You know how it is – you’re on vacation and you’ve taken 28 million photos, and you just want to select the best 12 so you can create a calendar. Nobody has time for that – and that’s why GoodOnes is here to help. The app is in early access mode at the moment and just closed a $3.5 million seed funding round to continue its march towards launch.
In a nutshell, GoodOnes connects to your Google Photos or iCloud Photos account and helps you select the “best” photos from your massive image library. The idea is not new; we’ve seen a number of apps try to clean up the mess of pictures. One example was EyeEm’s The Roll, which made a similar attempt, fueling its business model of turning everyone into a stock photographer.
At least The Roll made sense as a marketing stunt for EyeEm’s core business. What is less clear is how GoodOnes has a path to generating revenue.
“We’re really thinking about a subscription layer on top of this product. We have seen a lot of willingness to pay from users, especially for the target segment of parents and grandparents,” says Israel Shalom, co-founder of GoodOnes, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We haven’t finalized our subscription model yet. Our main goal at this stage is to build a good user base and get all the feedback to improve it.
The company raised its funding round from TLV Partners with participation from Liquid2 Ventures (Joe Montana’s fund), as well as Rich Miner (former co-founder of Android), and Peter Welinder (founder of Carousel, sold to Dropbox), as well as many more experienced carriers and funders. With this funding, the company plans to expand its team of engineers.
In a world where Google, Apple, and other photo-curating apps are already going out of their way to surface good, interesting photos, is there really a place for GoodOnes in the market?
“The reality is that these apps have been around for a decade, both on the Apple side and on the Google side. What they do well is offer secure storage for all your photos,” Shalom says, pointing out that insofar as competing apps bring up photos, they don’t do a particularly good job, and his solution is much more customizable.” What’s different about what we do is that we leave it up to you to orders.”
The app works by learning your preferences and using your left-like-it swipe and your right-ugh-get-out-of-my-face swipe to train your likes on an AI. From there, it starts creating photo galleries that it thinks you like the most. The final gallery or album is created and presented to the user.
“We think there’s room for another big player here. The same way Netflix is synonymous with streaming and Spotify is synonymous with music,” Shalom explains. “We’d like GoodOnes to be where you consume your most personal and valuable information, i.e. your personal photos and videos.”
The app can deduplicate, select the best photos and give you a gallery of your favorites. GIF credits: Good
“With the creation of mobile platforms, we ended up providing powerful computers, digital cameras and streaming devices in everyone’s pocket – we could never have predicted the volume of new content that would be created” , said Rich Miner, who co-founded Android, and is an angel investor in the GoodOnes round, said in a statement. “GoodOnes brings powerful curation to the deluge of photos we’ve all come to accumulate. I am very excited about this tool and technology, which is why I was excited to invest. »
