Photrade is Hanging in There
I’m a little late on this, but since I wrote about Photrade a few weeks ago, I thought I would follow up.
Back on October 23, Photrade experienced some “growing pains” at which time they had a database go down on them. They were able to get the site back up and running relatively quickly, but end users continued to experience issues and a few chimed in with comments on the Photrade blog. From what I can tell, from October 23 through November 14, there was no word from Photrade, not response to the comments on their blog, nothing.
On November 11, Tim’s Digital Darkroom posted a similar post as I did, stating where Photrade has gone wrong lately. Strike One - site outages; Strike Two - lack of customer service.
On November 13, Tim’s Digital Darkroom had a follow up post stating that Andrew Paradies, the CEO of Photrade, contacted him directly regarding his concerns, but lacked any details as to what issues Photrade was experiencing. Tim states:
I would like to publicly thank him for sharing that information with me, he by no means had to. I think it shows, despite what it may look from those of us on the outside looking in, that he is still very much committed to making the site a success.
Finally, on November 14, Andrew Paradies posted to the Photrade blog stating they are being affected by the latest economic issues and will need to downsize.
I wanted to personally let you know that Photrade has recently had to go through the same kind of downsizing. We decided internally that it makes more sense to make cuts now so we can maintain the overall service going forward. As you may or may not know, we are a venture-backed company and fund raising timeframes have lengthened.
Thus with our reduced staff, we have been overwhelmed trying to keep up the former level of customer service as well as to continue to roll out new releases for the site. We will continue to run the service and do our best to get back to your questions in a timely manner.
I think Photrade has an interesting business model and has potential to be a useful product. Personally, I got off on the wrong foot with them and will sit on the sidelines to see if they can pull through these rough times, but I do wish Photrade the best of luck and sincerely hope they can pull through.
Till next time…
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Hey thanks for linking my articles 
I think it’s unfortunate. After they got funding originally they hit the ground running (more or less) and a ton of improvements came about.
Now who knows.
I heard that Andy’s announcement was pretty much “lip service”, though I sure hope that in the end the site will be able to remain!!
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I wish them well, but they are such a newcomer that if they don’t have a lot of cash in the bank I really doubt they’ll have enough customers to fall back on. They have to build a base and that doesn’t happen at a time like this without either top technology (they just sliced up that department) or top marketing/PR. Both of those take a lot of money.