Fotello: AI Photo Editor for Real Estate; Consistently Perfect
Thursday, 19 June 2025
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN.info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia
Co-Founder
Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
WGAN-TV Guest
Harman Walia
Co-Founder Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically
Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
WGAN-TV | Fotello: AI Photo Editor for Real Estate; Consistently Perfect Photos Every Single Time | Guest: Fotello Co-Founder Harman Walia | 5 PM ET on Thursday, 19 June 2025 | Episode: 241 | Special Offer: Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
- - How is it possible to get real estate listing photos edited within minutes?
- - How good are edited real estate photos done by the Fotello AI-powered platform?
- - What happens if you are not happy with your Fotello-edited real estate listing photos?
Stay tuned.
Hi, all, I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com].
Today is Thursday, June 19th, 2025. You’re watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today.
We have an awesome show for you ... Fotello: AI Photo Editor for Real Estate; Consistently Perfect Photos Every Single Time. Our subject matter expert is Fotello Co-Founder Harman Walia. Harman, thanks for being on the show.
- Thank you so much, Dan. It’s my pleasure to be here, and I’m super excited to present to your audience what we’ve been building at [www.WGAN.info/fotello] for the last 10 months.
- Awesome. Harman, before we get to do a deep dive, what’s the mission of [www.WGAN.info/fotello]?
- Yeah, thank you so much for starting with that, right? We started [www.WGAN.info/fotello] about 10 months ago in Vancouver, Canada. The origin story is very simple. We had a friend who’s a real estate photographer.
He was visiting us, sharing the problems that he was facing in his business: consistency, delays in turnaround, not being able to communicate with the overseas editing.
And then those were the problems we started with, and we built the first product for him, solving these problems. And I think our mission is just the same as it was back then.
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN. info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia Co-Founder Fotello Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
So we only focus on two things: 1. making sure that the photos that we are delivering are photos that you are proud of every single time, and 2. doing it in a way that saves you money. These are the only two things we care about.
And everything that we do, right, in product, business, pricing, everything relates to just these two pillars of our mission.
- As you’ve talked to real estate photographers, are there other pain points that you’ve identified that are now part of that mission?
- Yes, absolutely, right? The biggest one I would say is delivering high-quality photos consistently, right? So that’s number one.
Second is delivering it in a way that provides personalization, right? Everyone wants their photos to look a little bit different. So consistency, personalization, affordability. Yeah, I think if we nail a few things, then it’ll be good in a good spot solving a lot of the problems.
- Great, could you start maybe ... start at the end instead of the beginning, can you show us an example of a page that has deliverables exactly what a real estate photographer would end up sharing with their client?
- Yes, absolutely, Dan. Let me do that. So this is if you’re using Matterport,
- I’m sorry, I don’t see your screen.
- Give me one second. Let me stop sharing and do this again. Can you see my screen now?
Perfect, so yeah, if you’re using Matterport for shooting your real estate photos and you have to deliver these photos to your customers, probably you’re delivering them through other platforms, or Google Drive, or Dropbox link, with us, you get a beautiful sharing link with your exterior photos coming.
Your customers can download the photos from there. They can see each photo as a quick slider, download each photo, and even your customers can request anything that they want changed in the photo. And this is a sharing page that has your company name, your company branding and logo.
- So maybe it’s a little bit hard to see. There’s a red button there and that indicates to download the photos.
- That’s right, yes.
- So this is how the photos can be shared, or if the photographer has a different workflow, they can download the photos themselves and go through their existing workflows.
- Absolutely, yes.
- And then I think that Matterport is providing JPEG, is that the only format, bracket images?
- No, we support all formats, right? From bracket images, photographers who are doing flambient shoots, photographers who are doing Matterport and JPEGs. So there’s no restrictions in terms of file formats. We support all sorts of RAW, ARW, NEF, and other formats that are there.
- Okay, so for our We Get Around Network audience that may be Matterport-centric, may have begun their journey as a real estate photographer, may actually be using the Matterport camera to generate images, works perfectly fine with [www.WGAN. info/fotello].
And for those photographers that are used to using professional-grade camera equipment for generating images, whatever file format they have, however many brackets, whether they’re using flambient photography, that’s all supported by [www.WGAN. info/fotello].
- Absolutely, yes. We don’t want photographers to change their workflows. We want [www.WGAN.info/fotello] to support all sorts of photographers and their workflows. So that’s how we built the product.
So we’re the only company in this space that supports everything from Matterport to as complex as flambient shooting styles.
- Great. Could you take us through the basic list of services that [www.WGAN.info/fotello] AI for real estate offers?
- Yes, absolutely, let me do that. So with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] right, every single photo that comes through us, we do automatic lens correction, there’s white balancing that we--
- Go a little bit slow for me. So just to embellish a little bit about each of those activities and what we’re looking at.
- Yes, absolutely, Dan. So as I said, as I was mentioning, right, every single photo that comes through [www.WGAN.info/fotello] there is automatic lens correction applied to those photos.
So if you see this photo, right, you can see that the photo is a little bit bulged on the sides, but when it goes through [www. WGAN.info/fotello] we’ll make sure that we identify the model of the camera that it was taken, use the specific lens correction based on that model.
