Y Combinator Startup Picplum Is Launching This Afternoon With A Brilliantly Simple Concept

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Paul Stamatiou Picplum

Co-Founders Akshay Dodeja and Paul Stamatiou. 

When you need to send your family pictures, what do you do?

You can send them as email attachments, but how will your parents put them on the fridge? You can create copies at CVS, but then you have to ship them and the quality might not be great.

When you think about it, there's really no good way to send high quality prints without lugging yourself to the store and doing it yourself.

Picplum is a Y Combinator photo sharing startup that is launching this afternoon, and it is filling that void.

Users can upload their best photos to the site or send email attachments to Picplum via their phones or computers. Picplum will then print high quality photos, put them in pretty packaging, and deliver them to any address in the world. Prints can be sent to as many people as you like for $0.50/print per recipient and $1.50/recipient for shipping.

Picplum also has a subscription model. For $7 per month, send a batch of photos to however many people you like. You can set up mailing lists on Picplum, so if your family is dying to see pictures of your baby, you can mail them hard copies every month.

We like the idea of easily mailing high-quality, hard copies of photos. But there are a few things the new startup needs to work on.

We're not convinced people will like the $7 subscription model. Most people don't send (or want to receive) monthly batches of hard photos.   In fact, printing hard copies of photos has become somewhat rare now that there are online photo albums and Facebook.

Also, Picplum only prints 4x6 photos. If your want another size, you're out of luck.

What is most interesting about Picplum is its inherent ability to curate photos. On Facebook and other photo sharing sites, people upload all of the items on their cameras. Eventually, they'll need a way to separate the good pictures from the bad.

"While watching a few people use the older version of this product and [upload photos], Picplum ended up being their set of best photos. We find that could be an amazing opportunity. " cofounder Paul Stamatiou tells us.

We think he's right. Just like content curation has become important for sifting through news on the web, photo curation could be an important way for people to organize their favorite memories.

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Alyson is the Editor-in-Chief and CCO at Fortune.  She was previously a co Editor-in-Chief overseeing Business Insider's tech and business coverage.She joined Business Insider in July 2008 as the company's sixth employee. She started as a sales planner before joining the editorial team in 2010, where she became a startup reporter and was first to cover some of today's largest tech companies, including Pinterest, Tinder, Instagram, Uber and Snap. Alyson rose to become a senior correspondent, then Executive Editor.She was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider in 2016, at which point she became the youngest and only woman to run a global business publication. Under her leadership, the business division has grown to hundreds of  millions of monthly readers.Alyson was a host of  Insider's conferences and launched a podcast, "Success! How I Did It," where she interviewed influencers ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Steve Ballmer about their career paths (subscribe on iTunes here).She has appeared on ABC, Good Morning America, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and CBC, and she has interviewed media personalities such as Megyn Kelly, technology leaders like Fred Wilson, political leaders like John Brennan, and sports star LeBron James. She is a judge for the prestigious Gerald Loeb Awards in business journalism, and has been named one of Min's Rising Stars in Media, as well as Folio's 2017 Top Women in Media.She graduated from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she majored in psychology and advertising.You can read some of her investigative articles here:— Leaked videos reveal the true founding story of Snapchat— The founder who dumped Jared Kushner: Inside the phone call that left the White House star in a fit of rage— The downfall of billion-dollar startup, Fab— How a startup that raised the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history blew itself up before it even launched— The dark side of Facebook, where people lie, cheat, and make millions— A profile of Uber's controversial CEO, Travis Kalanick— The mystery of Jody Sherman, a founder who was driven to suicide and left behind a shocking business disasterDisclosure: Alyson owns bitcoin and Snap. She is also an investor in The Spun, a sports-media startup founded by her husband.