FastEditor's Journey in Europe's Tech Scene, with Rick Molenaar

Discover the secrets of Europe's tech innovation with Rick Molenaar, the commercial director of FastEditor, as he takes us on an engaging journey through the company's transformation from a humble software provider in the Netherlands to a global powerhouse in photo editing. We'll explore how the vibrant European tech scene, with its unique challenges and opportunities, fosters creativity and international expansion. Rick Molenaar shares insights into how Fast Editor navigates language and cultural barriers, leveraging technology to enhance their market reach.

Imagine a world where AI revolutionizes the photo product industry, making creating photo books and custom drinkware seamless and enjoyable. We dive into how FastEditor is at the forefront of this transformation, using AI to upscale low-resolution images and reduce customer drop-off rates, ultimately boosting satisfaction and profitability. This episode highlights the delicate balance of integrating cutting-edge technology and maintaining a healthy bottom line, offering a fresh perspective on the evolving photo-imaging market.

As print and personalization industries merge, the importance of strategic partnerships becomes clear. Hear how FastEditor, in collaboration with industry giants like HelloPrint and Agfa Photo, enhances its offerings and expands its reach. By combining strengths—FastEditor's technological prowess and HelloPrint's customer network—these alliances demonstrate the power of collaboration in reshaping the industry. You'll learn how such partnerships improve customer experience and market positioning, with FastEditor continuously pushing the boundaries to deliver exceptional solutions.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Innovations in European Photo Editing
• 7:53 Advancements in AI and Photo Products
• 15:17 Expanding Beyond Photo Editing
• 21:53 Enhancing Customer Experience With FastEditor

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Rick M, who is the commercial director of FastE ditor and some other things we'll talk about later, and Rick's coming to us from the Netherlands. Hey, Rick, how are you today?

Rick Molenaar: 0:35

hey, Gary, thanks for having me and and very happy to be here. Uh, I'm doing very well. It's the end of the afternoon. In the Netherlands, it's raining, of course, because October started, but I couldn't be any better that day.

Gary Pageau: 0:48

Awesome, Awesome. Tell us a little bit about Fast Editor and how you got involved with the company. It's been around for a while actually, but it's reached kind of like a general awareness just in the last couple of years.

Rick Molenaar: 1:00

Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true.

Rick Molenaar: 1:01

So with Fast Editor we rebranded a couple of times in the last 10 years, so that made it switch from one brand name to another, but basically already in the space since 2015, more or less, where basically we started as the software company for one of the biggest retailers in the Netherlands that was in the photo space and basically needed to be developed online journeys and editing software for the customers to order as easy as possible online, not only in desktop but also on mobile devices, which we're picking off, of course, a lot at that time.

Rick Molenaar: 1:31

We've been able to do that with them for four or five years. We're very lucky to get their market insights and their views on how photos should be done in the best possible user way, but also all the traffic to get from them to optimize and learn and get all the data in. Basically, during COVID the contracts ended. The first contracts got extended for a long period of time, but the exclusivity got removed of the contract, which basically allowed us to open up to all kinds of companies in the world With the software that we already had built and tested over a volume of 25 million euros on a yearly basis, and that was basically the birth of FastE ditor, where we put the software more like in a new brands.

Gary Pageau: 2:15

We're looking for new parts of the world, integrated with some cool brands in the meantime and basically started to move and develop from from that moment on you're kind of a european-based company and that moment on You're kind of a European-based company and that's one of the things kind of interesting I've noticed just in that region of the world there's all these crazy little companies that have popped up in the last few years. What is it in the water over there where you're getting these brands popping up and these mobile sites popping up, you know, in the UK and the Netherlands and Germany and Spain, who are just?

