I started Fotrel back in 2008. Fotrel is a web gallery with shopping cart for wedding photographers.

The idea is that a photographer makes photos available for viewing on the web after the wedding. Guests view photos. Some of them buy prints. The photographer makes money by keeping margin.

Results so far: I have 30 clients. Fotrel brings about $400 per month. Not bad but not great either.

What I find is that wedding photographers are not really excited about the whole idea. I have no proof, this is just my gut feeling.

Also, 10 of my clients didn’t upload anything in the last 3 months. So they pay for my system but don’t use it. 20 of my clients didn’t get any sales in the last 3 months.

It looks like Fotrel doesn’t solve the real pain for photographers. I’m yet to find this pain point.

What to do?

I have an idea: change Fotrel to make it useful for kids photographers. I had a couple of clients who took pictures of kids at kindergartens. And they were getting a lot of orders.

Also, few kids photographers looked at Fotrel but didn’t start using it because it didn’t have features that they wanted.

One piece of advice I got is to speak to 50 kids photographers before adding those missing features.

The next question is how to reach kids photographers? I tried cold calling – that didn’t work because people were convinced I was trying to sell them something because of my accent. Now I’m thinking of other ways to reach kids photographers.