And that’s all automatic, with one click.
The second thing that we do is localize white balancing. So the white balancing that folks are used to with the tools that are out there, right, they do global white balancing.
You pick a point and then you white balance the photo based on that. However, what we’ve seen, right, is the best way to do white balancing is if you set out each object separately and figure out what’s the real color.
So we go very deep into what the right color for the ceiling is, for the wall is, for the furniture is, and do white balancing for each and every object in the house, so that you can get absolutely accurate colors and there’s no misrepresentation risk when you are sharing the photos with your clients.
And then eventually people are making their biggest life decision based on these photos. The third thing that we do is color correction.
So regardless of the lighting conditions of the house that you’re in, whenever you send a photo through [www.WGAN.info/ fotello] we’ll make sure that we brighten it up, we make sure that we make the photos a little bit more pop, so that you can see all the colors clearly.
Then sometimes, right, the images that we receive, right, are not sharpened. So you make sure that we sharpen all the images, every image that we output looks crisp. And after that, you’re aware of sky replacement.
So with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] you get an option of, we always do sky replacement with every single photo, but let’s say there’s a beautiful day outside and you’ve got beautiful skies and nature that day, and you might not want to do sky replacement.
So we actually give you one click button to turn on and off sky replacement.
And if you’re doing sky replacement today with traditional technology like Photoshop, then you have a static image that you’re using to expand, rotate that photo, but it’s the same cloud every single time.
But that’s not how it’s in real life. In real life, if you’re looking at the clouds outside from a different angle, the clouds will be somewhere else. Five minutes later, the clouds will be somewhere else. So we try to recreate the same effect with our photos, while maintaining the consistency of the sky across the listing.
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN. info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia Co-Founder Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
So you’ll get perfectly natural skies and clouds with us. Then we also do automatic perspective correction. So regardless of if the perspective was wrong when the photographer shot the image, we’ll make sure that we perfectly align all the verticals and straighten up the image.
The most important, the most beautiful thing about our outputs are the amazing window pulls that we do.
So you can see, right, in this, this was the window pulled before, and we clearly bring out everything that’s outside the window, so you can clearly see it. This comes in really handy for houses, when you’re shooting luxury properties and you want to see what’s outside the window.
And for an editor to do this work effectively, it would take them 15 to 20 minutes. And we do everything within a few minutes. And lastly, whenever you’re shooting in places, right, a bathroom or if you’re shooting in front of a kitchen appliance, sometimes, right, there’s a reflection of camera, the tripod or the camera person left.
We automatically get rid of all of these reflections for you. So all of these steps and many, many more that are all done within a span of two minutes of receiving the photo. And by two minutes, I don’t mean by one single photo.
In two minutes, we can process the entire house, which will take an editor about six hours to do that in Photoshop or Lightroom.
- And are there other services that you want to describe, even if they’re not listed there, in terms of image enhancement?
- Yes, absolutely. Apart from what’s listed here, right? We also add TV gradients in our photos. So if you’re familiar with real estate
photography, there are a lot of folks that like to add TV gradients on their TVs.
So we automatically do that. Outside of this, there is stuff, let’s see, there’s stuff sometimes, right, there’s horizontal correction, that’s not mentioned here.
So we can take care of that as well. So everything that you have to do to make sure that the image is deliverable to an end customer, we do that automatically with one click.
- Awesome. I think it would probably be helpful to take a look at a deep dive of the actual workflow that a photographer goes through of uploading pictures to get to that deliverable page that you shared with us.
- Yes, let’s go through that, Dan. So it’s very straightforward, right? You go to [www.WGAN.info/fotello], you log in. Once you log in, you’ll see all the listings that you’ve processed with us.
So today, the photographers, right, they’re storing their RAW images in Google Drive and Dropbox. With us, they don’t have to do that anymore. They can store their RAW images with us, but that’s a hidden cost savings of working with Fotello.
Then creating a listing is very simple. You click on create a new listing, and then you drag and drop all your uncompressed and unprocessed RAW images or JPEGs.
So as soon as these images are added, they’ll all automatically be bracketed based on a timestamp of two seconds. So all the photo shots that are taken within two seconds will be grouped together. Now, if--
- So, for clarification, if you were to click on that first thumbnail, there’s actually five images because they’re bracketed and there’s a little counter up in the top right of that image that’s telling you that’s image three of five, that’s image four of five, three of five, and so forth.
- Exactly, exactly. Now, if you are someone who’s a fast shooter, slow shooter, you can move across the time slider. If a photographer always does five brackets, three brackets, single brackets, you can use the count base.
Most importantly, right, if there are shooters who are doing five ambient shots, maybe one or two flash shots, or just overall flambient shooting, we’re the only company in this space that allows you to group photos together based on that.
So all you need to do is choose the manual bracketing, and then you can simply merge photos of the same scene together and split it where the next scene starts. So it’s that straightforward.
- So if we could go back to, yeah, that, yeah, no, thank you. You were going forward. It’s just helpful for me to look at it as a carousel, a film strip.
- Of course.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- So great, you’re back here.
- Yeah.
- Then what are the next steps before enhancing these images?