Rick Molenaar: 2:48

it seems like it's a very active market which we're really not seeing over here in North America yeah, it's very interesting indeed and and and I think it's due because of the country itself are smaller, of course. So your home market is always relatively small. So you need to be innovative and looking into new things and making things either better or more efficient or faster, cheaper, basically to have a place in that small market. And then, when you figured your product market fits and your growth engine in a local market, it's relatively easy to scale from there. So I think that perspective there's a local playground where the level is high because it's highly competitive in all the European home markets.

Rick Molenaar: 3:28

So you need to play very well there, and then, when you win your own markets, it's relatively easy to scale further.

Gary Pageau: 3:35

From that perspective, but you also have different languages and some culture, things, right. I mean, you've got some customization and personalization specifics you want to do if you want to move out of your home country, which you don't have over in North America. If I started a photo app in Michigan, where I live, I can have an Ohio version without any changes. But you guys can't really do that, right.

Rick Molenaar: 3:59

Yeah, I think what's changing in the last couple of years is that it becomes easier and easier to solve those things. Technology is on our side. I think what's changing in the last couple of years is that it becomes easier and easier to solve those things. Technology is on our side. It's so much easier to translate and localize compared to 10 or 15 years back.

Rick Molenaar: 4:12

And I think the benefit is, if you are really ambitious in Europe, you need to look over the border. So already from the beginning you have somewhere in the back of your mind that you say, like okay, first I have to solve some things in my home markets, in this very competitive market, but there's going to be a moment in the back of my mind already that I want to scale to other countries. If you're like in a well, relatively economic big state in the US, you can build 50 million, 100 million companies only in that state, you might keep yourself a little bit longer in the state maybe than in Europe, where it's much smaller, and therefore in the back of your mind it might already be the expansion plans from the beginning, Not for execution, but at least like to think about and already make some decisions from the beginning. That there's at least like an open path to go there over time.

Gary Pageau: 5:02

Sure, let's talk specifically about FastEditor for a while, because, specifically, you seem to be positioning yourself almost as a technology platform or as a provider of technology to the marketplace. What do you think your main offering is in that regard?

Rick Molenaar: 5:22

Yeah, very good question. Our view on the market is that the market is changing so rapidly at the moment at a lot of different dimensions, whether that's how to do marketing and do your customer service, or how to produce print and personalization products, and also in the software space. Our view is that companies in the next 10 years will be built more and more as different components of those things next together, so where usually potentially as a company, you want to control everything in-house, from the software side to the production side and everything how it handles the customer contact. It becomes almost impossible to keep that on a high level in all those dimensions because technology and AI is changing up things so fast. Right, we positioned ourselves in 2021 as the middleware basically on on the editing and software sites.

Rick Molenaar: 6:12

Okay, if we fully invest in this and we make sure that we're up there with the latest technology trends and latest ai tools and implementations, that we can create the best piece of software there in the middle and we can do those. That we can create the best piece of software there in the middle and we can do those investments because we can be connected to hundreds of parties over the world that want to work with the best type of software and we can do those investments. Individual companies probably cannot, because they only have their own business that they can work for and in that combination try to create value in the market with way more connectivity than historically always happens.

Gary Pageau: 6:47

So when you mean middleware, what exactly do you mean? I mean because if I were to go to a customer of Fast Editor and they're using your I'm looking at your UI, right. So what do you mean by middleware?

Rick Molenaar: 7:02

Yeah, so basically how it works from most of our partners is that they have their website with their homepage, with their product pages, they have their checkouts and they want to keep the customer data and the customer account, but also the payment relationship on their side. That's their foundation as a business, also in those type of cases. Right, there's much technology available basically that allows for good product pages and your optimized checkout and those kind of things. Whether you're running a WooCommerce platform or Shopify or something that you built yourself, things are very well there. One unique part of the personalization industry uh, customer Journey and that's a very important part for the end customer and can make the difference between converting into an order or not is how do I get my design and print ready file ready? And it's very specific on the product level.

Rick Molenaar: 7:53

If you look in the photo space, photo books are completely different than photo prints or wall arts or photo books in a certain way, and it's almost impossible to keep up with all those changes and trends and new tooling and new functionalities that are happening there.

