A pivot, an Uber driver, and 40,000 fans.
I’ve been waiting for months to share a whole new Arcivr. Hope you like it. No pressure.
I’m writing this from a tour bus somewhere between Kansas City and Denver. I’ve been sleeping on this bus with nine strangers for a week—and just now realized that my bunk has an air vent. That means a lot since the bus is balmy and showers are tough to find on the road.
While riding back from a coffee shop to tonight’s venue, my Uber driver noticed the Arcivr t-shirt I was wearing. Turns out he and his wife and their daughter are big fans of our new app. Just to be clear, a complete stranger, in a city I just happen to be passing through, uses—and loves—Arcivr. The new Arcivr app that we just launched last week. Holy shit.
The first Arcivr
Two years ago, two developers and I set out to create a beautiful, simple, and 100% private place to store and share your full-resolution memories with those who matter most. After years as a professional photographer, I was always taking photos of friends and family. Everyone wanted the hi-res photos, but sharing them was a hassle.
Emailing hi-res photos sucked. File sharing sites were efficient, but hardly an inspired home your fondest memories, and social networks crushed your files down to unprintable JPEGs. Worse, most of these services mined my personal information and sold it to advertisers and anyone else who’d pay. I hate that. So I prototyped a solution, raised some funds, built a team, and launched Arcivr.
Arcivr 1.0 was like a private, hi-res social network where users would pay a small monthly fee to remove all data mining and advertising. And it was a hit with our fiercely loyal users.
One year in, we were on-boarding users, adding features, and perfecting our pricing model with a lean but growing team. Slow but steady growth, plus a host of loyal users, was early validation of Arcivr’s product and the need it served. Further validation came in a less exciting form—competition. Dropbox launched (the recently-shuttered) Carousel, Google launched Google Photos and Apple launched Apple Photos. No matter how valuable privacy was, competing with free services from Apple, Google and Dropbox was a lot like this:
Not to worry. We had plenty of financial runway. We were lean and agile. And we had a passionate user base. Like every Arcivr employee, I wore lots of hats, one being the point person for customer service (I know, as a startup, we really should have a term like E-fan-gelism or Blissmation…). From day one, I was floored by the steady stream of input from Arcivr users. There were two overwhelming themes to those conversations:
- Keep Arcivr private and collaborative. (Private, invite-only Communities were by far our most popular feature.)
- Where are the iOS and Android apps?!
Our users loved private, hi-res sharing, but a web app wasn’t working for them. They wanted Arcivr’s functionality on their phones—where they actually take the photos and videos we’re helping them share. Honestly, so did we. So, we spent the next six months reimagining, rebuilding and perfecting a whole new Arcivr experience.
I’m so excited to share Arcivr’s new iOS and Android apps. They bring private, hi-res photo and video sharing to the device that’s already in your pocket — to the family reunions, baseball games, vacations, concerts, and schools where you make and document new memories daily. The apps are beautifully designed and simple enough for everyone to use, anywhere, at any time. Most important, they are 100% private and store everything in full resolution.
In short, the new Arcivr is a lot like Instagram, but with two key differences:
- Arcivr is private, ad-free, and safe for all ages. After installing the app, users create or join an “event” — or a private, invitation-only feed. Guests have your private event code to join. No nosy ex-sweethearts or profile trolls. To make Arcivr safe for younger users, we worked with parents and schools to identify features that offer a true social experience in a safe environment. Users can post photos and videos with captions and like others’ posts, but there are no comments. In our research, comments are, by far, the most common forum for bullying on social networks. And there’s no place for that in Arcivr.
- Arcivr stores every photo and video in full resolution. Arcivr users enjoy unlimited events, posts, and invitations. Arcivr Pro users (one-time $1.99 in-app purchase) can download any or all hi-res files from any event, for life. Pro users can also customize their event codes — SUMMERVACA is much easier to remember than the default J2IS04 :)
A quiet beta with 40,000 live music fans and one Uber driver.
Instead of the typical pre-launch press outreach and paid social barrage, we partnered with Warner Music Group to give 40,000 fans a chance to use Arcivr to get closer to their favorite artists on the K-Love Christmas Tour. The week before the tour kicked off, we posted a short video teaser and emailed ticket holders, asking them to install Arcivr before turning up at the shows. Then I got on the tour bus to meet as many fans as humanly possible.
For 16 days, artists shared exclusive content with fans, photographers shared exclusive backstage footage, and fans shared thousands of photos and videos from every seat in the house at venues across the U.S. As an added bonus, we streamed the Arcivr feeds on the jumbotrons and screens throughout venues in each city (subtle product foreshadowing). It was nothing short of amazing!
Here are some photos from the tour:
Within one week of launching, I was speaking with hundreds of active Arcivr users every night. Thousands of photos and videos were streaming through Arcivr every day. And I’d met that Uber-driving Arcivr super fan in Kansas City. In fact, I ended up trading him a Bryant’s BBQ sandwich for a tour of Kansas City’s lesser known neighborhoods and some product feedback. Definitely my favorite moment in Arcivr history to date!
Off the bus, and back on the wagon.
I’m now back in Nashville, and still writing this post. I’ve recovered from the BBQ-fueled food coma and chronic lack of sleep. I’ve showered in a real shower, in the same city, two days in a row. Users who installed Arcivr last month are still using it this month—a surprisingly hard thing to accomplish. Now it’s time to grow.
The first two years of Arcivr felt very David vs Goliath-ish. We were four people competing with tech giants with unlimited resources. Furthermore, we decided to forgo sexy features like facial recognition and behavioral learning in favor of protecting user privacy. But after some tough conversations and a few months of re-building, we’re sitting on two amazing products that users are using and, wait for it, paying for:
- a 100% private, ad-free, hi-res alternative to Instagram, and
- a web-based control center called Backstage that allows organizations to integrate Arcivr into large-scale events. More to come on Backstage in February.
So… in a way, privacy won. Corny, right? Don’t blame me. For better or worse, I was raised on a strong dose of 80’s cartoons and tend to filter life experiences through the lens of He-Man after-show lessons and Saturday morning Ones to Grow On. Need a refresher?
I hope you try and love the new Arcivr apps. And tweet at me @ckorbey if you want to chat about Arcivr, photography, or Skeletor’s uncanny string of unsuccessful attempts to overtake Castle Grayskull.
Cheers,
Chris Korbey
Arcivr’s Founder and CEO