- So the first step is bracketing. The next step is, all you need to do is choose the shots that are taken on the exterior as exterior.
We do this because we understand that exterior editing is very different from interior editing. So we’ve built two separate AI models for interior and exterior. So all you need to do is just select the exterior on the exterior shots.
As I was mentioning, right, if it was a beautiful day, you can choose to turn off the sky replacement or keep it on if you like. And then most importantly, you get a few styles by default with [www.WGAN.info/fotello].
Our default style is Signature. With the Signature style, we are not aiming to provide you that old-school HDR sort of look. Our goal is to provide you the absolute highest-quality premium edits, that if you had to find an editor to do that, you’d have to pay $3 or $5 per photo to get that quality for it. So that is our competition.
So that’s what we aim to deliver with our Signature style. If you are someone who prefers your photos a little bit more closer to RAWs or let’s say a little bit less edited, then you can choose the Natural style.
And lastly, there’s a third style that we’re experimenting with that’s Twilight, and it’s for the shoots that are done during dawn,
dusk and twilight. It’s not for the day-to-twilight conversions yet.
- Okay, so for clarification, if I shoot a shot at noon, I should not think -- today -- that I could apply the twilight effect to that. This is truly, you shot it at twilight, now optimize it for twilight.
- Exactly, exactly.
- Okay. Did I miss something in terms of you selecting which were interior, which were exterior?
- No, it was this, right? You just move these tags, exterior, exterior, and that’s about it.
- Okay, so is there anything else to do before processing?
- Yeah, you can name your listing here. So you can use whatever naming convention you use internally.
And today photographers are spending a lot of time, right, deleting the photos on their camera before sending it off to their editor or deleting them on their computer with us, they don’t have to do that anymore. You can just drag and drop all the photos, see the previews.
And if there’s a shot, right, if there’s a scene that you feel, “Okay, I shot this, but I don’t think I need this for my final outputs,” you can simply uncheck this, so you can do culling on the platform itself.
- Okay, cool. Sounds like we’re ready to enhance.
- [Harman] Exactly.
- Well, actually you just have five images here. I was going to actually set a timer. Have you hit start yet?
- No, let’s do it.
- Okay.
- So I’m going to click Enhance, and we start uploading the images.
- Okay.
- So now, what I want to show you, right? You don’t have to wait until one listing is being done. You can actually start and move to your next property and do the same. So let us do that, and then you can see, we’ve done that, we name it as Matterport.
And then you click Enhance, and you’re good to go. Now you can have multiple simultaneous uploads going on at the same time.
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN. info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia Co-Founder Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
And regardless of the number of photos that are there, right, in the house, we will process everything in two minutes after the uploading is complete.
So the upload speed will depend on the photographer’s internet speed. But once we receive the photos, it’ll just take us two minutes across. And you’ll see that, right, on the screen as we are waiting for it. Let’s go back to this.
- I did have a question there. So when you hit Enhance, is it possible that the images, you’re seeing a thumbnail, but the images actually haven’t actually been uploaded fully yet?
- That is right, yes, you’re spot on. We actually start uploading the images when you click Enhance. And as you can see, right, we were just talking and the images were already edited. So that is--
- Ah, ah, so again, let me just get, for clarification here, because I saw thumbnails, I saw you decide that was image one of five, but those were really only thumbnails.
- Previews, yes.
- Previews. The images had not yet been uploaded.
- That’s correct.
- So when you hit Enhance, actually, that’s when the uploading starts, so if you think it takes more than two minutes, really that extra time is the time it’s taking for your photos to upload in the background.
- Exactly, exactly.
- Okay.
- And as we just clarified this, right, both the listings that we did are already done, so it’s done and ready to be delivered.
- And forgive me, you wanted to go on and show something there?
- No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead.
- Well, you’re on a page that says Adjust. Can you tell us more about this?
- Yes, absolutely. So now, right, I think the third problem that I talked about, when we were discussing earlier on the problems that we solve, was personalization.
We know that every photographer, right, their style is unique.
You can’t expect everyone to have the same stack. So what photographers today end up doing is they receive the photos from their editors, download them into their computers, put them into Photoshop or Lightroom, apply their preset, make their adjustments, and then they’re ready to send it off to their customers.
So that adds extra steps, extra time and extra money that you’re spending on Adobe subscription. And our goal is to simplify this process as much as we can. So as soon as the photos are uploaded, right, you can see that there are a lot of style options that you can apply based on your preference.
You have Airy, Crisp if you like contrast, there’s Golden if you like a little bit of a warm touch. And apart from that, right, you can also adjust a single photo or all the photos based on your preferences. So you can go as detailed as contrast, exposure, shadows, sharpening, there’s a lot of options for you to choose from.
- So I think I’m hearing three things from Harman, the first is, if you’re not happy with a particular image, and there’s already an opportunity to adjust here in Fotello rather than importing into another editing program.
- That’s right.
- Two, if you make those changes, you can actually apply those adjustments to all your images. And three, going forward, if you want to save the settings to be applied to all your future projects, you can save a template, let’s call it Dan.