Gary Pageau: 8:10

Right, new formats, new book styles, and there's all kinds of things happening there. Plus, just in the drinkware category, that has exploded.

Rick Molenaar: 8:22

Yeah, for sure. And there are many, many niches and subcategories that are growing so so quickly In the same time, not only software and technology side, but also production side. There's so many things happening that it's way easier to produce smaller MOQs, do more print on demand and have like a whole innovation spectrum happening on that side. Combining that with strong technology and software changes on the front ends, yeah, that's going to change the market completely and it's already happening. It's going to be happening even more in the upcoming years.

Gary Pageau: 8:52

When you talk about the pace of things changing right. We've all talked about AI over the last couple of years. There's still a lot of debate, I think, in the marketplace of how beneficial AI is really being in the sense, is it increasing orders, is it just increasing efficiency? Is it increasing customer happiness? I think that's still a question to be answered. To be honest, I know everyone's talking about it you got to have it but I'm wondering are you seeing in your product and from your customers, is there being AI driven increases in book completion or something that is actually positive from your customers? Is there being AI-driven increases in book completion or something that is actually positive?

Rick Molenaar: 9:31

Yeah. So I'm going to answer this question from like a software perspective, because we are a software company. Our view on AI and especially where we are currently standing in 2024, is that there are so many highly valuable tools that can enrich the customer journey, but they need work and they need vision on how to integrate that in a total product and customer experience. So I think in our case we make use of depends a little bit how you count, but you could say 30 different AI technologies. I think 22 of them are just running in the backgrounds.

Rick Molenaar: 10:05

So a customer uploads a photo it's actually too small for the big photo on campus that they want to order. We upscale it in the backend without no customer noticing. Basically, that way, we make it possible to order that small photo on a 60 times 90 centimeters canvas. That's highly valuable for the customer, which they won't notice. Our integrator software, of course, highly value that because they get an order that they normally wouldn't get. And I think in many cases it's that Understanding the technology, understanding the added value and in which situations can bring value to the journey and then integrating in a way that also makes sense for the customer. And in many, many cases that is no mentioning to the customer, and just technology, do the thing.

Gary Pageau: 10:52

Well, I mean, I guess that's kind of my point is, you know, in the old days I upload the low res picture and I want to make a giant print out of it, I get an error message to say sorry, try again, find a new picture, so I may lose that sale.

Gary Pageau: 11:07

Right, so you can kind of see where upsizing, upscaling, would be a value there. Um, so I think a lot of that back end stuff is great. It's just. I think it's just hard to quantify from an investment standpoint, right, how much that increases, because the difference that you have with AI versus some other technologies is right. When you're pinging a server to hit the AI intelligence, there's a cost to that, right, and that's unusual compared to having a cropping or other kind of tool in your interface. Right, if you do a ai upscale, there's a charge for you for that. So you really hope that gosh, you know I'm gonna make more money from this doing this and and I think the jury's still out on that- yeah, completely true, and I think there's smart ways to to think about it.

Rick Molenaar: 11:54

So what we do, we already have like a pre-generation of the upscaled file, basically in the editor itself, so that the customer already can see it in a certain way, and the upscaling only happens at the moment that the customer really orders and basically we get the trigger from a partner and we're generating the print-ready file. So that's when the real costs are basically being made. Sure, also about smart choices that for a canvas of 60, 90 centimeters and the average order value of that product, it makes sense to do the upscaling for 25 cents, for example. But if you're going to create a photo book with 150 images and 120 needs to be upscaled, yeah, probably you're going to lose all your margin if you don't charge anything to your customer for that.

