Exclusive Interview with Ryan O’Grady, Founder and CEO of Fotaflo

The sphere of software development is constantly changing under the influence of emerging technologies, various external factors, and new societal demands. Fotaflo is a photo and video software company delivering guest memories to drive growth for tour and activity operators, providing them with a simple and automated way to capture and deliver guest experiences. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ryan O'Grady, founder, and CEO of Fotaflo.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and your company's services.

Fotaflo is a photo and video software company delivering guest memories to drive growth for tour and activity operators, providing them with a simple and automated way to capture and deliver guest experiences.

We turn customers into advocates with a photo and video marketing platform that improves the guest experience and generates trackable referrals. Fotaflo makes it easy for businesses to capture and deliver photos and videos to their customers.

With what mission and objectives was the company set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Shortly after I founded Fotaflo in 2009, I quickly realized that there was way more value in guest photos as relationship-building support, for both the guides and the guests than in selling them as souvenir products.

This epiphany was not easily understood or adopted within our industry over ten years ago. After all, many businesses barely understood the value of a website and didn't even want to have a digital social presence on Facebook and other sites.

However, with the paradigm that by supporting others to get what they want – helping them grow their business – ours would also flourish. I decided that the future mission of Fotaflo was to help tour, activity, and attraction enterprises grow their company by making souvenir photos and videos free to customers, treating this service as a marketing investment rather than a retail product.

Many businesses challenged the business development of the Fotaflo service. They didn't believe that there was an advantage in giving away photos and videos – and many skeptics constantly challenged us to prove this benefit. The feedback was incredibly beneficial in our journey as we continued to find ways to communicate the benefits and evolve our platform to demonstrate its worth.

Fast forward ten-plus years, and we're now seeing businesses understand our value, even before talking to them. We serve many different experiential companies that give memories to their guests for free, and our product quickly validates that this is more beneficial than selling photos.

Our current mission is that: every business providing an experience worth remembering is actively capturing memories and gifting them to their customers. When looking back on our initial vision – free photos for life – our evolution has progressed much further and helped more businesses and people than I could have ever imagined.

Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his contributions to the company and the industry.

Ryan O'Grady is the Founder and CEO of Fotaflo. He has over 13 years of experience in digital photo and video marketing solutions for the tour and activity industries, helping businesses grow their customers through photo marketing.

Ryan specializes in assessing clients' photo and video solution needs. Working with hundreds of businesses worldwide, he has maximized their social word-of-mouth marketing impact, and his strategy has provided businesses with growth and guests' with their memories.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value from them?

Our innovative software uploads and organizes photos and videos for quick delivery, providing customers with a seamless way to view and share photos through their own bespoke branded page.

We improve the guest experience to enhance the quantity and quality of online reviews, drive up repeat booking, and encourage customers to share photos of their experience to generate new referrals through word-of-mouth marketing.

Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

1. Pricing models, tiers, and plans – that's where our challenges fell. We work with numerous clients, each with different experience levels, assets, budgets, and guests. The deeper we looked, the more complex it got.

After determining feature breakdown, client usage analysis, and revenue analysis, our COO came up with the master plan: 4 different plans, a tier for each client category. We moved our business from sharing revenue as a percentage of photo sales to a subscription model. Our Starter Plan subscribers benefit from 3000 photos/year, unlimited cameras, and one branded site with branded emails. In comparison, our top-of-the-range Custom Plan offers up to 200,000 photos/year, cameras, 200 branded sites with branded emails, custom Google Analytics and a dedicated Account Manager. The ability to scale and upsell clients supported our team's focus and our YoY subscription revenue has grown well over 100% for over two years now; we couldn't be happier with the outcome.

2. The cost model revamp came with another spark of genius – give guests their content for free. You might be thinking, 'that doesn't sound like much of a money-making scheme to me' – you and the tour providers alike. We were the first to introduce this as an essential part of the plan, but when photo memories become everyone's souvenirs (not just the ones who feel stumped they had to pay for it), you get much happier guests and a marketing tool. It took a little work to win over our clients to this idea, though, especially as we had no proof of the concept. They couldn't understand how losing a stream of income through selling photos could gain more cash in their pockets. This was a considerable risk when updating our pricing model.

Over the last number of years, we collected data that validated the marketing benefit of social word-of-mouth marketing through photo and video distribution to tourists. Our primary reason why we felt comfortable being the first to promote 'giveaway photos' only was due to this pioneering effort. We were able to show comparable data to potential clients to let them understand the benefits of giving away photos and videos vs/ selling them. Now, the overwhelming majority of our original clients have chosen to give them away as part of the new strategy.

3. Like many industries, our entire global client base shut down during Covid, and tourism was hit particularly hard. We lost over 60% of our revenue within two weeks of the worldwide lockdown. However, after the initial shock, we continued to grow subscription revenue month over month and signed new clients every month except one over the last two years, which is astonishing considering the challenge to our industry. By doubling down on our commitment to our clients, knowing we were onto something good, we strived to spread hope with our simple and winning strategy so that we could support our fellows in tourism to recover better when businesses reopened. By believing in what we knew was right, even if our market didn't at the time, we succeeded in helping more new partners grow, following one of the biggest challenges our industry has ever faced.

What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

For many years, the tour provider industry has put a very short-term focus on selling photos as souvenirs at the moment and not realizing their true potential. Experience companies have held one of the most powerful marketing tools: Memories – some of the best. And Fotaflo's biggest differentiator is to keep that special memory alive for all our guests for years to come. Share a happy memory in real life once, and that's what it will be, a distant memory held in the mind of you and your guest. Capture it digitally and make it effortless for them to share with their friends, family, social media, and profile photos, and the potential for rebookings and referrals becomes   There's no better recommendation than one that comes from someone you trust – and when you share that happy moment over time, you only look to strengthen your relationships.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

I believe that any business that tries to sell their customers their own memories is already losing more revenue in bookings than they're gaining in selling photos.  While you may still see a cruise line trying to sell you a photo package, I believe this practice is already antiquated and obsolete.

I see hundreds of thousands of businesses that provide an experience worth remembering. By providing their customers with better-captured memories for free with Fotaflo, guests share their photos with more people, and businesses create more great experiences for those referred. There is more authenticity in brand communications with past customers and better relationships between front-line staff, brands, and previous guests.

The businesses that choose Fotaflo to provide their memory marketing service have experienced increased advocates, referrals, and guest satisfaction – and I see this only rising in the future.