- Mm. Yeah, so we can do the first two today, the third one is definitely on the roadmap and coming soon. So, Dan, it’ll be my honor to give you access to your Dan style very, very soon. ;-)
- So, Harman, today is Thursday, June 19th, 2025. Not to put you on the spot, but can you give us some sense of what your technology roadmap looks like for having a preset set by the photographer?
- Yeah, not more than a month. So we’ll have this ability for you to have your own styles less than a month from now.
- Awesome. Okay, so we’re ready to share. Are we ready to share these pictures?
- Yes, you can go ahead and share these pictures. We also, right, availability for requesting a revision, but I’m sure we’ll talk about that in detail.
- We could talk about that now, that’s fine. So could you talk a little bit about humans in the loop and how that works?
- Absolutely, so, Dan, our mission is, as I was saying, right, it’s very simple, we want to help you deliver photos that you’re proud of every single time.
Now we understand if you have such a broad and important mission, right, there will be situations where your customer might need something special, or maybe the AI saw a new type of camera, it wasn’t able to remove, or maybe the AI removed the camera, or it wasn’t able to remove as clearly as you would have liked, right?
So we put a stake in the ground saying that we’ll not only build the best technology for real estate photo editing, we will also back it up with the folks that have built this industry.
So there are the editors, the real estate photo editors that have been work experts of this field and working for the last 10 years.
So we’ve hired an in-house team of editors so that if ever our AI misses something or if you need some minor adjustments, you can just request those revisions directly on the platforms, and our teams can take care of it at no additional charge, and within a span of six to eight hours. So it’s already faster than any editor on the planet.
And our goal is to keep bringing this turnaround time down as time goes on.
- So it sounds like you get the best of both possible worlds. The first is the AI is super efficient and can process the images in two minutes, and they’re all probably either done, or through this process of adjustment, or if a photographer wants to go through a workflow with their own ... whatever they can.
But if there is a problem, there’s an opportunity to ask for a human in the loop in order to take a look at the image and make the change, that may be six hours, which is typically faster than most human editor services are turning around, but it adds some time.
So do you think at some point, how would you describe the AI today, [www.WGAN.info/fotello]?
Are the images just awesome and you’ll rarely need a human in the loop from [www.WGAN.info/fotello]?
- Yeah, so if you’re working with any editor today, right, your revision rate would be somewhere between 2% to 3%, right? 2.5% is the average of the industry. When you’re working with [www.WGAN.info/fotello], your revision rate is less than 1%. So it’s better than any editor even today.
And the beauty of our revision model is, let’s say you request a revision, we use those revisions to train our next model. So that is direct feedback on what are the gaps in the model, how we can fix that, and we use those to train the next model.
And you will see every single month that you’re working with us. If you start with a 1% revision rate, the next month it’ll be 0.5%. By the third month, you’ll never need any revision. So that is the beauty of this model.
- So I’m trying to think about different kinds of photographers. So I would say perhaps someone who’s using Matterportexported images is probably going to be someone who’s not using an image-editing package perhaps today, an imageediting service today perhaps.
So it sounds like, if you’re using Matterport images, you’re going to be happy as a clam ;-) when you get the [www.WGAN.info/ fotello] images back.
- Yeah, I would actually love to show you the Matterport before and after, so that you can see, right, what [www.WGAN.info/ fotello] can do for--
- Yeah, that’d be awesome.
- Yeah, yeah, let’s do that.
- Okay.
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN. info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia Co-Founder Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
- Give me one second, let me. Perfect, so now we can see the before and after together. The right side of the screen is, the left hand of the screen is the before.
And let me show you, the right side is the after. So, right, you can see in the before, there’s a lot of colorcast.
Let me actually add the right photo, perfect. Yeah, so there’s a lot of colorcast in the right photo, right, which Matterport has taken by default. The entire ceiling is yellow. If you look at the windows, you can’t clearly see outside the window.
And then if you had editors to edit these photos today, right, it would take them hours because you’re working with one single image.
But when you put these photos through [www.WGAN.info/fotello] we can clearly remove all the cast that is in these photos, we can bring out the window views, we can make sure the flooring is perfect.
So we hand blend all your Matterport images. So yeah, that is what you’ll get with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] within a span of two minutes.
- So the before and after is awesome, and the after is really amazing. I did hear you say, “Photoshop,” when you send your images through [www.WGAN.info/fotello].
- Yeah, [www.WGAN.info/fotello].
- [www.WGAN.info/fotello] okay. And really this is amazing because when you start with Matterport, you’re not using bracketed images, you’re just using one image to send to [www.WGAN.info/fotello].
So this is really quite a story to be able to see what’s possible.
- Exactly, and now Matterport photographers will be able to compete directly with photographers who are using DSLR cameras and stuff, because the quality difference will keep on decreasing as the model improves.
- Okay, so I really want to just take a moment to think about the different kinds of photographers.
So we talked about Matterport. I think there’s probably also many in our We Get Around Network Forum community, they’re high-end real estate architectural photographers.
I could imagine that they might say, “Well, I could use [www.WGAN.info/fotello] to do the heavy lifting to do 95% of the editing, but either someone on my team or someone I use outside is still going to do that last 5% of tweaking.”
Are you having that experience now, some of your photographers, or no, no, everybody said, “[www.WGAN.info/fotello] right out of the gate, two minutes, I’m ready to go deliver the images?”
