In one sentence, what is Foap?

Foap is a social iPhone app that lets users license their photos to companies for commercial use. Users upload their smartphone snaps to the Foap Market and they go on sale for $10, with a 50/50 split between Foap and the users if it sells.

In addition to this, Foap offer businesses access to an image library consisting of fresh, local and natural content. 

What problem/s does Foap solve?

We believe Foap is democratising the stock photography by offering users the opportunity to earn money from their smartphone pictures, as well as offering businesses the chance to use natural looking images that are fresh and relevant. Too many stock photos are staged, cheesy and fail to enhance and advertising campaign or piece of editorial. We believe Foap will solve this issue.

When and why did you launch it?

With the success Instagram has experienced in the last year, we realised that you don’t have to be a professional photographer in order to be able to snap great photos. At the same time, we saw a problem in the stock photo market. Very often you see the same content, year after year, and it’s staged. We then decided to create Foap.

Who is your target audience?

At one end we are targeting smartphone users who loves snapping photos and would like to earn some extra money. At the other, we’re targeting photo buyers such as designers, art directors, media agencies or bloggers.

What are your immediate goals?

Our goal in Q1 are to launch Foap Missions where brands can set the Foap community a task such as images of a family on holiday. We plan to launch this in January/February. We want to keep improving the service and add to the impressive selection of images we currently have available for buyers.

What were the biggest challenges involved in building Foap?

The biggest challenge was to create a minimum valuable product that is good enough to launch as fast as possible. We are still making improvements and are constantly working on new features. Being the first to market with an app like this means we have a big advantage.

How will the company make money?

We are already making money from Foap Market where companies can license photos from our users. We will soon launch Foap Missions for brands so that will be another revenue stream. We have also some other interesting revenue generating features to launch in the near future. 

Who is in your team?

David Los co-founded Tripl, a successful travel startup. MA Banking and Finance. Previously David ran a student events company.

Alexandra is also a co-founder and previously in e-commerce and digital manager at Solresor.se (online travel agency). Worked as a journalist for Aftonbladet.se, one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden. Alexandra has previous startup experience starting an affiliate platform that had a focus on fashion bloggers

Where would you like to be in one, three and five year’s time?

We would like to be one of the leading and most prominent stock photo companies with a new, fresh and social focus. We want to be the world’s biggest platform that converts photos, into dollars via different channels, not just stock photography.  

Other than Foap, what are your favourite websites / apps / tools?

David often uses Pulse, which is a perfect news aggregator in the app. Alexandra is a big fan of Instagram. Rebtel is also a fantastic tool if you want to make international calls and one we use a lot.