In an interview earlier this year with Trendsonline Linisha explained that the model works in other industries, and they’ve been working on building a community, by ensuring there are plenty of incentives to join PhotoPitch.
“Giving ‘Power to the Crowd’ gives companies the freedom to choose images that actually match their identity, needs and goals. And for photographers he becomes an opportunity to actually make money from it, they are deeply passionate about.” Linisha Palm to Trendsonline.
Linisha has been focused on PhotoPitch since a visit to San Francisco and Standford, along with several other students from CBS, after hearing an inspiring lecture by 99designs. The past few months, according Linisha, have been insane, with beside gaining an investor, the project has also brought a new co -founder Mikkel Lønow. The team now consists of Linisha, Mikkel, Marine Gastineau, Jens Axel Sø, and Christian Nobel. After co-founder Mikkel joined, they’ve re-built the project from scratch, with a custom design platform, but they’ve joined the Microsoft BizSpark initiative that helps selected startups for free for a period of three years.
Their angel investor is Kim Tosti, who comes with 25 years experience from Novo Nordisk and understands the idea behind Photo Pitch well. He has seen many business ideas and today has a handful of projects. After several months in which he helped the team behind PhotoPitch, he chose to make a small angel investment. Today he helps a few days a week to keep the focus on the important things and ensure they keep on track with the strategy
PhotoPitch has been running a closed beta where they’ve gained clients to test the system and give feedback. Now they’re launched, it’s full steam ahead to keep building the networks, the launch party as one example of a good opportunity for PhotoPitch to create customer-validation among the many photographers and designers who attended.
“Now we step on the accelerator, and now you must not laugh at me, but we plan to be across all of Scandinavia before we get to the end of the year,” says PhotoPitch co -founder and CEO Linisha Palm in conclusion to Trendsonline.
