Pretty awesome letter from one of the founders of Picnik to the other. Picnik is a digital photo editing service that is Internet enabled. Google bought it on Monday. Mike Walton linked to this email by the founders which spelled out what they were trying to do and how they were going to do it. My favorite part was the analysis on the difficulties established players would have competing with them.
I also liked the fact that the company was always bootstrapped by the three Founders. Cool stuff.
"Established companies with photo editing products. Established companies have to overcome two major hurdles to address this market (in addition to realizing it is a market!). First they must write an online photo editing application. There will be no quick ports of existing applications; most code will have to be from scratch. Second, they must implement their code to work as a seamlessly integrated service in a 3rd party site. Not only is this more work, but it is a new mindset for the established players. Their present mindset is more about how they can create a vertically integrated application and service of their own, not how can they add value to a 3rd party."
