This introduction has been a long time coming. Since our launch, eight months ago, the Photure team has had our heads down in dimly lit rooms developing the fastest, easiest way to mint an NFT from your smartphone camera. With this article, and subsequent follow ups, the Photure team intends to shed some light into our process, our progress, and our philosophy. In that vein, we are starting with an introduction, a “hello world” for those familiar with software development. For those who are not, a “hello world” is typically the bare minimum necessary to get started on a project. With that said…
Hello world, I am Evan Morris cofounder and CTO of Photure. A little about me. I was born in Pontiac, Michigan, I am a software engineer, a college dropout, and an NPR nerd (this last bit will become relevant later). I took an unconventional route to becoming a software engineer. While for this space dropping out of college is not novel, I did pick up software only 5 years ago at the age of 28. Prior to that, I had worked in retail, sales, call centers, warehouses, graveyard shifts at warehouses and construction. It was while working construction, and driving to and from the job site six hours away every week that I found NPR. At the time, I worked out of Columbus, Ohio. On the NPR station in Columbus I heard advertisements for a software engineering bootcamp. I always had an interest in computers so I kinda bookmarked those ads in the back of my mind. What prompted me to take action on that was about 5 months later. There is a show on NPR called the 1A named after the first amendment and broadcast from WAMU. They had a broadcast where the theme of the show was “I make $100k without a college degree” where they took calls from listeners. I may be exaggerating the numbers, but I remember something around 1 out of 3 callers were software engineers who taught themselves to code. It was then that I decided the path I would take. I spent the next year saving as much as I could from my construction job. Then I enrolled in a software engineering bootcamp.
So that’s the background on me. My cofounders at Photure have their own stories which I’m sure they will share in the future. For now, let me introduce you to the origins of Photure.
I met my cofounders, Patrick Pistor and Matthew Gray, shortly after finding my first software engineering job. Patrick was a coworker who was hired two weeks before I was. He was someone who had done what I wanted to do. He had participated in the hackathon scene of the 2010s and used his success in that space to start a consulting company. I don’t know what it was, but he seemed to accept me into part of this world and we started building projects together. Matt Gray joined us shortly after. We met Matt a party and 30 minutes later we were pitching business ideas in a corner somewhere. The first project we worked on together was something called MySources. The idea was to create a chrome extension and paired with news aggregating mobile application that would be able to determine biases and corporate interests in the articles the user was reading. We worked on MySources as well as several other projects during a time that spanned around a year and a half but nothing got any traction. What we did get though was a familiarity with how each of us worked and some friendships.
Fast forward another year and a half (mid-2021), and the team had all gone their separate ways. But, we all continued building things. I was building a mobile app that was trying to use TensorFlow to predict stock prices. While, Patrick was building a mobile wallet for the PolkaDot crypto Protocol. It was while building that mobile wallet that Patrick had the idea that would become Photure. He texted me on a Thursday in August, “Why don’t we build a an app that allows you to make an NFT from your phone’s camera”. I replied something like “Yeah, that sounds cool”. He then said, "let's do it this weekend," harkening back to his hackathon days. It was on Tuesday the next week that we launched the first version of Photure. The day before we launched I quit my job. It was the first time in 3 years, since the bootcamp to be honest, that writing code excited me. We were writing code not for some corporate entity, and in a weird way not writing it for ourselves. The user would own anything made in the app thanks to this incredible, new technology that is web3.
At the time, Photure was simple. Take a photo, it’s an NFT (I mean we made it in 3 days), but we listened to some of our users and over time we added some new functionality. It wasn’t until November 2021 where things got more serious. We entered the Web3 Jam hackathon hosted by EthGlobal. In ten days we attempted our most ambitious project yet. A mobile first NFT marketplace where users could create NFT’s using their smartphone cameras. We came away from the hackathon as finalists, but more importantly we seemed to have gotten on the radar of some investors in the space. This was the first time I had been in this position and to be frank, I can only speak for myself, I wasn’t ready. We had some conversations. Some went well, some not so well, but what I learned from these meetings was that we can’t simply have an app. We needed to be thinking about the space we are entering, we needed to be experts on what was going on in that space, and we needed to have a plan on how our product would solve a problem for users in that space.
