the picmix experiment
don’t underestimate the power of boredom

What is the minimum
viable product you can
implement in a few hours
with the resources you
already have?

Who’s the user?
Teenagers are content hungry

What content?
Pictures and videos

How?
Minimal UI
Single button
Per device navigation
content (just hit Next)
adaptation
3 simple principles

How we did it?
Use the Cloud, Luke
(and open source too)

Results?
4K PVs/day
SEO
~90K pageviews in ~90 days

Cost?
Free (no money was spent)
First prototype completed in
an afternoon by 3 people
~100 lines of PHP code
running on a spare machine

Talk less
Do more:
now you know that you can do a lot of
cool things with almost no money

Nerdish stuff ahead
(details on how it works)

How it works: Search
1: Pictures of U2?
4: picmix.net/u2-pictures
3: <r>URL</r>
2: <s>U2</s>
Crawl

How it works: Content
1: I’m an N98, I want U2.jpg
5:
4:
2:
3: Adapt U2.jpg
for N98

How it works: SEO
1: Pictures of U2?
6: More searches
2: picmix.net/u2-pictures
Generate Top
Keywords from
search logs
3: sitemap.xml
4: mobile pictures of U2?
5: picmix.net/u2-pictures

How it works: I18N
1: it.picmix.net
3: “Cerca”
Interface is automatically
translated in 20+ languages
2: Translate
(even Chinese and Arabic).
“Search” to
Italian
Quality is not perfect but
Google Translate
good enough.

http://picmix.net
Actual picture of Marco and
Rafael at work,
before we hacked up picmix:
don’t underestimate the
power of boredom
Marco Borromeo: dev + systems + spare server
Federico Feroldi: concept + dev
Rafael Sanches: dev + seo + spare domain