Today we interview Tris Le who is the Founder of a startup called Guusebump to be launched in December 2014.
The purpose of Guusebump is to help you photo-tell your journeys with matching music and lyrics. With Guusebump, it is not only about sharing your road-trip photos, it is also about inviting your friends to relive your best moments..
Lets find out a little more.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve? How did you discover this problem?
A: Viewing photos is ordinary, it is a one-sense thing. Even a beautiful photos album only requires you to use one sense to feel it.
Guusebump enables another sense for one to be more engaged in the photos. which is hearing.
I discovered this problem when I wanted to impress my friends when I shared a road trip photo album to them last year.
Q: How are you different from your closest competitor?
A: The last time I checked, I was still the only one doing this thing.
Q: What’s the coolest thing your product/startup does?
A: Loading Facebook and Flickr photo albums to Guusebump easily.
Using SoundCloud to bind the music to the photos.
There’s also a friendly and easy-to-use built-in tool for matching the lyrics to the song,
Q: What’s the biggest trend in your industry and what do you think will happen?
A: People are trying to build better photo sharing apps every day. They started with a simple photo sharing feature, then they add in color-filter technology (Instagram), then they allow people to add short music in, etc.
I think people will soon build an app which users can talk about the photos with his/her real voice. Guusebump wants to join that game.
Q: How did you meet your co-founders? Who are they and what do they do? How old are you all?
A: I’m 22. I build different product MVPs suitable for my personal use and test them out in the public before making sure it’s worth following. For Guusebump, I have no co-founder.
Q: How many users do you have?
A: Just a few, still testing traction channels
Q: Do you have revenue at this stage?
A: Not at all.
Q: Who is your target customer? What has their feedback been so far?
A: My target customers are: people who take photos and photographers who want to share their journey photos to closed ones and friends.
Q: What is your biggest challenge at the moment, apart from the obvious?
A: Find the right traction channels to market to and keep costs low.
Efficient use of web tech to improve speed and user experience.
The ultimately biggest challenge is making a much much better UI design when viewing albums.
Q: What’s your plan for next six months? How do you plan on growing?
A: Perhaps I will wait for the opportunity to have a co-founder who has the vision for and interest in this product.
I’m a fan of zero-budget marketing, it’s an art for viral-oriented product.
The next future step is to follow a technology which enables users to use their voice to tell their journey photos. Having a mobile app is also a plan but I need to find out if doing that is a wise decision.
Q: Whats the next step for you and this startup?
A: Find a co-founder. Make a better UI design. Add more value to the product.
Q: Will you or did you raise money? What will you spend it on?
A: I will only raise money when I think I can no longer keep things under control on my own, which I think would take a while.
The money would be spent mainly on building a better product, implement voice-recording feature using new web technologies.
Q: Is this a full time startup, if not, how do you juggle a job and a startup?
A: I have full-time job so I work on my products at night. There’s always a lot of hard work to determination.
As I know my field well, I delegated some of the work here and there for freelancers to do and I integrated them in later on. The work that I hired freelancers to do includes: graphics design (UI and logo), back-end scaffolding, copywriting.
Sometimes you don’t need to spend tons of money on outsourcing the project. If you know it well enough, you can break everything down to smaller pieces and delegate some of them to freelancers. Hiring reasonably-priced freelancers only and guide them on how to best complete the project that matches your expectation.
Q: Do you attend any startup related meetup groups, co-working spaces, courses or events?
A: I’m going to some of the meetups like Silicon Beach Perth at Sync Lab, Morning Startup at SpaceCubed (less now), Perth front-end developers, Perth UX, etc.
We wish Tris Le and Guusebump all the best for the future. Visit their site (http://guusebump.com) to learn more.
