This Story Concerns Complacency, Repositioning, and Reinventing a Company

The biggest challenge for photo scanning services is complacency—not focusing on new ways to speed up how to digitize pictures.

There is an ocean-size demand for preserving other media, yet the question is how to do for 35mm slides (especially those stored in carousel boxes) as ScanMyPhotos.com did with photographs.

We studied the repositioning of industry giants to learn how they reinvented and created entirely new product categories.

Take Amazon, which began by just selling books. Apple shifted from personal computers to hand-held devices. IBM abandoned hardware computing machines for software and IT consulting services. Nextflix shifted from renting physical DVD movies to producing and streaming movie content. At first, Starbucks only sold coffee but stepped up to become a technology company with its online ordering and loyalty rewards app. For decades, magazines were the source of all National Geographic Society content, yet they switched from just publishing to other media platforms like the National Geographic Channel.

Many businesses have one breakthrough and then lose everything. That was the case with developing pictures. Remember one-hour photo labs and selling KODAK film? ScanMyPhotos began as owners of retail photo labs but faced obsolescence. After film transitioned to digital, we had to reinvent everything.

Our passion has always been preserving the nation’s photo nostalgia archives. After identifying the problem that there are trillions of analog photo snapshots to digitize, we pioneered a new technology to digitize pictures (one thousand photos scanned in under five minutes). Beyond complacency, repositioning, and reinventing, an element few companies practice is listening. What are customers asking, and how can you solve their problems? Photographer archivists across the country shared stories about how boxes of slide carousals, not viewed in decades, cluttered up their homes. They wanted a simple way to get those digitized as they did with pictures, especially for uploading to all the photo-sharing apps.

After exploring how to provide a similar bulk scanning service for slides, ScanMyPhotos.com now has a simple way to get digital copies from boxes of KODAK® 35mm slide carousels.