In 2024, it may cost a fortune to find an analog camera, buy film (and perhaps special batteries) and take photographs that will then need to be developed. For those who long for those good old days, a startup called Lapse has been offering smartphone users an alternative: taking photos that you have to wait to see “developed” before sharing them with a select group of friends, if you want.
Lapse has been gaining ground in the market (with millions of users, 100 million photos captured each month, and a coveted top 10 ranking in the US App Store for photography apps) and is now announcing a new round financing of 30 million dollars. to take your ambitions to the next level.
Greylock, the storied consumer app investor that was an early backer of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok (when it was Musical.ly), and LinkedIn, co-led the round with equally iconic DST Global Partners. Previous sponsors GV, Octopus Ventures and Speedinvest also participated. Following the $12.4 million previously raised in seed and pre-seed funding, this brings the total to just over $42 million and a valuation of around $150 million, according to sources.
Lapse's plans include more behind-the-scenes treatment of “raw” photos, adding more features around the photo experience, and eventually moving into video.
In the future, there may even be some monetization, CEO and co-founder Dan Silvertown said in an interview, though that's not something that's been touched upon yet, and it looks to move away from the usual route social apps take by leaning toward advertising. . “The initial feeling and hypothesis is not to do that,” he said.
The ethos of the company may have an old-school feel, but some of the mechanics of how the app works are anything but.
Some of these are interesting technological details that arise from lived experience. As were previously told, Silvertown co-founded the app with his brother Ben after Ben found himself, while traveling in Asia, longing for the freedom of a point-and-shoot camera that didn't force him to constantly look at an app to see who “liked” it. ”His photographs of him, or what other people were doing and, above all, apparently leading his life to capture and share the moment on an app, and not the other way around. That led him and Dan to look at how to recreate the analog experience through a smartphone.
Although there is no possibility in the application to constantly edit images or retake snapshots if you are not satisfied with the initial result, there is an interesting treatment behind the scenes.
“There are about 12 different steps that photography goes through in terms of processing,” he said. Some of them have computer vision elements, some are built in-house, and some use third-party technology. Basically all of them, she said, are aimed at understanding what's in the photo you're taking and, as a result, are designed to optimize the look of your subjects and the overall composition.
On the other hand, some of the app's mechanics are not so laudable. The span has come under some scrutiny: see our story here – for how it has used growth hacking and forced invitations to increase the number of installations of its application. That technique definitely served to increase user numbers: it reached the top of the US and UK iOS app stores (the only markets and platform where it's available) at one point, although it's debatable. how sustainable This can be applicable to any long-term business if the app itself doesn't offer anything useful and interesting.
For Lapse, the lesson was definitely learned, although in its defense, Silvertown still maintains that the startup had to start somewhere: since the premise is to have a way to share your photos with a small group of friends without a discovery feed, If you download the app and you don't have contacts who use it, where do you go from there?
Today, he claims that the app, which has adopted more “diary” features, giving users a way to create albums that can be kept private or shared with a small group of people, no longer requires forced invitations to use, nor at least because now there is a critical mass of people and it is finding its own virality. However, my own experience was that for completely new users (perhaps especially consumers who are sensitive to sharing data on social apps they don't already know about) it's still difficult to examine the app's dark patterns to figure out how to use it without sharing it. at least a couple of names and numbers.
Going forward, we find ourselves at a notable crossroads in the world of consumer apps. The most dominant names in the business are huge in their scale, with billions of users, and for the most part (Snapchat is arguably the biggest exception) they have gone far beyond focusing on sharing with small groups of friends, and none of them it is. without a lot of bells and whistles that take users away from what already seems real.
Does that leave an opportunity for at least a couple of players who are willing to offer users that alternative? BeReal, Dispo and a few others who have tackled that idea seem to have lost some steam for now, but Lapse still believes there's a lot more to come for his vision of the concept.
And it seems their investors do too:
“What's very interesting is that most of the large-scale platforms, whether it's Instagram or Facebook, many of them originally started as places where we kept up with our friends, and then slowly became other things we know. “For today,” like sites for news, entertainment or keeping up with influencers, Jacob Andreou, general partner at Greylock, said in an interview.
“I think what's interesting about this is that it's left a void where there's no place you can go to just check your friends' profiles and see what they're up to. That’s also a great place to start because that’s where all these really big platforms started.” He believes the mechanic of “capturing a photo, one at a time, and viewing it later when it's developed, can lower the barrier to sharing, using it to create this amazing place where you can stay up to date with your friends.”