Published July 2001

PhotoTunes creator
finds e-card niche

By Kimberly Hilden
Herald Business Journal Assistant Editor

“I enjoy using PhotoTunes to correspond with my special someone who is far away. ... While nothing can quite capture the love I feel for her, the wonderful scenes and inspirational music you provide help me let her know I can’t wait to be with her again.” — PhotoTunes user

Receiving e-mail like this makes all the hard work behind PhotoTunes.com worthwhile, said Richard Duval, creator of the e-card Web site.

“If I never make a dime off of this site, the fact that I was able to do something creatively that touched a few folks like this — what a great way to go broke,” the Bothell/Mill Creek-area resident said.

But Duval, a 20-year veteran of corporate marketing, doesn’t intend to go broke.

“I love PhotoTunes. It’s a real personal thing to me,” said Duval, who photographs the nature scenes and cityscapes, and composes the music that go into the e-cards. “But I love it as a business. ... What’s my goal? I want to beat the competition.”

And beating the competition requires a sound business plan, which includes knowing PhotoTunes’ user demographic.

According to the Greeting Card Association, women purchase more than 80 percent of all greeting cards. PhotoTunes’ customer base parallels this number closely, Duval said, with women making up about 70 percent of his site’s customer base. And the cards the men are sending, well, the majority of them are probably going to women as well, Duval said, chuckling.

So Duval makes a point of promoting PhotoTunes on bigger sites geared toward women as well as the general public. For example, during the Valentine’s Day period, PhotoTunes was promoted on BlueSuitMom.com, Amazingmoms.com, GetRomantic.com and lovingyou.com.

But self-promotion alone isn’t enough to get new users to the site, Duval said. E-card giant Blue Mountain has somewhere between 12 million and 15 million unique visitors a month, he said, but they don’t get that just by advertising. They get it with viral marketing — users sending cards to others, who then send cards to others and on and on.

“You absolutely have to have it,” he said. “You have to have people out there who are so enamored with what you’re offering that they’re going to turn around and send it to someone else.”

To that end, Duval has scoured the Web, both before his site went live more than a year ago and since then, to see what the competition has to offer.

“I have not found any site that does original music and original photos,” said Duval, who discovered that niche while searching for an e-card “with more substance” to send to his wife.

With the help of Web Master Jim Drake and verse editor/writer Renee Robbins, Duval began PhotoTunes, which offers free e-cards and sells high-quality color prints of his photos, a CD of his music and PhotoTunes Screen Saver subscriptions.

During Valentine’s Day, PhotoTunes began selling the “Lover’s Getaway Card,” which combined a series of scenic photos, a romantic message and Duval’s music using rich-media technology, for $5.

“What I’m trying to do, obviously, with PhotoTunes is to build up the site recognition and build the brand,” Duval said. “In a lot of ways, if you remove the dot-com part of it and just look at it as a business, it’s very analogous to a gift store. ... I have to offer something different every month. I have to change my merchandise around. I need to go with seasonal things.”

One section of Duval’s “gift store” includes “Business Casual” e-cards, which he said “definitely has its spot” in the marketplace.

“People are in the ‘I want to acknowledge you’ mode,” said Duval, who has begun designing lines of cards for business professionals, including a motivational speaker and an Eastside real estate agent. “That’s taking your site and your business and looking where to extend it,” he said.

Strategic partnerships, with larger sites paying PhotoTunes to be on their site, also are part of the business plan, Duval said, adding that for those larger sites, an e-card link is a good way to keep visitors coming back.

And making repeat customers out of new visitors is key to any business, Duval said, which is why he figures PhotoTunes is going to work.

“If you strip away all of the glitter, so to speak, what you have from an e-commerce standpoint is a business you have to entice your customers to come. And how do you do that? Well, you convince your customers you have something that they can’t get somewhere else,” Duval said. “These are just classic business strategies.”

“There are 850 (e-card) sites out there today,” Duval said. “By fall, there will not be 850 sites.”

But he expects PhotoTunes to stand the test of time.

For more information on PhotoTunes, visit online at www.phototunes.com.

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