Dubble, a photo-sharing iOS app with a twist — the twist being that it turns standard photos into random double exposures by combining two users’ shots to make a new image out of the two — has made its first monetizing moves.
Version 1.5 of the app (which is still only available for iOS 7) adds an in-app purchase feature called ‘Dubble With?’ which — for $0.99 — allows users to specify who they want their photos to be remixed with.
This can be either the user’s favourite other Dubble users, or themselves if they only want to generate double exposure from their own shots.
Dubble added social hooks to its app back in March, including the ability to comment on and like others’ photos, to strengthen the community element of its natively entwined photo-sharing offering.
The new Dubble With feature retains the serendipitous element, which is core to the app’s film-camera double-exposure inspired concept, in that users paying for the new feature still won’t be able to specify which particular shots get combined.
That random surprise is Dubble’s special sauce so they’re clearly keen to hold onto it, even as they seek for ways to make the app pay.
Additional in-app purchases are planned, with a future focus on print — by offering users the ability to pay for a print of a particularly cherished dubble, for instance.
Back in March, co-founder Adam Scott told TechCrunch the startup was in the process of looking for external funding to accelerate development of an Android version of the app — having spent some £100,000 of its own money, raised from friends and family, to get the iOS app to market.
Turns out Dubble has been unable to close the £300,000 to £400,000 investment round it was seeking.
“We had a lot of drama, investors in, then out. VCs firms excited, then cautious. I lost 4 kilos and some hair,” says Scott, describing the fruitless funding hunt as “hell”. “So no round was closed.”
Instead, the plan now is to raise money via a crowdfunding route — as well as from in-app purchases. “We want to use the crowd to reach out to our own community and angels that have expressed interest to invest. We’re talking to equity crowd platforms now,” he added.
Dubble’s iOS 7 app launched back in October last year and has had some 150,000 downloads, with around 50,000 monthly actives now, according to Scott. Nearly two million dubbles have been generated by users across 187 countries to date.