Formerly known as Crossroads, iOS and Android app Comet has been imagined by two entrepreneurs who came to the conclusion that no existing solution was offering an experience handy enough to gather photos with friends and relatives: “During my bachelor party a few years ago, everyone took a lot of photos with their smartphones, and we decided to gather them using Dropbox or Flickr afterward. The process was really laborious and unnatural, and at the end, we didn’t receive all the pictures,” told us Mathieu Spiry, CEO and Co-Founder of Comet.
Here’s how Comet works : Once you’re logged in, you can create a collaborative album and share it with your friends by email, text message or by letting them flash your QR code. Once they have installed the app, they can upload their picture to the album. The best part? You don’t have to wait to upload or download 100+ pictures manually, just keep the application running in the background and your pictures will still be uploading or downloading. You can also create real-time slideshows and even share the albums with people who don’t have the app so they can access all the pictures through a web link.
The plan is to become the default destination and most user-friendly way to share photos with a small group of people. No frills: the UX is built around the sharing, viewing and downloading of pictures, period. “We don’t want to be another hot app everyone will talk about for a brief instant. We want our product to speak for itself. That’s why we developed, and we continue improving, the best tool to create collaborative photo albums,” commented Spiry.
Since the successful launch of their beta on Product Hunt -when the app was still named Crossroads, followed by the release of their newly rebranded and improved app back in Decembre 2015, the Paris-based company has drawn the attention of Orange Cloud’s business unit and has been selected to Orange’s startup accelerator. This experience allowed them to get a handful of advice from Orange, as well as potential deals with Asian telecoms and smartphones manufacturers. They also experienced some important traction by reaching Orange’s user base via Orange Cloud solution, where the French telecom suggests its
This experience allowed them to get a handful of advice from Orange, as well as potential deals with Asian telecoms and smartphones manufacturers. They also experienced some important traction by reaching Orange’s user base, where the French telecom company suggests Comet to Orange Cloud’s users.
For now, the app is mostly used for family and friends events such as weddings, birthday parties, bachelorette parties and more. Some people create collaborative albums for their babies or even for their cats, users imagination is the limit, but the main use is clearly personal. However, the company’s strategy to build awareness, and also to monetize the tool, is to make partnerships with professional events. Helping event managers to gather automatically all the pictures taken during the event by their attendees. “Originally, we clearly made a BtoC app, we want to give people the best solution to gather pictures with their friends. Although, We quickly realized that we could monetize our technology by offering a solution for professional events. A simple way for brands, companies, and events organizers to digitalize the experience. We want to show our potential users how the app can be used. We think that the BtoC acquisition will be easier through partnerships.”
So what’s next for Comet? First, they’ll keep improving the app -they just introduced a feature allowing new users to signup just by using their phone number. They recently closed a deal with the French tennis open Roland-Garros, offering their technology to the event’s staff so they will be able to take pictures from different angles. A back-office will be available to enable event managers to moderate these pictures, as well as features like an embedded photo album or a slideshow that they could share everywhere. Mathieu Spiry also announced that Comet will be present during every game of the upcoming European soccer championship, Euro 2016, along with the sponsors and teams of the tournament.