Is There Finally a Growth Hacking Tool for Photographers?

Last month, the creators of MotoCMS, an award winning DIY website building program, ran a Kickstarter campaign for Defrozo, a free display and marketing melding of Smugmug, ShootQ and Zenfolio. What could be more fun than putting up some photos and have the offers pour in, right? I was excited to get started.  Look out, Big Boys, Defrozo is here, and it’s awesome! 

What Defrozo Is About

Currently available as public Beta, Defrozo is looking to be a one-stop solution to help photographers organize, showcase, and market their work online. In fact, the full-featured version will have a capability to replace a bunch of 5-7 different apps that photographers on average use to host, display, and sell their work.

Here are the main features Defrozo will offer:

What’s really great about Defrozo is that it’s not just a concept, it’s a working product with 3 out of 7 features already available (mobile-friendly websites, downloadable client galleries, and cloud image library). You can start your free account today and provide your feedback to the development team and they will use it to make Defrozo solve real problems photographers face on the way to success.

Kickstarter Rewards

While Defrozo offers an all-inclusive free plan, there will be an opportunity for growing businesses to upgrade for more storage and more options within each feature block.

While the Kickstarter campaign for Defrozo is over, the company did a pretty cool move by extending their Kickstarter program until May 31, 2015.

Thus, anyone can back Defrozo on the official website and pre-order their top-tier plan at a fraction of the price. Moreover, backers of $25 pledge level and higher receive private development time access to this premium plan meaning that they will be the first to see the new features and provide feedback on them before Defrozo goes live in October. If you’re working in the creative field or looking for a nice present for your photographer friend, this offer is definitely worth checking out.

My Experience with Defrozo

The company is located in Brooklyn, New York. I  immediately pictured twenty guys feverishly writing code in a fifth floor walk up as a tattooed dude in a wife beater shirt yelled up through the open window for the guys to buzz him up so he could deliver hot pizza and cannolis, but I digress. And I now crave cannolis. I’m sure that it’s a lot more refined than my mental picture, but I kind of like the thought, so I’ll keep it.

The first thing that you do is start building your website with their custom templates. It’s quick and easy, and I was kind of cursing myself for paying my fancy dancy web people for charging me so much money when I could have just been doing it myself…just saying. I don’t own a screwdriver, but ask me to build a website and I’m in!

You can add as many pages as you want, which is super cool. Then you just drag and drop your photos into the Media Library. You can sort them by date or folder, which would be a great thing for  pros, of course, but even mom-tographers who want to keep track of their little angel’s progress from toddler to tiara couple easily do it here. You can choose the website’s colors, font, and gallery website, as well. If you do a lot of online sales, you can create client photo galleries for your clients to peruse their photos from the privacy of their own homes.

There is going to be a bigger, beefier paid version available, and people who contribute to the kickstarter campaign get even more than what you could get on the paid version, so it might be fun to take a gander over at kickstarter to see what you might get.

The guys at Defrozo really are paying attention to what photographers use. There is a ton of visual detail. There are buttons to push if you need help all over the website. CEO Demetrio Fortman has his picture up on the site and when you click it,  you can see a step by step guide on how to set up your Defrozo website. It seems idiot proof, and when I can do it like it’s nothing, you gotta know that it’s gotta be true. It’s like when you go to a restaurant and instead of plain white bread with cold, hard butter, they have amazing, flavorful bread with a rosemary sea salt dipping oil…you just KNOW that you’re going to have the meal of your life.

Must-Have Business Asset for Photographers

Defrozo gives you a proofing system, a place to build a portfolio, you can choose templates and crop your pictures while you’re there, and perform bulk actions, which is so awesome and will save you tons of time. You get a 1GB area to store and catalogue your media, a store for you to sell your images, schedule your shoots and viewing appointments, an area for you to create websites for your clients, and a CRM system.

You can have your blog on the site, as well. If you shoot for stock, you’ll really appreciate the filing system that you can use to create loads of keywords and freely group and regroup the same photo, making finding and selling the big one for a boatload of money a breeze.

Defrozo has a lot of potential. The guys behind it are really on it. So check it out, you’ll be glad you did.   

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Barb Stitzer is an award winning Master Photographer living in Hudson, Ohio with her husband, her teen, Zoe and her tween, Tenley. She creates beauty and memories worldwide. Feel free to find her on Facebook or check out her website.