Gary Pageau: 12:38

Exactly, yeah. So I mean I think we're at an interesting point in that, because it is such a buzzword, right? I mean, you can't open up anybody's business page these days and having, you know, ai, gen, ai, all these things and they're wonderful tools, right, but you know, the challenge is the business case, right, and that's some of the pushback I'm seeing over here is, you know, yeah, we love the AI stuff, but is it increasing orders? Is it increasing satisfaction, right? I mean, what I'm really interested to see is as people start putting more AI into the photo book tools, right, if that helps with the abandonment rate, right, because over here, the abandonment rate is still probably north of 60, 65%, where people start a book and then bail on it, and I think AI can help with that. You know, if we can drop that down to, you know, say, 40%, don't even get it down to zero, just go down to 40% We've almost doubled the mark, right?

Rick Molenaar: 13:33

So yeah, and I think photo books are a very interesting example where ai can also play like a vital part in increasing those conversion rates also that's my point, also make it visible to to the customer.

Rick Molenaar: 13:46

So we have some technology built where the customer gives some input on how he wants the ai to generate the book. What kind of style do you want more pages, uh, with less photos per page. Or do you want more pages, uh, with less photos per page. Or do you want less pages and then more photos combined on the page? You give all that input so that the user also really feels like I have control over how the ai is generating my book, sure. And then in this case we have like a loader kind of little bit that tells you like, hey, the ai is creating your, your best photo book and taking into account all your unique desires that you have there, and then basically present them a book that they can order directly. So in some cases it's just running in the back end, not making it visible at all, and in some cases it's enriching the user experience to make it very beautiful and telling them what it actually does at that moment.

Gary Pageau: 14:31

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about some of the niches and markets that we've been talking about that you've just kind of opened up, and you've just recently added a logo, editor of all things, which I think goes to the idea of this intersection between personalized photo and personalized products. Right, there's sort of an intersection there. What was the impetus behind that? Well, first of all, tell us what it is and, second, why did you choose to do that?

Rick Molenaar: 15:00

yeah, yeah. So basically we made the decision there to to step into logo products next to, uh, photo products because two reasons one completely external in the market happening actually, and the other one more on our side and how we were positioned to relatively easily tap into this opportunity. So in the market, we saw traditionally that the difference print categories or personalization categories were quite moving independently from from each other. But because of a lot of production investments, technology improvements and and making it easier to produce in lower MLQs and way more print-on-demand, you see those categories and parts of the industry moving closer and closer to each other. So that made for us a lot of sense to say like, okay, we don't want to be the photo editor anymore. Over time we want to move into all the different categories because that's why we see the market happening anyway and now we might have some customers that are only in photo. We believe that much more and more companies in the next 10 years will not be in a single category but will move over categories, basically because it's much simpler to to have those kind of things.

Rick Molenaar: 16:06

The other thing why we moved in in logos because our foundation from photo was like a perfect setup to get us there. Uh, so the UI UX that we needed to test for photo needed to be state of the art, basically, and the home moms needed to be able to order a photo book lying on the couch from the mobile devices. So we needed to do a lot of investments there. That are basically requirements and needs that are also coming from promotional products and merchandise logo products. So that gave a good foundation and on top of that we felt, with some testing, that also yeah, with some automation, tooling and AI algorithms, we were pretty close to next to photo, also bringing value to logo products, which, in essence, a little bit difference. Generating the print ready file is much difficult for logo products than photos.

Gary Pageau: 16:55

Because in general, you're not always working with a flat surface. I mean, that's one of the major problems.

Rick Molenaar: 17:00

Yeah, yeah, and I have to say like one of the subcategories of photo where we're pretty strong in is photo GIFs, so it could be keychains or puzzles or those kind of things.

Gary Pageau: 17:11

Mugs, their 3D visualization of the products is also very, very important, especially in the consumer markets, sure, so that's something that we can tap into relatively easy from the photo sites and now make it available for logo and do it from that site. We were talking earlier, before I started recording, about this congregation, if you will that technology has created this intersection between the personalized photo products and printing, and it seems like there's so much crossover between that crossover between that. Do you think, though, that if you're a, let's say, for example, you're a traditional photo book site, you know everyone's looking for growth no, everyone's, especially nowadays we're looking for growth. I get concerned that a lot of some of those folks make it distracted by adding all this other stuff, and you get kind of distracted and it becomes a mess for the consumer. Is there anything you're doing from a software standpoint to help maybe, single focus companies add products without cluttering the darn thing?