- Yeah, so there’s a lot of diversity, right? We have folks who are just delivering photos end to end, right? full volume, without any, touchless.
There are folks that are using our revision services to make sure that the photos are perfect.
And there are some folks, right, who are downloading the photos, adjusting them into Photoshop and Lightroom, and then sending them. Our goal is to serve the entire market.
And the only piece left is the folks that are still doing adjustments.
So we are here to listen and understand what are the adjustments that they still need, right? How can we add that directly into our model or into our platform?
So over the next few months, you will see us rolling out a lot more features and [www.WGAN.info/fotello] will become a lot more powerful in terms of customizations for these architectural photographers.
They’ll be able to do detailed work, figure out which bracket to add, which to not add. So there’s a lot coming down the road for everyone.
- ‘Because my impression is that perhaps the largest group of photographers, not at the very top, that care about every piece before it gets delivered, and they’re charging for that level, and maybe the others that photography’s new to them, because really when they got a Matterport camera and they started delivering, they realized that the clients kept asking for photos even before they were asking for Matterport so they figured out how to use their Matterport camera for photos.
But somewhere in that middle is, and I don’t even know if it’s fair to say to you, you know, “good enough” is good enough, because actually what you’re delivering looks awesome.
So do you think you’re at the point where the [www.WGAN.info/fotello] AI-delivered real estate photos are either as good as or better than an outside human doing the edits?
- Yes, absolutely, and I think our scale speaks to that, right? Every single month we deliver more than 20,000 homes to MLSs across the globe, right? So these photos are being delivered to MLSs, people are using these photos to come view the houses, houses are being sold using these photos.
So definitely I think the time is there and it is this year, as you had mentioned in one of your forums early this year, right, that this year is going to be the year of AI in real estate.
So that was definitely a foresight that you had, and I think you were absolutely spot on. 2025 is the year when AI will far exceed what editors will be able to offer in terms of editing service.
- So that’s awesome, because it really speaks to, it’s probably at the point today that you can use [www.WGAN.info/fotello] and deliver it right out of the gate.
And, oh, by the way, it’ll probably surprise and delight you about even what’s coming down the road. My observation from ... we posted a question in the We Get Around Network Forum today, the question of the day is, “Do you edit your photos yourself or outsource them, and why?”
And one of the photographers wrote back and said, “I outsource because that lets me do more shoots per day.” Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
I imagine that’s a pretty common reason for outsourcing, maybe there’s some other reasons for outsourcing. [www.WGAN.info/ fotello] is an example of outsourcing.
- Yeah, yeah, if you think about, right, where the time should be spent, right, as a photographer and as a business owner, right, you want to get as many clients, as many shoots per day as possible, right, eventually build up your teams, expand your business, expand the markets that you’re serving.
Now, if you’re spending a lot of that time on editing, that will take away the time that you can do to grow your businesses. So that is why, right, overseas editing serves that great need, right? You could get the same, get the quality of edits that you would need at a much lower price point. And I think AI is just the next phase of this, right?
That we’re saying you’d be able to get the same or higher quality of edits that you’re used to, and do that in a way that’s even faster and even cheaper. So yeah.
- So maybe just to expand on this a little bit, for those of our audience that are already outsourcing, they get it, exactly what you just said.
They absolutely get it. “It’s more time to shoot, more time to do something else I like, more time to spend with my family,” more time to do whatever it is that they choose to do with that extra time.
And particularly as a photographer begins to scale a business and starts to do more and more shoots per day, more and more shoots per week, if you’re doing your own edits, then you’re really probably working night and day when this is one of the things that can be easily outsourced.
Could you just take a moment and speak to those photographers that say, “Hey, I love editing my own images. I really want to spend some time. I like editing.”
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN. info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia Co-Founder Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
So I think about this as a business conversation maybe versus an artist, does that inspire any thoughts for those that are presently editing their own images and why they might still want to try [www.WGAN.info/fotello]?
- Yeah, absolutely. And I think, right, there is no right way to do things, right? Everyone has a different need that they’re serving in the market.
The photographers who are outsourcing their edits, right, they’ve identified that their market is the Realtors who are happy with the photos that are 80% there.
And they figure out what their Realtors care about, what the home buyers care about, because 95% of the folks view these images on their phones. But there are other markets, right?
When you’re doing luxury, when you’re doing a little bit more high-end, a little bit more architecture, right? And those photographers have built their businesses around the quality of the photo, the design that they give. So we have photographers who are doing both, right?
So the photographers who are doing the editing themselves, right, [www.WGAN.info/fotello] helps them save about four hours per house in terms of editing that they’ll be spending.
So if they are spending four hours with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] they can get the everything done, and maybe after that, right, do some minor adjustments in Photoshop or Lightroom, or even use [www.WGAN.info/fotello]’s tools directly on the platform,
which when we start working with these photographers, right, I generally get on calls with them, try to understand what are the gaps in the platform, what are they trying to do outside the platform so that we can get those tools inside [www.WGAN.info/ fotello] as quickly as possible and save them the time and stuff.
