Hey Fellow TalkMicro Members,

I would like to humbly present my business for a dynamic licensing marketplace to you and ask for your advice, any suggestions you can think of and support while we grow.

My name is John and I'm the founder of Cutcaster, Cutcaster: Stock Photography and Footage: Search for Royalty Free Images and Video |, which is community-based content marketplace for licensing royalty free photos and stock video. Cutcaster is dynamic and unique because the site matches supply and demand by giving creators the option to set their own price for the cost of a royalty free license or choose Cutcaster’s patent-pending pricing algorithm to correctly price the content. On the other hand, the platform lets buyers seamlessly submit bids/lower prices for content to a seller, which they can accept, decline or meet with a return offer back to that buyer.

For the first time, buyers and sellers can negotiate seamlessly over a site and close sales they might never have known about. Sellers always have the choice of where they want to price their hard work and aren’t cornered in to what the site charges. In addition, we plan to offer hard data to sellers and buyers i.e. Cutcaster’s market education tools, so they can learn and adjust their pricing levels to capture more sales volume. This, we hope, can lead to more dollars in creator’s wallets than higher pricing alone.

We are young obviously and making up for it by working hard and listening closely to what people tell us is the right way to build a business and treat our members. My background is trading stocks on Wall St., which is where I got the idea for Cutcaster. We had electronic trading platforms, which seamlessly helped buyers and sellers find one another, negotiate on pricing and cut out the expensive and inefficient middleman. I should know because I was one of those middlemen and left the business ;-)

I can tell you I have learned a ton and still have a long way to go but I’m excited everyday.

I’m asking you for your time and a chance to prove that we can create something new and better together. I’m always available to chat and my cell and email is below. I would love to hear your thoughts and criticisms as I’m always learning. And plus, I have thick skin ;-)

Best,

John Griffin
Cutcaster: Stock Photography and Footage: Search for Royalty Free Images and Video |
john@cutcaster.com
215-688-2751

I wish you well. It's too bad there has been so many startups in this business that have ended up so woefully short of expectations. I imagine lots of folks here have given their last "freebie" advice about three new micro sites ago.

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haha. Yeah I have been listening to some of the frustration in a lot of the forums and in my conversations with people. I understand it would take a moment to check out the site and write something up and that is why i am not expecting anything but hoping for some help because we are a young company and the users know what they want.

Do you see one thing with the site's homepage that you would change?

Thank you louoates though.

Hi John! Good luck with the start of Cutcaster. I think it is an interesting concept with an algorithm to calculate the price of the image. This why I am giving it a try.

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I went and looked last month when you posted the first notice. The site looks nice. Personally there are too many sites and not much room for someone new to attract buyers. Without buyers, it doesn't matter how good your site is, what you commission is or how great your library is, with the best photographs. No buyers, it's a dead issue.

That's personally, nothing against your trying. I hope you succeed.

I wrote to someone who had footage up there and asked for her experience, but she never replied.

I wonder how your footage price calculator works. I see some old 16mm B&W shots for hundreds of dollars and new stock from names we'd recognize here, for peanuts. I'm kind of mystified by why an old car crash is priced so high?

I do wonder why you didn't just do footage first, since there's much more opportunity in that area. You can always add stills later. I'm looking at it as an identity issue. I mean, why don't you add music and audio, as long as you are diving in. That's supposed to be the largest growth area in the next decade for stock.

If you have a plan that will attract buyers, you're golden. There's no shortage of photos, video, vectors, music or audio to fill the site with quality materials. There's no shortage of artists and contributors. But you have to move the product to make a profit, just like a retail store.

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I like that we can set higher than microstock prices there. The pricing algorithm could be good when the site has good sales. I like the look of the site.

If you want people here to upload their portfolios, you need to get the FPT sorted out so that all we have to do is upload them. Having to add keywords later takes too much time. That should be your priority, as most contributors wont be interested until this is functioning. Most buyers wont be interested until you have lots of content.

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Thanks sharpshot. We do have FTP access and can bulk upload if you want. Or on the site you can upload multiple files through the upload page. If anyone is interested I can give you the directions via email. Just email me at john@cutcaster.com.

@Racephoto. That is a good question about who sets the price and why are some priced so high and others not. In the case of the crashing car, that one was set by the seller and he chose to use a fixed price. He gets to choose but if he asked the site we could help him if he wants. The nice thing is that buyers can go in and submit a bid if that seller has priced his content too high. It wouldn't be uncommon for the buyer to submit a bid for 150 instead of paying the 250 like the seller is asking and at that point the seller knows where the different demand lies at different pricing levels. The whole goal for him is to get hard data on where to price and get the most sales at the highest prices.

And you are absolutely right about the buyers and sellers. We know that we need the buyers to get quality sellers. That is our focus now going forward now that we have our marketplace platform ready. I hope you would give us a try out and let me prove that the work/time you put in will be worth the return on your investment in Cutcaster ;-)

That's not the problem. Other sites read the IPTC data that most of us input in to our files. This means we don't have to add titles and keywords when we upload, as the sites read the data and do this for us. Your site will need this or a lot of contributors will be put off.

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You are absolutely right. Our uploader on the live site is for photos and videos and because there are no similar things to IPTC data files for video we needed to put titles and keywords in there so we had that information for video clips that were being uploaded and thus it added more time for photos that already had the titles and keywords embedded as you know.

I was telling another member today that we are going to split the upload process into two content types, photos (with IPTC metadata embedded) and everything else (videos, photos, illustations, motion graphics etc), because our uploader actually does parse out IPTC/EXIF metadata its just being overridden for the moment because of the video (which stinks and makes more work I agree). I am going to have that fixed asap and thank you ;-)

Which site do you think has the best upload process and takes the least amount of time?

Did you see anything else?

Lucky Oliver is the site I find easiest to upload to. With several sites we just upload our photos and click on a link to submit them. When you can use IPTC data I will upload more photos and give you more feedback about the site. I am too busy at the moment.

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