Text by Ney Alvarez.

Images by: Flixel ® and ANTM ®.

 

   Flixel Photos Inc. (Flixel) was created in 2011 after Phil LeBlanc saw cinemagrams for the first time and was fascinated. His curiosity led him to learn out the entire process of production of these “living photos”. Cinemagraphs show a still photo with in two seconds of some type of movement. This makes the photo come alive without taking the attention away from the main subject. It is also called a hybrid picture.

 

   LeBlanc realized that creating these photos with movement was a very complicated process that would require the photographer to know how to use computer software such as Photoshop and After Effects. He thought this process could be simplified in the form of a mobile app.

 

   However, LeBlanc had never developed an application before. He founded “Hour of Balance Inc.,” a health and wellness consultancy company that created portals to monitor health metrics and fitness progress inside companies, in 2007 with Mark Homza, in their native New Brunswick, Canada.

 

   Therefore, the two understood the potential of social technology platforms. LeBlanc, as CEO, brought in Homza as CMO and together found their first angel investors. After looking around in the New Brunswick area for a company to develops the mobile app, they decided to go to Toronto and work with “Endloop Mobile.”

 

   After working on the project for a while and seeing the potential of the app, two of Endloop Mobile’s partners decided to join Flixel: Bretton MacLean as design co-founder, and Mark Pavlidis, as development co-founder.

The first versions
   
    At first, the idea was to give the app away for free. “Kind of the Instagram strategy of just getting a lot of users and then figuring out what to do,” MacLean remembers. This was March 2012. But unfortunately, three weeks before they launched Cinemagraph (formerly known as Flixel), Cinemagram, a similar app using GIFs as a platform, came out.

    Cinemagram received a lot of media buzz. But Cinemagraph found a good audience too, obtaining more than 200,000 downloads in its first two months in the market.

 

    The first challenge that they experienced from a business perspective was not just having a competitor, but also technical difficulties. “The first versions were not very stable,” says MacLean. “But, the biggest issue was that we were generating this as an animated GIF, which a 25-year-old platform and they are not as nice because they have just 256 colors and they are huge in size. So people were trying to see this cool cinemagraphs and they were dealing with long loading times. Our server was on fire!”

 

    It was then when Cinemagraph started to change to what it is today. The co-founders decided to switch to a video format, which gave them better quality and a smaller file size. It was time to start hiring people. Today the company has total of 10 employees, including the four co-founders.
Cinemagram tried to improve its app so the firm could compete with Cinemagraph with better quality cinemagraphs. But later, it abandoned the strategy and started to concentrate on a more simple social network-style app.

   On the other side, Cinemagraph was struggling with more technical issues. “These things are harder to create than a picture. At the end you need stability. We tried an algorithm for stabilization in the first version but it was making you wait 10 seconds trying to create some kind of stability. It did not work. It was easier to tell people keep your phone stable and you are good to go,” says MacLean.

    When it comes to the development of an app from a business perspective, a company has to decide where the revenue is going to come from and how popularity will help to make the users buy a paid version.
 

   At Flixel, they noticed that people love to see the final product, but not everybody wants to create it. “We realized we were not going to hit the numbers with the same audience as Cinemagram,” says MacLean. Flixel knew that the firm needed to have two communities: the professional photographer and creative one, and the one with those who wanted to experiment and create their own cinemagraphs.

    The app was then improved to offer widescreen captures and it started to attract more people who were experimenting and creating their own cinemagraphs. Therefore, they built a free version and a professional version, which cost $9.99. To export the HD files from the “Pro” version customers have to pay $19.99 for each cinemagraph.

 

     “So for burn rate for a company you have to think: how much am I theoretically have to spend on a free customer?” asks the design co-founder. “Any-time you have a business that relies in bandwidth, which is not cheap, you have to think: am I making enough from my paid customers to paid for my free customers?”

 

    MacLean points to the case of Everpix, a photo sharing company with many fans. Its Amazon Web Services bill was $35,000 per month, so between covering the cost of salaries, revenues were not enough to keep the company open.

 

   Flixel wanted to avoid failure at any cost. “It is always a balancing act. There were people within our company saying we should go with the paid app (and) no free version”, says MacLean. But in the middle of that discussion came Tyra Banks. The model and executive producer was a Cinemagram user, but was not satisfied with the quality of the product.
   
    Banks started looking for something with quality that she could use on her television show, America’s Next Top Model (ANTM). She found Cinemagraph. She started negotiations with the firm last year and became one of the investors. MacLean does not talk about Banks’ investment or the company’s angel founding. However, there have been media reports that Flixel received $2 million in angel funding from Banks.
   
    “We have not announced that, there has been miss-reporting,” says MacLean. He thinks some companies announce this kind of information to brag, while others do so for marketing strategy, but because Flixel is a Canadian company, he feels the release of funding information is different than in the U.S.

    “There are less people here and therefore less money for Canadian entrepreneurs. We do not have the ability to compete with the same big numbers that American companies do so we do not get into that,” says MacLean.

 

    Today, Flixel is in conversations with ANTM to have the application used for all 39 versions of the show in different countries around the world. For the next season of the show in the U.S., there will be a special contest for the audience that involves the app.

 

    Also, the company is developing a desktop version for a more professional audience. But that is not all. They have a creative agency that launched a link on its website last week. Flixel has already produced cinemagraphs for advertisement campaigns for Kraft, Macy’s and Panasonic.

 

    After Top Model, Macy’s approached to the firm to create cinemagraphs for its Marilyn Monroe Collection. The retailer is planning to promote the line on store television screens showing the living photos.

 

    Panasonic, with its Lumix GM cameras, also used Flixel services for its campaign and is now launching a bundle: a camera that will be able to create Cinemagraphs with the desktop “Cinemagraph Pro for Mac” application that was recently released.

 

   MacLean thinks that when you are trying to figure your business model “the key is to try a lot of things.” That is the reason why Flixel is offering so many different options: an IOS App, a Desktop App, Creative Services and also an advertisement side.

 

   For the design co-founder, “cinemagraphs are the evolution of photography. Cinemagraphs are the future of advertising, because it catches your attention in a way that a regular video and still images do not do.”