Featured Startup Pitch: Kaptur is a photo app that allows event attendees to create instant and shareable albums

Company: Kaptur

Website: www.kaptur.com

Founders: Tejpaul Bhatia and Vikash Mishra

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2011

Investors: Angels

Twitter: @kapturit

Facebook: facebook.com/KapturIt

Blog: blog.kaptur.com

Brief Company Description: Kaptur is a website and mobile application that enables users to collect everyone’s photos from any event, instantly.

By Tejpaul Bhatia, president

Product Overview

Kaptur enables users to create shared albums by collecting everyone’s photos from an event like a wedding, graduation, birthday, or vacation. Simply enter the date or select an album for an event and Kaptur will find the photos from that event that everyone took and will also notify attendees to upload photos from their mobile devices. Kaptur users can also download everyone’s photos to their phone, tablet, computer, TV with just one click of a button.

Founders’ Story

My partner, Vikash Mishra and I met when we worked together at ESPN. We got the inspiration for Kaptur after my wedding when trying to find and organize all of my guests’ photos.  Kaptur is able to find and bring together everyone’s photos easily, and in less than three seconds for any particular memory. It’s pretty mind blowing what we can do with technology and social media.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Our initial marketing strategy was to focus on specific types of events, such as weddings, since you’re able to reach 100 – 200 people through one group shared album. As a result we gained 4 percent of the U.S. wedding market within our first year. We soon realized that the app was perfect for other types of events, such as graduations, proms, etc., and we were seeing more users naturally creating Kapturs as a part of the sharing process.

The nature of Kaptur being a group sharing site/app means that attendees can be notified about the Kaptur once it’s created, which has a viral impact. We also leverage the Facebook open graph platform to make communication amongst friends frictionless. As a result our website audience size has been doubling every month and is currently at 2.5 million monthly visitors.

We also have a strong connection with our users, who have become passionate brand advocates, and we focus heavily on customer service to give them a good experience.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

The great thing about Kaptur is that it focuses on what people already do. People attend events, take photos and post them on social networks, then Kaptur does the hard work of collecting all of those photos in one place. The app also notifies guests to add photos from the device they’re on because quite often photos will just remain on the phone, tablet or computer you have.

Other photo and social platforms fail because they rely on the user doing something, like downloading an app before the event or tagging people in the photos.  The other apps try and alter user behavior. Kaptur doesn’t.

Business Model

Kaptur is currently a free service and experimenting with multiple revenue streams, including advertising, ecommerce, big data, and storage.

Current Needs

We currently have Angel funding and are in the process of raising additional funding to accelerate growth, cover operational costs, scale the user base, recruit engineering, marketing, and business talent, and implement scalable revenue streams.

Kaptur – www.kaptur.com