The next time you think about it, pay attention the next time you look at houses on Zillow or watch an ad for a hotel, cruise, or resort. You’re 85% likely to see drone videos or images to help sell the product. Aerial imagery is everywhere and it’s becoming more popular every day. I’ve spent the last decade providing that imagery as a drone pilot. There’s still a lot of unnecessary effort that goes into the process of accepting new customer orders and delivering files. Current workflows aren’t smooth and there’s enough friction for many potential customers to shy away from ordering the imagery they want.
What is paypixl?
I’ve spent the last three years building paypixl. Simply put, paypixl is a portfolio + payment + flight planning platform for drone pilots. It’s an all-in-one hub that’s intended to eliminate the friction from the ordering process and create more work for pilots.
The Motivation behind the Product
But what compelled me to leave a great career at DigitalGlobe, drop out of grad school at USC, empty my life savings, and strain my family for the last 3 years? Great question. Sometimes I wonder myself. But then I interview a pilot or meet up with a group of pilots and the reason revalidates itself, and I’m recharged to keep going.
The drone world is full of passionate tech guys, creators, and entrepreneurs. We have a broad range of apps that help us build automated flight plans, plan our flights, and process our imagery into really cool products like mapping images and 3D models. We can build really neat things. But there’s a scarcity of solutions that help pilots simplify their products, deliver files, and make it easy for their customers. In lieu of a few options, pilots use an average of 6 different apps to fulfill customer orders. The result is often an email to customers with several links to different folders and a separate payment link. This process and the apps used vary from pilot to pilot.
Whoever solves this problem must have deep experience with the issue from both the pilot and the customer side, and they must be crazy enough to risk building in an apparently niched market that appears to be inundated with similar solutions from the inexperienced observer’s point of view. That’s me; I’m that guy.
Where Will paypixl Be in 5 Years?
My team and I have a very ambitious roadmap full of awesome features and obtainable major milestones. We truly believe we’ll be able to build a best-in-class portfolio not just for drone pilots, but for all photographers and videographers. But we know that getting there requires building