Rick Molenaar: 18:33

I think the question for every party in the market is going to be what kind of company am I and where am I good at? And is it good at customer contacts? Am I good at software? Am I good at production or any other thing? And probably it's going to be harder and harder to be good or even at like an okay level for all three of more of those dimensions.

Rick Molenaar: 18:53

Probably, if you try to keep up with that, some companies will still survive and thrive with that, but I think you're increasing your probabilities of losing when you try to keep up with all the different parts. So every company should ask themselves the question what the unique points are that they can bring to the table. And probably it's only one of the three either the customer contact and service or the software part, or it's the production part, and it would probably be smart to look to outsourcing and looking to connect to partners for the other tools that you're not the very best at, potentially in the world or your market area, to partner up with and create a stronger proposition together because you do the things that you're good at yourself. Partner up with the best possible partners on the things that you cannot even have.

Gary Pageau: 19:38

Now let's talk about partnerships for a second, because you have strong partners with a company called HelloPrint, who I strongly suggest people go back and listen to my interview with Hans Scheffer, the CEO of HelloPrint, from I don't know when that ran, but it was very interesting from their standpoint as a European sort of another sort of middleware player, right, and together you have a joint project. You've created a consumer brand. If you will, can you talk a little bit about how that works together, because it kind of touches on exactly the point you were just making.

Rick Molenaar: 20:13

Yeah, I think this is an exact, great example, basically to give more value to the story that I was just doing. So, basically, how we see the partnership between Fast Editor and HelloPrint and producing partners that are connected to HelloPrint as an example of the story that we just had. So, with FastEditor, we believe that because our vision and our experience and where we currently stand, that we can be the very best party in software for editing products and getting consumers to start with some content and get to their print-ready files, we don't see any reason to believe why we could be the best in producing or why we could be the very best in customer contact. Also because completely different competencies are needed on that part.

Rick Molenaar: 20:56

Blockprint on the other side is started and always optimized on the best customer contacts.

Rick Molenaar: 21:02

They have, like an excellent customer service office in valencia that's serving all their customers in uh in europe and I've always been optimizing in creating customer demands, being able to convert that via the website and creating very strong value from that part, and also learned already quick in the journey that they were not going to be the very best on the production parts and they didn't have the interest and didn't want to do the the investments in owning a production hall and like those kind of things.

Rick Molenaar: 21:27

So they connected over 350 European suppliers right with technology, basically defining which supplier can order which individual product for which customer. So basically in this case it's completely split up between 350 producing partners that only produce when they are the very best use case for producing that order. It could be price or sustainability reasons, or quality reasons or logistical reasons or something like that. Hello Print, focusing on everything customer facing and which was added to being in the middle basically to process the customer contents, create that print ready files in a very user friendly way and basically make the triangle complete in that way.

Gary Pageau: 22:07

And, like Agfa Photo is an example of that right. That is one that you've announced recently, that you've partnered with, so they're the brand right, so their job is to make customers aware that this thing exists.

Rick Molenaar: 22:20

Yeah, exactly. So that's an example where we took that triangle and basically said to Agfa Photo you have a great brand, you have a big customer database. We can basically give you all these competences and you can tap in directly into the software side, the customer contact side and the production sides and go basically from zero to one in creating an excellent proposition to your customers Extended product range, all locally produced, the best software being connected, good customer contact and customer service connected. Basically, you're ready to go and sell and tell your customer base about it and we can promise you that the orders will come in because the proposition is just good and makes sense and it's a very strong fit with your brands.

