StartupDunia

Picsquare is an Indian startup offering photo sharing and printing services, which I profiled here.

Here’s an interview with the founders, Manish Agrawal and Kartik Jain.

1. How did Picsquare originate? How did you get the concept behind Picsquare?

Picsquare originated as the need felt by one of its founder when he was in US. There are roughly 20million Indians staying abroad and having connections in India. On many occasions they want to share their life with their loved ones abroad through medium of photographs. Hence Picsquare is providing them a convenient medium of sharing.

2. What is your target audience? Does Picsquare cater only to NRIs or to India-based customers too?

Picsquare started in December 2005 targeting only NRIs. Currently Picsquare is focusing on both India-based customers and NRIs.

3. There are other sites that provide a similar service. What is it that makes Picsquare unique amongst others offering similar services? Any significant features people should know about?

The unique value that Picsquare is providing to users is the service quality. Picsquare is focusing a lot on providing world quality service to users; be it print quality, delivery times, user experience. It’s an ongoing effort; we are continuously innovating, learning from our mistakes and are trying to improve ourselves.

A part from photo prints, users can create few other exciting stuff like personalized greeting cards and t-shirts. We are looking out for vendors to introduce more products.

4. If India based customers can also use Picsquare, how do you plan to compete with local photo printing services?

Picsquare has clear differentiator with the local photo printing services – convenience and ability to do much more with photo other than printing different sizes on paper like personalized greeting cards and t-shirts.

However, Picsquare is not directly competing with all the printing labs. The strategy is to partner with them and create a win-win for both the business.

5. A lot of users have existing photos uploaded to Yahoo Photos/Flickr — any features in the works to import those pictures to Picsquare?

Yes, that’s true; a lot of users have uploaded their photographs else where. And it’s a big hassle to upload it again. We would definitely be trying to solve this problem. At this time, we can commit when exactly we will have that solution.

6. How well is Picsquare doing? Any significant milestones/accomplishments so far?

Picsquare has been doing well so far. It’s a year old company; the journey so far has been very exciting and exhilarating.

7. We just noticed that the Site design and the layout were recently overhauled — what prompted this change? What changes/feedback (if any) have you noticed after this site redesign?

Picsquare is an India focused website, we wanted to make the website look more Indian. The colors, pictures all have been selected keeping Indian audience in mind. The overhaul is not a one time process. We are constantly working on the user feedback to make it more users friendly.

8. Some of the key technologies used on Picsquare?

Picsquare provides features like a) Uploader tool – for easy upload of photos, b) Tagging – for effective management of photographs, c) Storage – unlimited storage capacity.

There are few new features in pipeline and will be introduced soon.

9. Could you tell us more about your team and their roles? Before founding Picsquare, what did you guys do in your previous life?

Picsquare is founded by two first generation entrepreneurs – Kartik Jain and Manish Agrawal. They both are engineer graduated from IIT Bombay. They worked for

Kartik before starting Picsquare, worked with large scale IT company. Manish did his Masters from Purdue and worked with a startup company.

Picsquare is a small team of 6 members including founders. Currently both founders are wearing multiple hats and handling responsibilities including overall execution, marketing, operation and technology development.

However Picsquare is looking for passionate individuals who could join the team and help take Picsquare to the next level.

10. How is your startup being funded so far? You did receive an offer for VC funding some time back, but decided not to go for it — what prompted that decision? Going forward, are you looking for any angel / VC funding?

Picsquare is funded by angel investors from Silicon Valley.

Yes, Picsquare did receive favorable response from US based investors, however the deal didn’t happen as the negotiation couldn’t reach to a common ground.
Picsquare is looking for Series-A VC funding for growing the business and taking it to next level.

11. Do you have any advisors / mentors whom you seek advise about day to day operations or strategy?

Picsquare from day one is actively mentored by advisors and that has helped a lot. Sanjay Swamy was our first advisor; he is currently heading mobile payment startup - mChq.

12. Where do you see Picsquare going forward? How do you plan on accomplishing your goals?

We would like to see Picsquare as one stop shop for all the photography related needs of Indian community. The only way we can accomplish this is by execution. And the team has its head down on execution. We are confidant that we will reach there.

13. What are some of the key challenges you face and how do you plan on tackling them?

The biggest challenge that Picsquare is facing is hiring people. It’s hard to find people who are interested in working for startups.
We are actively looking to have a senior biz development in our team.

14. How has the entrepreneurial journey been so far? What part of entrepreneurship do you love? What do you hate?

The entrepreneurial journey so far has been very exciting. It’s been very challenging bumpy ride but end of the day it’s a very satisfactory experience.
The part we love about entrepreneurship is: we get to meet lot of different people and there is a learning opportunity in every meeting. And success is all about learning process. There is nothing particular that we hate about entrepreneurship.

15. Any advice for current/future entrepreneurs?

We have seen many people spending too much time analyzing their idea before actually going out and executing. They spend so much time that at the end they loose all enthu, get distracted and end up not executing.
One should analyze but should not go over board. An idea without execution is worth nothing.

16. What is your daily schedule like?

We end up working 13-14 hours a day, but trust me its fun.

17. How has entrepreneurship affected your lifestyle?

It depends on how you see it. Entrepreneurs do spend long hours working and people think it affects their life style as they don’t find much time for themselves. However, we feel it has improved our lifestyle. It has ingrained in us a sense of confidence that we have ability to take any challenge no matter what.

18. Anything that you wished, you would have done differently?

Nothing so far

19. Any question you may want to answer and no one has asked so far?

We would like ask readers a question:
What do you think is the risk you are taking when you decide to leave your job a take a plunge into entrepreneurship? Looking forward to read your comments on this.

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