Concept to launch: Building my first software product (as a photographer)
Solving my own problem ----> a software product for photographers
🌸 Good morning/afternoon/evening, depending on where you are in the world. : )
If you’re new here, I’m Cait, a creative laborer working in art and advertising. I run a creative company called FLOWERS.
The customer is…me
Many many years ago, some of us photographers starting out used the Getty Usage Calculator to calculate usage fees for photography. It was clunky and contained ad placements that don’t really exist anymore or have changed form drastically. Still, back when I was first starting out, this is where many of us got our general ballpark ranges from which I personally took with a large handful of salt.
There’s also this very very silly one that is really confusing and looks unchanged since ~2006, give or take. Mostly it was too confusing and I had no idea what it wanted from me.
As a commercial photographer in advertising, I was and still am constantly calculating usage fees and day rates based on the many different types of jobs and ad placements that come across my desk. It’s time-consuming and frustrating and relies heavily on several extremely nuanced factors.
Pricing is a complete unknown to most, including many of my friends and peers who would text me constantly asking for pricing advice. The thing is, it all really depends on a lot of things.
I really wanted a tool that actually worked and, obviously, waited for someone else to build it first or fixed the outdated ones. Then no one did.
Finally, I asked photographers, “What are the biggest mysteries of the industry you wish could be unlocked?”
This was a sampling of the response, which I expected:
I knew these were going to be the answers that came back, but it was exactly the type of validation I needed that this idea should be realized.
So, I built BaseRate for myself initially, with help from two developers over the past five months.
When I casually mentioned it to fellow photographers, each response was immediately, "Wait….I want that. I would use that all the time."
And here we are!
Starting small, fixing bugs first
In my last High Thought, I gathered some emails of those of you who were interested (and many of you were, thank you!) to roll it out first on a tiny scale.
Instead of a massive launch, I then trickled out BaseRate semi-secretly on platforms like Instagram Threads, lol.
Why? Because it’s sort of a ghost town, which is a safe space to work out the kinks on a product with a few bugs after deployment. This smaller audience helped identify those bugs before expanding to a larger market, which I’m approaching slowly!
Which brings us here, where I thought it could be interesting to chronicle the process of building something in a new medium.
Ironically, as a photographer using my own images in the mockup ads, I don't need to calculate usage fees for my promotional materials - an absolutely fun cheat code for me!
Good challenges
There have been many, many revisions and unexpected hurdles throughout development. Managing people and the entire project solo has been exhausting at times, but so many unique learnings have come with it.
I haven’t been so hands-on with a project in years, thinking about it for about 60-70% of my day. It’s amazing the lessons that can be learned from being a beginner and letting things break after working in advertising at such a high level for a long time.
I’m relearning the skill of extreme experimentation, which is hard for me as a control freak building in public. I love taking risks, but I usually do those things behind the scenes and reveal the big switch later. This time, I’m liking the idea of pulling back the curtain on the process a bit through the early, messy growth of this project.
Unlocking industry gates
The pricing information photographers need isn't widely available. And that's deliberate. Having been represented and having an agent for six years (2017-2023) before leaving to go completely independent and start my own studio, I recognized that pricing uncertainty holds many photographers (and creatives in general) back, particularly those without representation.
BaseRate gives photographers more autonomy by giving them information. By democratizing access to pricing tools and frameworks, I'm aiming to help solve what I've found to be the industry's number one problem: knowing what and how to charge for photography in advertising.
I would love for you to check it out, poke around, let me know your thoughts! Photographers - reply with your feedback! I’m truly all ears.
Many who read this are not commercial photographers, but do encounter pricing uncertainty at work. If that’s you, I’d still love to know about your industry’s pricing gates as well. BaseRate may one day be able to solve more of these problems and I’m curious about all of them. Human (creative) labor in particular is really interesting and important to me especially these days as we witness the rise of AI at work and throughout our lives.
I always see this particular venue (High Thought) as the antithesis to other platforms in that a lot of times, a comment or email reply gets a great discussion going. I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, questions, bug reports.
Creatives in other industries:
What is your experience with pricing uncertainty?
How have you navigated that?
Where do you get your info from?
Thank you for coming as always. I really appreciate it!
Cait
📸 High Thought is written by Cait Oppermann, a creative laborer in the world of art, advertising, & what falls between.
Cait runs things at FLOWERS & BaseRate.
@flowersfullservice & @caitoppermann
📑 General idea behind High Thought here.
*or*
📚 Past editions in the (small) archive.
Ride or Die vibe
📯 Send to friends, if you want.
This is so inspiring, Cait! Congrats on BaseRate!! Here for creative people building software. We need more of this in the world. Bravo!!
I’ve used base rate 4x in the last month now that I’m also back to being independent after moving away from representation. I had learnt a lot from my producer and agent who I’m still close with and work with on jobs. But having a tool like this is seriously a game changer. A big thing is for certain clients who lake the information and education around usage, it means there is now a solid data point to refer to. Well done Cait.