The Ambition of Photogrom

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Matthieu Rouif is the co-founder and CEO of PhotoRoom. PhotoRoom enables anyone to create studio-quality photos on their iPhone. Before founding PhotoRoom, Matthieu was the Senior Project Manager at GoPro. Matthieu is also the co-founder and CTO of HeyCrowd, and co-founder and CEO of As-App.

Matthieu earned his graduate degree in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, and his bachelor’s degrees in economics, and physics from École Polytechnique. While at École Polytechnique, Matthieu was a member of the skydiving team and debate team. Matthieu also served as a Parachutist Commando Officer in the French Air Force.

Matthieu started developing apps in 2009 as a student at Stanford, and subsequently started two iPhone app companies. He was part of the Replay app team when they won App of the Year in 2014. Matthieu started PhotoRoom after leaving GoPro in 2018.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Matthieu’s retention strategies for keeping app users subscribed
• Innovative and clever ways to get users to demo your app
• Balancing your app’s pricing and features
• How churn can be an asset

Links & Resources

• YC
• HeyCrowd
• GoPro
• Photoshop
• Zenlea
• Shopify
• Poshmark
• Depop
• Corel

Matthieu Rouif’s Links

• Matthieu on Twitter
• Matthieu on LinkendIn
• PhotoRoom is hiring!
• 10 Tools to Ship an iOS App in 2 Weeks
• PhotoRoom’s Website
• PhotoRoom API
• PhotoRoom on Twitter

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 David:

Hello, I’m your host, David Barnard. And with me as always, Jacob Eiting, RevenueCat CEO. Our guest today is Matt Rouif, co-founder and CEO at PhotoRoom, the app for removing backgrounds and creating studio quality photos right from your phone.

On the podcast, we talk with Matt about how his time at GoPro led to founding PhotoRoom, how churn can actually be an asset, and how being locked in Apple’s basement led to one of PhotoRoom’s biggest marketing wins.

Hey, Matt. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. How are you doing?

00:00:48 Matthieu:

Great. Hey David, Hey Jacob.

00:00:51 Jacob:

Hi, it’s nice to finally meet internet/virtual face-to-face. We’ve known each other for a little while. I’ve become fortunate to know you kind of through RevenueCat, but not actually know-know you. So, it’s nice to finally put a face to the name.

I was looking back through my email and I think the first I ever heard of you was from our mutual friend, Cisco, if I say that correctly?

00:01:23 Matthieu:

Yeah, Francisco.

00:01:24 Jacob:

Francisco, who shared with me a blog post that I had seen that you wrote where you talked about RevenueCat as part of your stack. Since then, I think we talked as you were thinking about going into YC, and then after YC, I put in a little bit of money, so this is a good opportunity to check in on my investment.

I’m super excited to dive in, because there’s a lot of questions. I kind of have followed you guys and kind of seeing some of the stuff you’ve been doing, but I don’t know, like the behind the scenes decision making processes and like, and all that stuff. So yeah, I’m excited to hear the story firsthand.

00:02:04 David:

Yeah, but before we get into PhotoRoom, you’ve got quite a history in app development. So, I want to go back to the beginning and talk war stories. A lot of people were in the industry way back when. Jacob and I both started really early as well. So, you got your start during the Stanford class and you were actually a teaching assistant at Stanford at the time, right? I’m kind of stealing your story, but yeah. Tell me, tell me how you got into it.

00:02:34 Matthieu:

Yeah. Actually I wasn’t a teaching assistant in physics. I was doing a master’s in physics at Stanford, right at the moment of the first iPhone class. And, I actually went to Stanford because I was fascinated by the entrepreneurship. And I had this business idea of printing photos and sending them.

And that seemed a lot easier not to buy hardware, but just use the iPhone which just started at that point. So, I was at Stanford, there was the iPhone class. I wanted to do a photo app. So, see, 12 years later....

00:03:05 Jacob:

A 12 year overnight success.

00:03:07 Matthieu:

That’s what they say. Exactly. And, yeah, I got, I actually, I got started, programming.

I was doing physics before, and I didn’t know anything about programming. So I took a class with a friend that went through the basics, and I just wanted to push products on apps. And I found that the iPhone was the best at that point. And actually the photo app became something else.

The first company I started back in grad school and they became like a ski resorts app. I shipped, we had all of the major ski resorts. And, It was a great, I did that for two years and a major ski resorts and, yeah.

I started an apps company after that, one called HeyCrowd around a social network. So like we had surveys that you could answer to with polls, like, a bit like Instagram stories now, and that didn’t work so well compared to the ski resort, but, yeah, I got into iPhone apps right since the beginning.

00:04:18 Jacob:

I remember the Stanford course. It was on iTunes U that was mass disseminated or was it the later one?

00:04:25 Matthieu:

No, it was the one that it wasn’t Stanford U. There was a, the guy from Fitboard during the class. I don’t know if it was doing that.

00:04:42 Jacob:

Yeah. I remember. I remember it being like the moment when we were like, oh, this is going to go mainstream. Right? Like, because up to that point, you had to learn iOS by doing basically Mac OS. That was like the one point there was the big nerd book you learned Mac OS, and then the SDKs came and you like tried to learn quickly, like what worked and what didn’t.

But, if you were like me who came from no Mac programming, there was really no iPhone entry into it. I remember when the Stanford...