Luckily, Patrick had been through an experience like this before, he knew what we needed. A startup accelerator. We began looking and applied everywhere we thought we might fit. The first to give us the time of day was TechStars. We met with the directors of their Seattle branch and things went well. We made it to the final round and didn’t make the cut. It was devastating. We thought this was the best opportunity we had and possibly the only opportunity we’d get. We were running out of patience, and, to be frank, because I had quit my job in September I was running out of money. As fate would have it though Patrick’s hackathon days would save us. A friend he’d hacked with knew someone who had been through an accelerator specifically for Web3 companies. That friend gave us a warm introduction. Through that introduction we were able to meet with the team behind the Tachyon accelerator at Consensys Mesh and somehow we got in.
We thought with Tachyon's coaching and some capital that the rest would be smooth sailing. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The Tachyon Team challenged us to release new features twice a week and talk to as many customers as possible all while preparing ourselves for eventual investment meetings. This program has been one of the most stressful and draining experiences of my life. Though it is in moments like these where I’ve noticed myself grow the most. Photure has grown as well, and now I’ve given you appropriate context to tell you how.
Our Intent behind Photure has always been to be the fastest, easiest way to mint an NFT. Putting that capability in your pocket is something we believe can help move the world forward. Our challenge is to find the space where the benefits of our tools and platform are most beneficial. For the longest time we had been thinking of the NFT market as it stands now and how it stood in the summer of 2021 when we started Photure. We thought NFT projects like cryptoKitties and Bored Ape Yacht Club would evolve into more general, maybe not as high priced but, more accessible NFT projects. To an extent we were correct in that assumption, but these projects are not made on mobile phones and their marketing channels are vast and varied. So we thought about the photography market. The tool we have and the tools we could build could make this space easier to navigate and more profitable. While we have gained some traction in that space, the more we talked to photographers the more challenges we saw in their processes. Are they making their art on their phones? How much of the stuff they create is being sold? Can we be better that discord for community building? Better than twitter for shilling? Better than Opensea for content? We could answer one of these, maybe. But something that can bring all this utility together is beyond what 3 cofounders can do.
So where does this leave us. One of the thing’s we’ve learned from our mentors and Tachyon is we need to lean into what makes Web3 unique. What is it that we can do that these other platforms either can’t or refuse to do? What can we do as a mobile Web3 application that instagram can’t? We believe there are 4 pillars on which Photure can stand above these other platforms.
So the question becomes where can we use these advantages best? What market can benefit best from these advantages that we’ve identified?
Well, let me introduce you to Photure The Global Decentralized News Media Platform.
We want to build a platform for and network of citizen journalists.
It's weird but it feels like we've been building this for years, not 8 months. 3 years ago we began with MySources. We were young Ethereum was young. And I know, at the time, I wasn't ready. But now...
With the tools we’ve been building, as well as some on the way, we have created a platform where anyone, anywhere in the world can share their story. We can verify that story with photos/videos minted as NFT’s. We can stamp those NFT's with time and location data. We then can store this data on a decentralized storage network and attribute ownership using the blockchain. And we can do this with only a wallet address to provide as much protection for users in areas where sharing your opinion prohibited as possible.
There is no question that in the modern era, traditional media has lost the confidence of much of the population. Whether it’s biased new outlets, hosts spouting disinformation, or hosts protecting people close to them, we need a new standard by which to determine the validity of a news story. So, I propose today that we trust the people who are there on the ground. We trust the people who’s lives have been impacted by the stories we hear and we give them to tools to tell the story themselves. Then rather than hoarding that story, editing it to fit an agenda, and weaponizing it. We leave ownership of that story to the people impacted, and allow them to gain or lose based on the merits of their arguments and unique perspective.
This is a work in progress and it will be difficult. We are going to have to rework some of the tools we've created and completely start from scratch on others to make this vision for Photure a reality . We believe we can do it, but we are going to need your help.
A core tenet that makes the blockchain revolutionary is the idea of it being trust-less. The network of computers that make up a blockchain do not have to trust one another to agree upon facts. I argue we could learn something from that simple tenet. We can use the blockchain and some of the advantages I’ve laid out to change the world. Some people don’t trust traditional news outlets, whether that is right or wrong is not up to me to decide. But, I can try to make a world where if that’s how you feel then it’s fine. You don’t have to trust traditional news outlets. Trust Your Neighbor. Trust Your Friend. And tell your story on Photure.
Hello World,
Photure Team
Evan Morris
P.S. If you want to be a part of this mission and help us build this join us on discord.