You know how it is: you’ve been on vacation and you’ve taken twenty-eight million photos, and you just want to select the best 12 so you can make a calendar. Nobody has time for that – and that’s what Good is here to help you. The app is currently in early access mode and has just closed a $3.5 million seed funding round to continue its march towards launch.
In a nutshell, GoodOnes connects to your Google Photos or iCloud Photos account and helps you select the “best” photos from your massive image library. The idea isn’t new, we’ve seen a number of apps trying to clean up image clutter. An example was EyeEm’s The Roll, which made a similar effort and fueled its business model to turn everyone into a stock photographer.
In any case, The Roll made sense as a marketing stunt for EyeEm’s core activities. What’s less clear is how GoodOnes has a path to monetization.
“We are really thinking about a subscription layer on top of this product. We saw a lot of willingness to pay from users, especially for the target audience segment of parents and grandparents,” explained Israel Shalom, co-founder of GoodOnes, in an interview with australiabusinessblog.com. “We haven’t finalized our subscription model yet. Our primary focus right now is to build a good user base and get all the feedback to improve it.”
The company picked up its round from TLV Partners with participation from Liquid2 Ventures (Joe Montana’s fund), as well as Rich Miner (former co-founder of Android) and Peter Welinder (founder of Carousel, sold to Dropbox), as well as many more seasoned operators and financiers. With the funding, the company plans to expand its engineering team.
In a world where Google, Apple and the other photo tracking apps are already making an effort to surface good and interesting photos, is there really room for GoodOnes in the market?
“The reality that these apps have been around for a decade, both on Apple’s side and Google’s side. What they do well is provide secure storage for all your photos,” says Shalom, noting that to the extent that the competition’s apps pop up photos, they don’t do particularly well, and that his solution is much more customizable . . “What’s different about what we do is we put you in the driver’s seat.”
The app works by learning your preferences and using your swipe-left-I-love-this and swipe-right-ugh-get-out-my-face to train your tastes on an AI. From there, it starts creating galleries of photos it thinks you like best. The final gallery or album is created and presented to the user.
“We think there is room for another big player here. Just like Netflix is synonymous with streaming and Spotify is synonymous with music,” says Shalom.
The app can duplicate, select the best photos and give you a gallery of your favorites. GIF Credits: Good
“With the creation of mobile platforms, we ended up putting powerful computers, digital cameras and streaming devices in everyone’s pockets — we could never have predicted how much new content would be created,” said Rich Miner, co-founder of Android and an angel investor in the round of GoodOnes, it said in a statement. “GoodOnes brings powerful curation to the deluge of photos we’ve all come to collect. I am very excited about this tool and technology, which is why I was thrilled to invest.”
