Progress Update: 1 Month of Nanna

It has now been just over a month since I started working on my new project, nanna. As we move forward, I am going to take a page out of Courtland Allen’s playbook (at Indie Hackers) and try to write up a monthly progress update on lessons learned, challenges and changes at nanna. There aren’t (m)any transparent, honest, first-hand accounts of building a startup in Switzerland — hopefully these monthly updates will be of some use to new founders (even if they serve only as a ‘what not to do’ guide).

What is nanna?

At my last startup, Gymhopper, I noticed a massive gap in the photo/video content generation market. Over the last 10 years, the kind and amount of photos a marketing team needs has completely changed — whereas we used to need just a few, very-high quality images for adverts and print media, today we need 10x as many photos and videos for social media, newsletters, web-content and more. The requirements have shifted from pixel-perfect to good-quality, authentic and channel-suitable.

Yet the professional photography market hasn’t adapted to this change at all. Even today, if you don’t have an in-house photographer, you’re left with the choice of generic stock-photos (which are ignored), poorly taken iphone-photos or (in Switzerland) a professional photographer who charges upwards of $1000/shoot and delivers your photos a week later.

Nanna is my solution to this problem. We make getting great marketing photos 10x easier and 10x cheaper. On our website you can book the perfect photographer for your business needs in just 30 seconds. There are no hourly/hidden costs — simply pay CHF20.- per professionally-edited photo you order (after the shoot).

We can deliver the final results within 30mins of the shoot/event finishing. Currently, we have over 50 partner photographers based in Zurich, and are trusted by companies such as AXA and Sharoo to provide great visual content.

Month 1: What Went Well…

It’s common knowledge that no new product survives contact with first customers. Getting first customers for my first startup, Gymhopper, three years ago was a very difficult and time consuming process, so I was expecting the same with nanna. Luckily, we seem to have hit on a more urgent problem than we were trying to solve at Gymhopper, and the initial sales process has been more of a market-pull than a hard push. Here are some key points:

• Nanna only works if we can easily recruit great photographers willing to work at the right price-point. I was expecting this to be hard work, but we have actually been inundated with high-quality applications with very little recruiting effort on our end.
• I’m pretty confident that I understand the visual content needs of marketing teams, so it feels quite easy for me to pitch/sell our nanna service to prospective teams. Where I’m not an expert, however, is on the operations side of things when it comes to photo shoots. I count myself very lucky that several of Switzerland’s premier photographers have come onboard to advise me, as well as having two new team members (Yentl and Dustin) who are much better at this than me.
• While getting a foot in the door with clients has predictably been difficult, the enthusiastic response to our product has been much better than I expected. With a very poorly conceived landing page and little social proof, we’ve managed to win over several amazing clients including Sharoo and AXA. I’m indebted here to several friends who were happy to connect us with the right people.

Month 1: The Challenges/Mistakes…

It’s important to look back and reflect honestly on what went well and where there is room for improvement. Often, the most important and difficult task to tackle next is the one I keep putting off.

• As previously mentioned, once we have a prospective client’s attention, they are nearly always happy to try us out. Getting in front of the right employee at the right time is a challenge, however.
• I’ve been perhaps too naive about how much uninterrupted time I can spend focussing on growing nanna. When you leave a team where you were the problem-solver for three years, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it will take your old team a while to get used to you not being available at a moment’s notice to sort out little problems they can’t/don’t want to solve themselves. These changes won’t happen overnight, yet we’re slowly nudging in the right direction.
• Without social proof and a large portfolio, it has been difficult to get much of a response from traditional SMEs (such as garages, accountants, lawyers etc). In the first few weeks I probably focussed too much on acquiring larger clients and need to double down on assessing product market fit with SMEs next month.

Month 1: Key Learnings and Updates…

Here’s what we learnt from our first 30 days and will be putting into production in the near future:

• Our photographers and editors can provide the required quality easily. Already, we’re better value for money than any competition in Zurich. Where we can improve even more, however, is by making sure our photographers are thinking like marketers as well as artists. By training our team to understand visual content marketing needs and the way their photos will be used, we save ourselves and the clients time, produce much more effective visual content and put ourselves truly head-and-shoulders above other photography services. We are already working on this and have seen some great results (with more to do)!
• We’ve spent a lot of time talking to marketing teams about where they most need support with producing and managing their visual content. Current platform solutions for producing, managing and using visual content in teams are wildly insufficient and we’re looking for test clients who we can work with to improve this with our own platform solution. You’ll hear more about this in the coming months.
• The response we heard most last month was, ‘great — do you also do videos?’ We want to focus on providing affordable, scaleable and high-quality content for our clients, so have stayed away from video until now. I’m proud to say that with Dustin joining our team, however, we will now be branching out into offering a selected array of fixed-price, affordable video products which cover the most common use-cases. Depending on how this works out, we’ll expand our offerings here further. You’ll be able to book a video-shoot on our website starting next week, with prices beginning at CHF 80!

Want to know more about a particular topic or have some questions/feedback? I’d love to hear from you at
nanna [ at-symbol] discovered [dot] ch

Thanks!