Flickr, Instagram, Snapchat… The most popular portals of all times are flooded with photos. We are bombarded every day with such a number of pictures that it is impossible to browse through them all, let alone appreciate them. Tookapic is a Polish startup that tries to reverse this trend. They invite their users to take one picture a day – every day for a year – and capture the moments that really matter.
“Being able to save just one photo a day teaches you to appreciate your photos more and think before you take another snapshot. It’s quality over quantity,” says Paweł Kadysz, the founder and CEO of Tookapic. “This habit makes learning photography extremely easy, too. It’s surprising how much you can improve after just few weeks of daily photo taking. With no prior experience in photography some of our users learned so much in just one year they’ve been able to build their career around photography.”
Paweł Kadysz is a designer from Białystok, Poland. He has been helping clients from all around the globe with their products, websites and startups for 15 years. Since 2010, he is also an owner of High on Pixels – a graphic and web design agency. On 15th August 2013, he started taking one photo a day and publishing it on tumblr. A year later, Tookapic came into existence as his first very own project.
The goal of Tookapic is to keep photoamateurs motivated enough to make taking photos a habit. “We make sure that your journey from photo #1 to photo #365 is exciting and rewarding,” says Kadysz. The platform uses gamification means, such as unlockable achievements and a point reward system, to ensure you receive immediate gratification. The community is lively and supportive, making it the perfect place to ask questions regarding photography technique. Additionally, the Tookapic team provides a weekly theme so that no one runs out of ideas.
Currently the platform has a traffic of about 500k page views a month. They also have an iOS app with around 110k screen views a month. The number of published photos reached an astounding 155,000 – remember that each user can only post one photo a day.
Tookapic is bootstrapped, without any investor or outside funding. Their main sources of income are the online shop (users can order prints, as well as whole photobooks or customizable T-shirts), premium accounts and commissions made when users put their photos on sale. The team is currently looking for a startup accelerator to help them scale the platform.