So for everyone that’s doing editing themselves, using [www.WGAN.info/fotello] would save them a lot of time, it would give them consistent high-quality photos, and they can still use the outputs that we deliver to add their personal touches on top of it after it’s done.
- So for those photographers that are presently spending hours per listing making their photos look beautiful, that perhaps the workflow might just change a little bit to say, “Hey, use [www.WGAN.info/fotello] for the first 95%,” reduce all that time, and then use your creativity on taking it to the next step, if that’s what you want to do, but return that time back to you, Because the reality is, [www.WGAN.info/fotello] AI for real estate photography can literally do, if not a 100%, certainly pretty close to that. For many photographers, it’ll just be, “Yep, let’s deliver it. Yep, let’s deliver it.”
- Yep, no, absolutely. And get that time back, spend that time with your family, right? Spend that time to get some more sleep, so that you can focus on what really matters to you, your customers.
And the only ask is, right, if there is stuff, then, when you’re working with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] right, we don’t come from this industry, so we have a chip on our shoulder to prove ourselves.
So we are very eager to listen, learn from every single photographer that we work with. That’s why when you are onboard, right, I personally need everyone that joins us, so that we can understand their use cases.
Everyone sends me the feature requests that they need, we make sure we listen to them, deliver it the next week, just as you asked, right, “When can we have the ‘Dan’ style?” I committed to you, you have the ‘Dan’ style in a month. So it’s the same with everyone.
- Awesome. I think we could probably take a look at the pricing. Do you want to just talk about pricing or show your pricing pages? It’s public on the website.
- Yes, pricing is public. I’m happy to show you the page in a second. I want to start with the why behind the pricing. So we price our product a little bit differently than others, and I want to start with why.
So we firmly believe, right, the business that we’re in, the goal is very simple. The house that we’re shooting, how can we get that house sold in the market as quickly as possible and at the highest rate as that house deserves?
Now, if you have two houses of the same square footage, one has more features than the other, but if you have a cost-per-photo model, you’re never really incentivized to shoot more for the house that has more features. You’re actually de-incentivized to do that.
So we didn’t think that model was very customer-centric enough, and believe that with AI bringing the cost of everything lower, the business model should also evolve to be more customer-centric.
Now, there were two approaches to go about this. Either we could have gone with credits, right? But credits is like creating your own currency.
And whenever companies create their own currency, right, they rarely end up using that currency in any customer-centric ways. So that’s why we went with a very simple, upfront and extremely affordable cost per listing. So this is a flat cost that you can bake into your pricing, and then never have to worry about this.
So now this cost per listing depends on two factors, and that’s how much are you willing to commit to us in terms of term or the volume.
So if you pay yearly, you get a 20% discount on your cost per listing. If you pay monthly, then it’s a little bit more expensive. Secondly, as your volume of business grows, your cost per listing drops because we want to support when you’re growing the business.
And the cutoff point is when you move from 50 to 75 images, because that’s where we see, right, folks are hiring their first person in their team and expanding their teams and there’s a lot of expense in the business.
So we didn’t want to be an additional expense, we wanted to support the growth. That is why there’s a cost difference after that. Any questions, Dan, about pricing or anything you think might be helpful?
- So on the per listing, so I would say, I’ve looked ahead at the pricing page and it generally runs anywhere from $20 to $12 per listing, depending on your monthly volume [number Of listings] and depending on how many images you want to upload.
And also whether you’re month to month or year to year. [And, Monthly or Annual plan.] If you could just scroll down a little bit
on that page, Harman.
I think it was helpful to just compare the three plans, if we could go down to the three plans. Yeah, could you talk a little bit about the difference between Starter, Solo and Teams?
- Absolutely, so [www.WGAN.info/fotello] is free to sign up for anyone, right? So as soon as you go to [www.WGAN.info/fotello] you can just log in, create an account--
- I’m going to suggest going to www.WGAN.info/fotello in order to get a special offer. And while you sign up for free, when you convert to a paid member, you’ll get 1,500 free photos.
That’s the equivalent of 25 free listings on a Solo Operator plan. So we’ll suggest to our viewers: www.WGAN.info/fotello
And if you’re talking to Harman or another member of the team, just let them know WGAN and they’ll honor that special offer for the We Get Around Network Community. Forgive me, I interrupted. You were talking about the difference between the three plans.
- No, no, thank you so much for sharing that, because this is a very special offer for everyone in the WGAN Community, and we would love to, yeah, we would love to support and get everyone on board.
And then in terms of the plans, right, it’s free for [www.WGAN. info/fotello] Starter, but as you said, anyone who signed signs up, depending on the volume, if you’re doing equal to or less than 50 images you are on the Solo Operator plan.
If you’re doing more than 75 images then you’re the Teams plan. And then when you sign up for a [www.WGAN.info/fotello] paid membership and give us the referral code - WGAN - you get 25 free listings regardless of the plan that you sign up for.
- As long as that’s on a paid [www.WGAN.info/fotello] plan.
- That’s right, yes.
- So that would be Solo Operator or Team, or enterprise for that matter.
- Yep, yes, absolutely.
- Okay, so if we just take it off of screen share, I did have some followup questions, that’d be great.
