ShieldShot LLC

We are working on a photo storage, protection, and distribution service.  Models are able to use the service to upload photos they need to send to their customers, in which case the photos are immediately ran through a steganography process to embed each individual file with copyright information.  Once this is done, the photoset page will show that the status is "Ready for Distribution".  They can assign a "tier" to that photoset, as well as assign email addresses to that "tier".  If the tiers match, when they create a distribution job, it will automatically populate the job with the photoset that's being sent out and which emails should receive it.  Tiers also have a hierarchy, so if some one is assigned to Tier 3 and Tier 3 is a child of Tier 2 which is a child of Tier 1, they will receive all of those photosets.

This is the initial plan for the tool.  We already have photoset processing fully working.  There are other features down the pipeline, like sending sets to customer accounts instead of emails (so the user has to login and they will have a list of sets that they have access to, at which point if they click the download link it will generate a presigned URL, which will expire upon downloading, that is pointing at a user-tagged version of that set so if the photos are shared and ever found online, we can analyze the photo and see exactly who shared it).  Also features like a store where you can link previously uploaded photosets to a store page and sell on the site, and a way for photographers to login and upload their photos, then share the set with the model so they can distribute it as needed.  Essentially an all-in-one tool for photographers and models to distribute photosets to their customers.

The tentative pricing model is below:

Starter - $1 a month
 - 100 photos per month
 - 20 emails per month (if you send to customer accounts, it won't count towards the email limit)
 - 5 GB total storage (photosets linked to store pages won't count but we'll take 5% of sales)

Basic - $10 a month
 - 1000 photos per month
 - 500 emails per month (same notes as Starter)
 - 30 GB total storage (photosets linked to store pages won't count, but at this point we'll just take 2% of sales)

Plus - $20 per month
 - Unlimited photos per month
 - 10,000 emails per month (same notes as Starter)
 - 100 GB total storage (same notes as Basic)

Premium - $50 per month
 - Unlimited photos per month
 - Unlimited emails per month (same notes as Starter)
 - 1 TB total storage (same notes as Basic)

The team is currently just myself and an hourly contractor from the Philippines, which is why the funding request is a bit lower.

Despite the small team, we have gotten the majority of the basic features done in under a month.  I have a lot of experience with AWS Cloud Architecture & Security (I have my AWS Solutions Architect cert and have implemented AWS environments for 4 companies now) and have quickly learned NodeJS to handle all of our lambdas.  There are no servers being used in the entire process of the application's frontend and backend.  My frontend developer has a lot of experience and is very passionate around the project.  We work through a simplified agile methodology, which I have had the opportunity to manage in the past for previous companies.

There is already a lot of interest around the product and we have a lot of people who are wanting to use it even at the basic featureset, so we really do think this can be successful.  We have everything separated between stage and prod environments, but everything is deployed via CICD pipelines and variablized based on the environment.  So we can keep production very stable.

The funding would allow us to continue working on this for another 3 months full-time and allow me to completely focus on this.  We may also hire additional contractors to handle QA and UX/UI design.  Based on our product roadmap, that would give us time to get the basic functionality done, the customer logins and distributions, the store functionality, a Patreon-like model feed page and subscription, and potentially even the photographer upload and sharing sets with models portion.  Essentially making the product fully featured.

The costs around the product are super low and due to the serverless nature are 100% scalable with growth and usage.

I hope you can take the time to consider funding this project.