Since early January, our team have been busy working behind the scenes to prepare for this moment.

We’re officially launching our BETA! (Insert sounds of cheering and hand-slapping high-fives)

 

Ok, so for most of you I appreciate that this might not be as big a deal as I’m making it out to be – but when you’ve been thinking about a concept for over a year and that little idea starts to bubble, slowly transforming before your very eyes into a real life product… Well, it’s an amazing feeling and a proud moment for our whole team.

So what are we actually launching? Well, any of you who’ve been following the iSPY journey will know that it’s been our goal to ease the headache that many of us experience on a day-to-day basis: finding good stock imagery without it taking forever. The logical starting point to attack that pain point was to bring together some of the best image libraries under one roof so we can finally stop repeating our searches on these individual search engines. (Also, it helps decrease the number of tabs I have open where I’m trying to flick between providers to see who’s got the best content for my latest obscure campaign search).

On our BETA you’ll find five great image libraries, all with very different propositions; Getty, 500px, Shutterstock, Photoshelter and Gallery Stock – all searchable under one roof! This initial fantastic five represent some of the largest image collections on the market, along with some of the most unique, editorial and high-end. We felt like it was a good mix to start off with, but watch this space because we’ll be adding more and more as we go along.

There’s also a bunch of other features to kick off our entry into startup land: iSPY comes locked and loaded with the ability to compare your search results side-by-side, allowing you to really see the dramatic stylistic differences between collections (handy if your client is struggling to select which provider to open an account with). We’ve also got lightboxes for easy image shortlisting and the ability to filter by collection and license type – all of which is designed to help make your searches more relevant and get to the best content quickly.

Sounds cool, but what’s a BETA?

Being in BETA essentially means that we’re in test-mode. We’re launching our product to a small audience of friends and early adopters so that we can understand what you all think about the tool, how we can make it better and what isn’t working. As with any new software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, we’re going to have growing pains, but we believe that by talking to the people we’re trying to serve we can make sure that we’re building a genuinely useful product. BETA also means, at least to us, that for the time being our product is completely free to use. Everyone who signs up to iSPY during this BETA phase not only gets to influence the ongoing development roadmap of our product, but does so completely free of charge.

Over the course of the next year, we’ll be experimenting. Talking with our community of early adopters, our investors and advisors, to get a sense of the changes we need to make to iSPY and – hopefully – confirming some of our assumptions about where we should focus our efforts next. I can already tell you that our dev team are already busy working on the next tranche of providers to connect with… And did someone say “video search”? Yes, that’s coming too!

We’d love you to join us on this journey, so please do sign up and let us know what you think!

Speak soon & happy searching.