photo © 2008 Anton Fomkin | more info (via: Wylio)Hi. My name is Dan. I'm one of the guys responsible for Wylio. My wife Rachel is an author and my friends James and Matt have dared to embark on this crazy little adventure with me.
The idea for Wylio originally came out of Rachel's need for pictures for her blog. We found the Creative Commons search on Flickr quite useful for finding free pictures, but there wasn't an easy, intuitive way to size them and then place them in her articles. It was taking her 20 and 30 minutes just to find, size, attribute, and upload a picture.
I had a few ideas about how I could streamline the process rattling around in my head for a year or two. Then one day I started outlining the concept on paper (read: google docs) and putting together a partial business plan, which helped me decide how I wanted to proceed. I figured if I was going to put time into it, I might as well try to make it financially self-sustaining. I showed the plan to a few friends to get their feedback. Soon after that, I started piecing together a mock-up that worked well enough to help me explain how I wanted the interface to work and showed the idea to James and Matt.
They were excited about the project and after a few weeks of part-time, evening, and scattered work, we had a functioning proof of concept. Soon after I contacted TechCrunch (kind of as a shot in the dark). It seems that Alexia Tsotsis found our site useful and she was kind enough to write an article about us.
All of a sudden our proof of concept was handling TechCrunch size traffic, which was a little scary and really exciting at the same time. As of today, that proof of concept is still what people are using.
We've since been working hard behind the scenes on a brand new version of Wylio. This version will include both free and premium accounts. The free accounts will have similar functionality to what is currently available, and the premium accounts will have some new useful features for a small monthly fee.
All of a sudden our proof of concept was handling TechCrunch size traffic, which was a little scary and really exciting at the same time. As of today, that proof of concept is still what people are using.
We've since been working hard behind the scenes on a brand new version of Wylio. This version will include both free and premium accounts. The free accounts will have similar functionality to what is currently available, and the premium accounts will have some new useful features for a small monthly fee.
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