[LRUG] [JOBS] Junior/Mid-Level Ruby Dev With A Thing For Front-End/Design (& the Three Great Nonsenses of the image licensing industry)

[Benji Lanyado]

ElRuggers!


For those of you I know - ahoy! And those of you I don’t, also ahoy! I’m
the founder of Picfair <https://www.picfair.com/> - we’re changing the way
global image licensing works.


Quick primer: image licensing is a multi-billion dollar duopoly controlled
by Shutterstock & Getty, who have become masters in enforcing the
industry’s Three Great Nonsenses, namely:


Nonsense 1: Screw the Photographers

Brace yourself. Every time an image buyer licenses from Getty or
Shutterstock, the vast vast majority of the money goes to Getty and
Shutterstock, not the photographer whose image is being licensed. Getty
take 85%, Shutterstock around 75%; the leftovers to the photographer. Yuck
yucky yuck.


Nonsense 2: Make Licensing Stupidly Complicated

Getty has 324,000 ways to license an image. A cynic might say that this has
been deliberately complexified to ensure the middlemen simply HAVE to be in
the middle charging bucketloads to connect buyers and sellers. But I
wouldn’t say that, nope not me your honour.


Nonsense 3: Exclude the amateurs!

We are living through the greatest proliferation of digital images in
history. This isn’t just a quantity thing - it’s quality too.
Exponentially-improving cameraphones, affordable DSLRs, hitherto
professional-standard editing software baked into camera apps … there are
billions of fit-for-market images being produced by “amateurs” every year.
And yet the industry wants nothing to do with them. Professionals with
mega-expensive kit only please thank you very much.


Picfair is reversing each of the Three Great Nonsenses: An open market
connecting any photographer with any buyer (they choose their own prices,
we add 20% on top), with 3 super-simple & super-broad licenses, and open
access to any photographer (our tech filters the what from the chaff).


Where are we at?

We’re at a really exciting stage having spent the last three years building
a formidable library of 4.5 million images uploaded by 25,000 photographers
across the globe (they’re stunning - go have a looksee
<https://www.picfair.com/blog/post/best-of-2016>). Armed with a fresh
investment round, we’re now turning our attention to revenue generation,
with a multi-pronged assault on publishers, agencies, and corporates. Every
type of modern business licenses images, and we want all of them. We’ve
already got some of the biggest publishers in the country nibbling - The
Guardian, Lonely Planet, Random House, OUP all use Picfair images. And we
don’t even have a proper sales & marketing team yet (they’re coming).


Finally .... The role!

We’ve got a small development team helmed by a stupendously-good CTO (and a
technical CEO, that’s me - I built Picfair myself
<https://hackernoon.com/-242f8b94afa1> and still code when I’m allowed to),
and we’re looking for a junior-to-mid-level Rubyist to join us. Ideally
we’d like someone who’s also passionate about design and front end, or, at
the least, highly front-end-curious.


Our stack: Ruby on Rails, JavaScript/jQuery, Elasticsearch, HTML/HAML,
Sass, a pinch of Backbone but let's not talk about that, Postgres, Redis,
Heroku. On the design side of things, we’d like you to know your way around
Sketch or Illustrator.


Some of the technical challenges we wrangle with:



   -

   How can we intelligently & algorithmically rank images uploaded from
   anywhere, both subjectively and objectively?
   -

   How can we weaponise our army of 25,000 photographers into
   buyer-acquiring advocates?
   -

   How can we produce beautiful buyer-facing content that engages while
   converting? How do we make a site that could stand alone as a gorgeous
   online publication while ensuring its raison d’etre remains commercial?


And some other stuff: we work from a very fun multi-startup workspace in
Shoreditch next to Spitalfields with lots of other creative companies,
offer a £1,000 academic bursary to all staff members, and do a team lunch
every week.


Money & Things

How we’re doing this: We’d want to meet you first, and if it feels like
it’ll work, after a small code test we’ll get you in for a week or so on a
£200-300 day rate depending on your experience. If that goes swimmingly,
we’ll look to either put you on an extended contract with a month-long
notice period, or a staff role. Our budget for the staff role is a maximum
of £50k, again depending on experience.


This is already a horrendously-long email, so I’ll leave it there. If this
sounds up your street, we’d love to meet you.

Benji Lanyado
Founder, Picfair.com
@benjilanyado <https://twitter.com/benjilanyado>
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