The One Thing: Legacy File Sharing for Creatives Gets a Needed Upgrade in Storage and Smarts

If we weren’t thrilled with online file exchange and archiving of product images before the pandemic, surely the past two years fixed that.

Correction. It surely did not.

Images and video fuel commerce, never more so than during the explosive evolution of eCommerce since 2020. As all that new content ate up more data storage, creatives were imagining a better, faster way of finding precise images and transferring data-heavy art files.

Jessica Ko, co-founder and CEO of Playbook, is one of those commercial designers. She’s lived that frustrating reality, found it unacceptable, and innovated to fill a void and solve a problem.

Recalling her time with real estate startup Opendoor, Ko told PYMNTS she grew that team to 15 designers to meet an endless torrent of demand for visuals to feed the platform.

“At one point, the team was growing so fast, and the company was growing so fast, every day we were getting tons of requests from all over the company asking for a white version of a logo or this photo shoot, that photo shoot and where’s the photos from, like, August?

“We were digging through all these folders in Dropbox and Google Drive. It was out of control.”

Advice seeking and solution shopping wasn’t working, so Ko decided to do something.

“Everybody was still struggling with Dropbox and their folders and files and Google Drive,” she said. “That’s where the Playbook idea came up about.” She began working on it in 2018.

Fast-forward to April 2022 and the “visual cloud storage platform built for creatives” raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures — a big vote of confidence for a startup that’s managed to amass 50,000 users in less than a year on a subscription model.

See also: Adobe’s Digital Subscription Revenue up 29% to $864M in Q3

Designing a Design Platform

Digital demand is a good thing, but the photo of that sofa or the video illustrating that business process has to live somewhere — and people have to be able to find them for the endless reformatting of sales visuals.

It’s a lot of work, often landing at the feet of design professionals with no say over systems, yet all the responsibility when it comes to the collaboration, file-sharing and organization.

Ko envisioned Playbook as the platform she needed but didn’t have when designing, with deceptively simple drag-and-drop interfaces that instantly de-duplicate images, organize assets and make them easily retrievable, collaborative — and with plenty of cloud storage.

“Design founders are pretty rare. You don’t see them very often,” she said.

“I was one of the first people to also worked at Google Drive back in 2010 and worked on YouTube and Google Plus. I really understand the problem that designers are going through.”

Graphic design is one of the original gig economy jobs, going back to when it was just freelancing.

“I also feel firsthand how the industry’s changing right now, the way that the work process has changed quite a bit,” Ko said. “Everyone’s going remote. Everyone’s freelancing, especially in the design industry.”

Full-timers are having the same issues, however, as “design operations within corporations have become much more complicated. We have to support so many social media platforms. LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, you name it, everything visual comes in different sizes.”

“Very small teams have to support all of that — the collaboration piece of it and the sharing piece of it — from in-house all the way to freelance, and there’s a constant handoff of files that’s become so complex. The tools were just not catching up fast enough.”

See also: AWS Commits $30M for Underrepresented Early-Stage Founders

More, Smarter Storage

With storage a constant concern for designers working with digitally dense graphics files, Playbook’s offer of four terabytes of free storage to subscribers is winning converts.

Asked if it’s sustainable to continue giving that much free storage to subscribers, Ko quipped that Bain “did the math” on that core promotional offer before sinking $18 million into the Playbook platform.

“They know cloud storage is becoming commoditized. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper every year. Just making money off cloud storage is not enough. There has to be something else.”

That “something else” is the artificial intelligence (AI) assisted image tagging that makes the Playbook interface easy to navigate, which unsurprisingly displays in three attractive layouts.

“You can see everything. You can find things easily. We have extremely advanced image tagging AI,” she said. “You can click around, find related photos easily within your organizations. You can find stuff based on when you share and who you share with.”

That “findability” and the types of collaboration it brings about “are completely different than what you normally deal with in traditional cloud storage,” Ko told PYMNTS.

As for what comes next, Ko said the platform is aiming to double registered users each quarter “so hopefully we can get to closer to 300,000 users by the end of this year.”

Related: EU Regulators Scrutinize Microsoft’s Cloud Business, Practices