When we were thinking of an innovative business model for professional portrait photography, our original goal was to see if there was a way to improve the gig economy for professional freelance photographers while providing more accessible pricing options for clients. 

Economics: Solving for Supply and Demand

Typically, when photographers are still establishing their brand, they can struggle to find sufficient client volume which translates into charging prices that can cover all their time and costs. You want to charge what you’re worth, of course, but you also HAVE to charge that much to stay in business.

This then results in higher pricing, which disincentivizes many clients from even considering hiring a professional. We’ve sent a poll to clients who are on the fence for hiring a professional photographer, and they shared the primary thoughts behind their hesitation which included:

• What if I hate the photos?

• That’s a lot of money

• I just don’t know if I can justify it in this economy!

We asked ourselves, if we could create more client volume, how flexible could we make the pricing where all of a sudden more people would seriously consider hiring a professional photographer? Can we generate more demand and pass along the benefit of greater volume in the form of more accessible pricing?

Inefficiencies: Solving for gig-to-gig challenges

For most artists, they live a gig-to-gig life. You may have one gig a week, two in totally different places, or sometimes none at all. By the time you factor in travel time and cost, there’s a lot of waste to do just that one gig.

This reality led to our next set of ideas: what if we could improve the traditional “inefficient” gig structure? What if instead of the photographer wasting all that time traveling between gigs - what if we could get clients to come to them instead?

• Goal #1: Improve logistics for the photographer: We tried this idea first in New York City in June 2018 - if we have a photographer waiting at one location, will clients book and provide some back-to-back sessions for one photographer, resulting in less wasted time and cost for travel and more clients.

• Goal #2: Create a hard-to-resist offer for clients: Typical photographers charge a “sitting fee” and then oftentimes the cost of photos / limited photos provided on top of the sitting fee. This is cost-prohibitive for many potential clients. In order to attract more clients, we decided to try offering a photo session that was free to book upfront and clients would have the freedom to only pay for the photos they want.

Accountability: Solving for quality

We opened up our schedule with our business model that aimed to a) consolidate client demand at one location while b) offering photoshoots that were free to book with a pay-by-the-pic structure, and it filled quickly with clients!

 Quick detour: operational history learnings

At first, we let anyone book a session and cancel it with no penalty to see what would happen. This resulted in 50-60% of clients canceling or no-showing their sessions which was terrible for the photographers who had forfeited other gigs to reserve their time for these sessions.

This led to us quickly instituting a credit-card “pre-authorization” system which takes a credit card payment but ONLY to check for a $75 balance to cover the potential fee if people cancel late (i.e. the day of the session) or fail to show up at their session. The fee is charged and then immediately released and is a necessary step for a booking to go through. This change alone resulted in the late cancel and no-show rate declining to 35%, a significant improvement from the 50-60% rate prior to our changes.

Now that we saw that our basic business model worked, it was time to figure out how to build out robust operational protections for our photographers’ time which include payments for late clients, cancelled sessions, etc. Read more about our policies here.

Interdependence: Creating a win-win-win!

We’ve structured our business model such that if our photographers don’t make money, we don’t make money. Follow along with us as we break down all the interdependencies we’ve created:

• When photographers win

  • When Shoott is able to effectively target and source the “right” clients for them – those that have the intent to purchase multiple photos. This means Shoott must constantly be on their A-game for their marketing and pricing strategy. We need to be smart about our pricing to maximize take-home for photographers without becoming cost-prohibitive for clients. We also ask for and pass along constructive feedback from clients so photographers can continue to work on their craft.

  • When they are able to fill their supplemental time with easy and convenient gigs where they simply have to show up with the camera and lens and photograph. We’ve tried to build as seamless of a platform as possible for them to take more gigs and earn more if they so choose!

  • To date, average gallery sales have improved by 70% since our start in 2018! We also standardized tip collection for photographers in the purchase process so photographers earn $23 in tips on average per session which they get to keep 100% of after credit card processing fees.

  • The average take-home for a photographer is roughly $140-150 per photography hour which is a good amount higher than our starting minimum guarantee base of $100 per photography hour.

• When clients win

  • When photographers provide a great experience and product for the clients; this means photographers must be on their A game for their sessions because the pay-by-the-pic model incentivizes them to provide a great Shoott experience.

  • When Shoott hires the right photographers – those that are dedicated, reliable, personable, and technically proficient to provide the level of quality that clients expect. This means that Shoott must be on their A game for hiring and photographer management.

  • We’ve maintained an average 4.9 star client rating across Google, Meta, and TripAdvisor so we’re doing something right!

• When Shoott wins

  • When photographers are happy – they’re typically happy when they’re making money and the reality is: if they don’t make money, Shoott doesn’t make money; there is no scenario where Shoott is making money off the hard work of the photographers without them seeing benefit.

  • When clients are happy – there’s nothing like positive word-of-mouth to continue to drive our client base

  • When our team meets our goals – our biggest being: can we prove we’re a sustainable business? We’re proud to share that Shoott just achieved breakeven with slight profitability in 2023 of $45K.

Maintaining our unique business model has been a true juggling act of sorts but so far, our photographers have mostly given positive feedback that taking on extra gigs via Shoott has indeed paid off for them! Check out our next blog post where we go into more detail about how exactly we pay our photographers!