On February 17th I went to to STHLM, Stockholm’s tech meet up. A pity I arrived late at the event, the door gift was a microchip!
When I arrived at the meetup, the first start-up has already began pitching, I have forgotten the name but the idea was quite good. It is to create a market where consumers will pay for images. Like how Spotify revoltuionised the music industry, the founder believe that his platform will revolutionise the image industry. People do not pay for the images they use even if they do not possess the rights. Many people just rip it off google image search, just like how a huge number of consumers were illegally downloading music before spotify came about. The platform allows consumers to use images legally such as design work or photographs by professionals with a minimal amount of money. What was really amazing is that the founder actually got Microsoft to integrate his platform on the upcoming version of powerpoint. Hence, users can just insert an image into their presentations through his plug-in in Powerpoint, how convenient is that. The investors were also very impressed that he had secured a brilliant distribution channel.
The next 2 start ups are dating apps with somewhat creative ideas. One of them was 7 heaven which plans to solve the problem of people posting photos that do not look like them on dating platforms. Their workaround is too set a timing of 6 hours for the photo to uploaded after it is taken. Of course people can still edit their photos or choose a very good photo within 6 hours. The other was trice which wanted to do a snapchat version of a dating app where conversations can only be take place in pictures with captions. I felt that it was restricting it does not allow pure text to be sent over and just adding an image send to a dating app is just a small addition. However, one investor brought up an insightful point that dating apps are still hot as the market is always willing to accommodate more. Users of dating apps are desperate and they are willing to try new apps and most users use several dating apps at once.
All in all, STHLM was wonderful and I signed up for the next one on March 24th already. Next time I will arrive early for the door gift haha!