The more visible examples of creativity often involve stories of genius. Whether staring at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, appreciating the complexity of sending a man to the moon, or admiring an Ansel Adams black-and-white landscape, we often associate pure genius at work in creating these masterpieces. And yet, creative inspiration and delivery don’t need to be so grand: Any mother who on the spot thinks of a clever way to distract her toddler knows this to be true.
Creative minds also don’t necessarily approach genius in all categories either. Just because a photographer can brilliantly capture on film the essence of love between a bride and groom, doesn’t imply a similar talent to fix a broken garbage disposal or even balance a checkbook. The most dramatic example of this contrast is the legendary photographer Annie Liebovitz. After decades of tightly shielding her masterpieces from commercial exploitation, she nearly lost the rights to her life’s work last year when she incurred debts totaling $24 million.
The average photographer will come nowhere near that extreme. But those who are especially creative in their craft are often less interested in the details of running a small business. Yet an independent photographer is indeed a small-business owner. And he or she not only needs to succeed behind the camera but also must execute mundane tasks such as customer relationship management, project management, bookings, contracts and payments.
This is where a company like ShootQ steps in, providing a Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) application that automates the details a photographer needs to run a business. But the company understands that its strength is not necessarily in running IT infrastructure. Therefore, the founders teamed up with Joyent to empower ShootQ to deliver its application from the cloud.
ShootQ VP of Product Development, Jonathan LaCour, discusses how ShootQ uses Joyent for its cloud infrastructure.
LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN
Running a small business is not easy, especially if you’re wearing all the hats and more interested in hanging with your right brain creative side.
For starters, there’s lead management. For many creative types, that means a sprawl of business cards and phone numbers on bar napkins cluttering up our desks. Wouldn’t it be nice to use a content relationship management system that not only tracks whom you’ve met, but also lets you know whom you should remind that you still exist? Better yet, wouldn’t it be nice if that system also told you how much potential business you had in your pipeline? Who knows, you might have enough business on the horizon to leave your day job and focus on your creative endeavor full-time.
That’s what happened for one ShootQ client who was doing her photography business part-time as she worked an uninspiring office job. After looking at the ShootQ analytics, she welled up in tears as she saw she had enough business to take the leap.
Once a potential client shows interest, it’s time for details such as booking the engagement, signing contracts, managing all the logistics and taking payment. Those Post-it notes attached to your monitor and keyboard might have sentimental value, but they aren’t the most efficient way to make sure you’re getting your work done. Worse yet, you can end up devoting much of your off-work time to those small business to-dos.
A married couple that focused on wedding portraits recently had a baby. They found themselves struggling to get all the logistical details done and spend quality time with their daughter. Having access to a SaaS application that acted as their business manager helped them take back their lives. On one level, the couple could control their business instead of their business controlling them. Yet on a more personal level, the couple now had time to spend with their newborn.
CLOUD GENIUS
Focusing on what you do best is certainly not a new concept. In the case of ShootQ, the founders were photographers who understood through their own experiences the challenges other photographers faced as small-business owners. In addition, one of the founders was a developer who understood how to build web-based applications. None of the founders were IT operations experts, nor did they have the start-up capital to fund an operations team. Therefore, the natural conclusion was to deploy on a cloud infrastructure.
That move immediately gave the ShootQ founders the benefit of not having to buy the servers, storage and networking required to service the first customers. In addition, running on a cloud infrastructure meant the team could increase capacity on-demand in response to increases in client workload and new customer sign-ups. A cloud also meant they didn’t have to worry about buying the capacity with enough lead time so it could be racked, stacked and configured in time.
As important, however, was ShootQ’s requirement to have its cloud provider acting as part of the team. ShootQ was running its customer’s business infrastructure and couldn’t afford crashes taking down the portals into the customer’s operations. Yet ShootQ was running with zero operations expertise in-house, leaving it completely dependent on the cloud provider filling the gap.
According to ShootQ’s VP of Product Development, Jonathan LaCour, this is where Joyent shone. “We’re such a small team and didn’t have the funds to have an operations team,” LaCour said. “So Joyent stepped in and worked for us as our operations team. It was like having 10 full-time employees working as part of our operations.” In fact, the ShootQ team knows the names and faces of the Joyent support people.
It also helps that Joyent’s infrastructure has performed flawlessly. According to LaCour, “Joyent has met and many times exceeded our expectations. For example, we’ve had no unplanned downtime since we launched with Joyent nearly two years ago.” As another example of Joyent’s reliability, ShootQ’s MySQL database has been replicated and running without fail or restart also in the two years since launch.
THE GENIUS IN PARTNERING
Many people still ask whether cloud computing is really just a lot of hype. Still others think cloud computing will happen eventually, but they think it’s still years away as they raise questions about topics such as security and reliability. Perhaps the jury is still out.
Or perhaps it doesn’t take a rocket scientist genius to see that cloud computing has already taken off. Just ask ShootQ’s customers, who have collected more than $144 million through ShootQ’s SaaS solution hosted on Joyent’s cloud.
A creative software visionary and leader, with a passion for dynamic languages, usability, web applications, and the latest in open-source technology. I love designing and implementing solutions to real problems, for real people.
Joyent has been providing Infrastructure as a Service since 2004, before anyone called it cloud computing. Today, Joyent is the only cloud computing company that has built its own complete technology stack, runs a major public cloud on that stack, and makes the technology available for anyone who wants to build a cloud.
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