Today we’d like to introduce you to Akin Akinlawon.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Akin. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Our story began in late 2015. I was at a friend ’s wedding and it was quite possibly the coolest wedding ever! The bride was wearing a red Vera Wang dress, the venue was historic yet modern, right in the heart of downtown Chicago, one of the actresses from Orange Is the New Black was a guest’s date, DJ Steve Aoki happened to randomly show up toward the end of the night. It was like out of some weird fantasy and every guest was taking what seemed like hundreds of pictures trying to capture all of it.
A few weeks later, over a conversation with the groom, it came up that it was such a tedious task to gather all the pictures off social media, even though they had a unique hashtag, they just weren’t even bothering. It was sort of heart breaking to know this amazing wedding and all these amazing pictures couldn’t easily be gathered and then shared or revisited by the bride and groom 🙁
This was when the problem was discovered and the quest for a solution started. That is what drives us and stays at the core of why CliqPic was formed. We don’t want anyone to ever have an event and then not be able to enjoy the pictures afterward and relive those memories, or to think of any part of it as a tedious task. It doesn’t matter if it’s a wedding, birthday party, Auto Show, or Hot Dog Eating Competition, we want to do our part to keep the event planning, going, and reliving process stress free and enjoyable. Plus, hey, we are all a little lazy. Why not have this one thing in life be easy, stress free and fun!
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It has been anything but smooth but luckily for me I never expected it to be smooth.
There are more rough days than smooth, but some of the more notable challenges were:
1.) The very first developer I hired to build my site and app stole my money and did no work.
2.) Having the link to the site randomly stop working via Instagram, which is where most our or business comes from.
3.) Having a few of the features stop working the day we were going to shoot the demo videos for a new marketing push.
4.) Just the normal struggles of funding it on my own, getting support for the vision, seeing competitors pop up when the landscape was relatively empty when I originally had the vision.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about CliqPic – what should we know?
Technically speaking what we do is help users quickly crowd-source then aggregate their event pictures using their unique hashtag. So, for example if you have a wedding and your hashtag is #HappilyDebrahAfter, using CliqPic you can just plug that in and we pull back all the pictures off Instagram and put it into a digital album you can email, download, and share on Facebook or Twitter. But I like to talk about it in a more human way, what we really do is allow you to have a fun, easy, quick way to share and relive those fun memories. Getting your photos should not be hard, time consuming, or stressful. The ability to share photos is as old as time itself look at cave drawings. We are visual creatures and I want CliqPic to ultimately be on the forefront of cool new ways to do that. I have so many more ideas and features in mind and in store to really make it an experience!!
What sets us apart is we try to be as organic and unobtrusive as possible. No knock on anyone but I don’t get the event photo sharing apps that require folks to download the app then have the guests share their pictures in the app.
The reality is:
1.) just because a host uses your app for their event doesn’t mean the next host of an event your guest goes to will use your same app so now they have this app on their phone they used for just one event.
2.) even if they share their pictures in your app over 60% of guests will STILL share the pictures on social media so you’ve caused them to “post” these pictures twice. With us your guests just post to social media as normal and we do all the work without requiring anything from them. Easy!
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
Oh man so many friends and family just supporting me along the way with advice, words of encouragement, or offers to help in any way, early financial contributions, voice over work for marketing material, ideas on features. My wife Lauren, My sister Funmi, my brother in law Niran, my mom Lola, my friends Bernard, Jason, Thom, Randy, Petar, Mookie, Mark Smolenski, Erica, Jackie, Rachelle, Olga, Colleen. I am sure there are some I’ve unintentionally left off but I really had some good support to push forward and take the idea and make it reality. If I were to go through each thing and instance I would be writing forever.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://cliqpic.com/
- Phone: 8589974015
- Email: akin.akinlawon@cliqpic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cliqpic_/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CliqPic/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CliqPic
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