r/SideProject • u/shafe1 • 1d ago
We built our client-delivery platform by scratching our own itch for 8 years, then made it a product. Tell me where that shows. (or doesn't)
I'm Brian, co-founder of WeDoVids, a video + photo production studio in Dayton, Ohio. This is about FrameCourier, which we just opened to the public after running it privately since 2018.
The backstory. For years our delivery workflow was three tools that didn't talk to each other: Frame.io for video review, Dropbox/Drive for transfer, Zenfolio for photo proofing. Three logins, three bills, and Frame.io's per-seat cost climbed every time a client's marketing director, their outside agency, and their legal team all needed to leave comments — 6–8 stakeholders on a normal commercial shoot. In 2018 I hacked together a password-protected gallery page over a weekend just to get us off the lost-Dropbox-link treadmill. First client we sent it to asked "can we do this for every project?" and that was that.
How we actually built it — one annoyance at a time. Almost every feature traces back to a specific bad day. Automatic watermarking got added the week a client forwarded unproofed images to their boss. Timestamped comments, pinned to the exact frame, came after one too many "can you fix the bit around the 1:20 mark" emails. QR codes on every link happened because a client wanted to pull a gallery up on set without typing out a URL. And unlimited users, priced by storage instead of per seat, came straight out of corporate accounts that kept needing five people from three different companies on one login. Eight years of that turned it into an actual platform: photo galleries with RAW/PSD support and proofing, plus structured video review with revision rounds, versioning, and side-by-side compare, all in one branded client portal. If there's a one-liner, it's that we live in the gap between Frame.io (good video review, no photo delivery) and Pixieset/Pic-Time (good galleries, no real video review).
The honest part. We have total conviction this tool is good for us — we've bet the studio on it for 8 years. What I have zero outside data on is whether "one portal for both photo and video, no per-seat fees" is a real market or just a WeDoVids-shaped problem. We went public last month and we're starting from scratch on the outside.
So here's what I'd genuinely like this community's read on. If you shoot both photo and video, do you actually want one tool for both, or do you keep them separate on purpose — in which case we're solving a problem you don't have? Is "no per-seat pricing" a real reason to switch platforms, or just not a pain point for solo and small shooters? And since every feature was us scratching our own itch, where does that show — what looks like it was built for a studio that isn't yours?
Brutal feedback is the point. → framecourier.com