Gary Pageau: 23:01

So how long has that been going on and what's been the reception in the marketplace to that?

Rick Molenaar: 23:06

For Aqua Photo. You mean yeah. So basically we started creating the website at the beginning of the second quarter this year, but a lot was already in place for head upgrades and other partnerships. So it was a two to three month period basically to get from.

Gary Pageau: 23:21

Yeah, I mean you're not building it from the ground up, obviously.

Rick Molenaar: 23:24

But Exactly so in two to three months, we could build it from from well, not being there, but like starting to use the building blocks that were already available to a fully tested proposition at the end of q2 that we could launch to the european markets. And and from that moment it's it's growing every week and every month. Uh, we know, and historically know that, that these kind of models need to take time and if you grow 10% every month.

Rick Molenaar: 23:48

It doesn't seem a lot like the beginning, but you're creating the snowball that's getting bigger and bigger over time, and that's the phase that we're currently in. Most important indicators are very happy customers. That gives a lot of good feedback. It's that we keep up with that growth rate on a monthly basis and that we move from there, because it's's another proposition that we started for half a year or a year, which is something that we try to put in the european market for sure years at least. So we have the time, but also the pressure, to keep getting better every month and improving that perspective. So that's a combination of the two, actually.

Gary Pageau: 24:20

So when you come up with enhancements to your platform, which I imagine are coming out all the time right because you're constantly developing actually. So when you come up with enhancements to your platform which I imagine are coming out all the time right because you're constantly developing this so when those are enhanced, all the customers get it right there are a few bases for a rollout.

Rick Molenaar: 24:35

Normally depends on how risky the rollout is. Uh. So we have our own testing label where there's like some traffic on that that we use for very risky ones. And and then we have some of our partners that like to get the new updates the earliest and then we test them on their traffic, which could be a winner or a loser, and they know that, but they try to be at the forefront of innovation happy to have a loser every now and then to a lot of winners, and then, when the tests are there, basically we can push to all the partners that are using a software.

Gary Pageau: 25:04

so, uh, if everything that's out out of testing base is always released to every partner so they're always up to date with the latest up-to-date version so I guess the reason why I said question is because all your, your customers, who are like the marketing and the brands they're benefiting from, the technology investments are, whereas if they were doing it on their own and then and they had their own development team, there'd be much more difficult to roll out enhancements all the time. But since you're doing it for the benefit of basically a marketplace of brands, it's much more efficient that way.

Rick Molenaar: 25:38

I think that's a big benefit of doing it this way. So for every new partner that we sign, basically the next step is directly that we add another developer to the team, not for specific integration that needs to be done for that new brand, because that's easy to do in two to four weeks but just to add, like more to the core engine and the core functionality so that every euro that comes in a new revenue for the business can be invested in making the software better and better. And then we roll up with all the partners. So really our partners also benefit from us getting new partners. In many cases they're not always likely to recommend ourselves to in the same home markets, but in many cases they recommend them to their peers in other markets. That doesn't hurt them because they know the more partners we sign, the bigger the development team and the better the rollouts. So many cases our happy customers are very happy and motivated to also bring new business to us.

Gary Pageau: 26:32

Awesome. Well, if people were interested in bringing business to you, where would people go to get more information about Fast Editor and you and all the fine people there?

Rick Molenaar: 26:42

Our website is www. fasteditor. com. All the information is basically there and people can request a product demo on how the software works, but also see it already like online, and everyone can always contact me on LinkedIn, happy to chat and set up a call to explain more about what we do or also just about the vision that we have on the market and where we see it evolving.

Gary Pageau: 27:03

Well, great, rick, great to see you again. Thanks so much and hopefully we'll see you soon somewhere in person.

Rick Molenaar: 27:09

Yeah, that would be so great, gary, and looking forward to that for sure. Thanks for having me. It was a real pleasure. Always good to see you and always nice to talk to you.

Erin Manning: 27:20

And hopefully see you very soon. Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.