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN. info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia Co-Founder Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
So it’s based on, let’s say I’m a Solo Member, I’m uploading up to 60 images per listing, I’ve signed up for let’s say 25 listings per month. It’s a busy time right now, it’s seasonal business, what happens when it gets slow?
That month, do I lose my listings? Again, if I have 25 listings in my plan and I’m going month to month or maybe annual, what happens?
- Yeah, great question, Dan. So we understand, right, the real estate is seasonal business, so there’s no lock-in in terms of our plans.
You can start at 25 listings, you can come down to 10, you can go to 50 as you feel like your market is changing, or just take a yearly plan, right, to cover. But let’s imagine the scenario that you asked, right?
You sign up for 25 listings and you end up doing 20 that month. So the five will roll over to the next month. And we do that for the entire year so that you can account for all the seasonality that happens in real estate and in your market.
- So what’s the best way to approach figuring out which plan is right for me?
- Yes, so the best way, right? You probably know your volume over the last 12 months or the last year that you did, right? Take an average of that volume and then start with that plan.
Let’s say if the average comes out to be 25 listings, then you can start at the 25 listings a month. If the average comes out to be
40, maybe you can start at the 50 listings, get advantage of the rollovers. When the season slows down, you can go come down to the 25 listings and still --
So there’s a lot of flexibility in the model to save costs. The goal is the same. You want to make sure that every single person that works with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] they’re saving money.
That’s why if you go to our pricing page, which I’m going to share briefly again, you can clearly see that it’s based around how much you are saving, right?
So you can calculate how many photos you’re doing, what is your current cost of editing, and then you’ll be clearly able to see how much you save with [www.WGAN.info/fotello]. So yeah, it’s very simple to understand this.
- Thank you. So talk to me a little bit about satisfaction guarantees. Yeah.
- Yes, yeah. So every single paid plan, right, with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] comes with a few things. It comes with human revision. So that’s included. It comes with listing rollover that we just covered. It also comes with a price match, right?
So, as I said, right, we are deeply committed to making sure that you save money when you’re working with us. So if you feel like you’re in a different market, there’s a different MLS restriction, there are pricing, we have a price match guarantee?
Fourth thing, we are deeply committed to our mission of making sure that the photos that we deliver are something that you’re proud of.
Now, by doing that, we want to give you the best AI photo editor, the best human editors possible as backups. But if your customer is still unhappy with a single photo in the entire listing, right?
They call you, email you, text you about any complaint in the photo, we’ll credit you the entire listing back.
This incentivizes us to make sure that our product always keeps getting better and better because we understand that it’s your reputation at stake, and this is a way for us to be committed to that, making sure that we always maintain your reputation.
And lastly, we understand this is a new way of doing things, right, you’re probably used to paying per photo, paying after you receive the services, paying to an overseas editor, right? This is AI, new technology, new business model, right?
So we want everyone to use us and test us without any risk. So when you are working with us, you get a full seven-day refund policy.
So you can use as many listings as you want, you can use any human division. If there’s anything that you don’t love about the product and the service that we’re building, we’ll fully refund you the money.
The only question I guess that we will ask you is, “What did we do wrong? How can we improve?” But you’ll always get the money back.
- So let me see if I understand how to enter the superhighway of AI with [www.WGAN.info/fotello].
I begin with: www.WGAN.info/Fotello or if I’m talking to you, I mention WGAN, that’s even if I sign up for a free account where I get five listings with five images each, those can still be five bracketed images, but a deliverable of five, so I can test and try with a number of images. Second, I then decide to sign up as a Solo perhaps, with X number of listings per month, either on a monthly or annual plan.
And even though I went ahead and have now committed to that payment, if within seven days, I just decide it’s not working for me, again, what happens?
- Yes, you get your entire money back because we want you to use [www.WGAN.info/fotello] to make sure that it’s successful for you and your business. And any testing once you’re on paid plans is absolutely free.
Once you get on a paid plan, if you’re using a few listings to test different shooting styles, you can use those listings, reach out to our customer success team and we’ll credit you back, right? We want you to be successful with [www.WGAN.info/fotello].
And so testing is free, there’s a seven-day refund policy. So it’s risk free to try.
- Harman, earlier today, I uploaded two jobs to take [www.WGAN.info/fotello] for a spin. We Get Around Network Member, Tom Sparks, with Sparks Media Group, was kind enough to send me two of his recent listings.
And I really was just blown away. I was blown away by, first, the quality of what came back, and it looked to me like it was ready to deliver to the client. The second was how fast it came back, because it literally was minutes.
And in one of the jobs, it was 49 images. Let’s call it 50 so I can do the math in my head, and it was five bracketed, they were all five bracketed. So that meant it would’ve been 250, so it was 245 images that were uploaded and processed within minutes, ready to deliver to the client.
And what that sparked in my mind was, “Oh, this creates a whole new business opportunity to offer same-day delivery.” Are you getting any photographers that are giving you that kind of feedback?
- Yep, yep, great point, Dan. So not only can you get one entire listing within two minutes, you can also get multiple listings within a span of 15 minutes. The only blocker to that will be your internet upload speed and your computer.
There is no limitation with us. We have companies who are doing 50 houses with us within a span of one hour. So it’s a new era for real estate media. And in terms of the question that you asked, right, in terms of the new business opportunities that it creates--
- Yeah, I mean, my impression is that it opened up two opportunities, either for a photographer that just wants to differentiate on delivery speed, “Hey, no extra charge, we deliver the same day.”
- Yep, absolutely.
- Or perhaps charging, “Well, you need rush delivery, we can do same-day delivery, it’s $49 extra,” “It’s $99 extra,” whatever the price point is for the add on.
And then, oh my gosh, it doesn’t even have to be the same day, it literally could be “Well, our standard is to deliver the next day, but if you need the same day, we deliver that within eight hours.
And if you need half-day delivery or you need it within hours, there are price points for that.” And it shouldn’t matter that the photographer is getting it back within minutes because the real estate agent is not the one who’s subscribing to the [www. WGAN.info/fotello] service.
[www.WGAN.info/fotello] service, they probably don’t even know about it.
It’s just, really, this is creating a whole new opportunity for speed of delivery that enables a photographer to either differentiate or offer add-ons, or both.
- Exactly.
- Yeah.
You’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your [photo] revisions. You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want. So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN. info/fotello. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
Harman Walia Co-Founder Fotello
Get up to 1,500 Photos Free on Paid Membership | Automatically Receive with Affiliate Link: www.WGAN.info/fotello | Code: WGAN
- Exactly. So you get a cost savings when you’re working with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] and exactly as you mentioned, right, you might actually be able to increase your revenue because you can actually start charging extra for the delivery within one hour.
So we have photographers who do a shoot, they have their SD cards plugged in after the shoot in their cars, they upload to [www.WGAN.info/fotello] and then within a span of 30 minutes before they even reach the next shooting place, they have sent that delivery to their customers.
So yeah, we’ve already seen that a lot already.
- Forgive me, have they given you feedback on whether they’re charging extra for that?
- A lot of the people that I speak to are using it as a marketing opportunity to expand their territories, right, differentiating themselves from the market, because it’s easier for the solo operators to use this opportunity rather than the large enterprises or teams to change their processes.
So I’m seeing that, as a startup myself, this is actually an opportunity for the new startups and solo operators to use this technology to gain a competitive edge and expand their market share, before the larger players start doing that.
- Awesome, before we wrap up, I have just a couple other questions. First of all, again, looking at the images coming back today, the two jobs that I processed with [www.WGAN.info/fotello] about the quality and the speed, the word that kept coming to mind was magic.
- Yeah.
- So is there just some amazing developer that’s behind all this that just has figured out the secret sauce of machine learning and AI in order to deliver a solution for real estate photographers within minutes?
- Yes, absolutely, there is definitely a magician behind this, and that is my partner, right? So we are building this together. His name is Ray, and he was an extremely smart developer at Amazon Web Services before this, working on AI/Machine Learning .
And he started building the first model with this and wrote every single line of code up until we had about the first 50 users.
So everything that you see on the platform, right, on the AI/Machine Learning [ML] side, you have a very large deep infrastructure layer, everything was done by one single person. So I’m very proud and grateful, yeah, to be building this with Ray.
- So Ray came from Amazon Web Services where he was working on machine learning/AI, had a lot of subject matter expertise, and working in conjunction with his friend, a real estate photographer, were able to collaborate on creating a solution that met the needs of a photographer, and now you’ve been talking to lots of photographers to keep continuing to give that feedback to the development team and keep moving forward.
- Exactly.
- Awesome. So I think my parting question is really, you know, if we just met in the elevator, and you got a minute to tell me the [www.WGAN.info/fotello] story, and we’ve never met, but you heard me say, “Hey, I’m a professional real estate photographer,” what is it that you want to say to me?
- Yeah, I mean, it’s exactly what you just mentioned, right? That you’re probably not getting enough sleep today. You’re probably waking up early; sending your revisions.
You’re getting frustrated that the edits that you’ve gotten back are not the way you want.
So get your sleep back and experience the magic of Fotello by just going to: www.WGAN.info/fotello And then you’ll see yourself once you try it once. So all you need to do is just try a few photos, and then you’ll see the difference.
- And just take me back up to the vision, the mission of [www.WGAN.info/fotello] that very big picture where we began the show, just put a bookend on what’s important to you in terms of the building out [www.WGAN.info/fotello].
- Yeah, so it stays the same, right? Our mission still stays the same that it started with, serving our one friend, right?
How can we help deliver the photos that he’s proud of and do it in a way that saves him money?
Now the mission’s just expanded to doing the same for everyone that we speak to. How can we deliver photos that can make everyone proud of when they’re delivering it and do it in a way that saves them money?
So it’s the same mission as what it was 10 months ago. And a clear focus and a clear mission allows us to not get distracted by the noise around it and always being very focused. And on the two problems; two biggest things that we are solving for.
- Awesome, Harman, thanks for being on the show today.
- Oh, thank you so much, Dan. It’s a pleasure that you invited me and I’m super excited to meet the rest of the WGAN Community in the coming days.
- Awesome, we’ve been visiting with Harman Walia, Co-Founder of [www.WGAN.info/fotello]. Harman is based in Vancouver.
I’m Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum in Atlanta.
Thanks for watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
