Mr Seb Coursol: Singapore is a great place to start a new business.

Upload once, sell everywhere – that is the tagline for iSyndica, which was set up in May to provide photographers, footage producers and illustrators with a single platform to manage and distribute their portfolio.

“Someone who does stock photography will have to upload his photos to various websites,” explained Mr Seb Coursol, co-founder and chief technology officer of iSyndica. “The idea is to have a system that sits in the middle so they upload images once to us. We will then connect to different marketplaces and push the content out for you.” 

iSyndica’s media distribution platform – the Virtual Distribution Service (VDS) - also sends data in the opposite direction. “If you want to know how much money you are making from the various agencies, instead of having to visit their websites, we can reverse that and aggregate the reporting data to tell you how much money you have made.”

VDS was conceptualised late last year when Mr Coursol was in the United States. With the market crashing and slim prospects of attracting investments in the country, Mr Coursol and his co-founder Mr Gwyn Jones decided to build the system on their own and set up their operations in Singapore because of the relatively low cost structure here. 

“I’ve lived in the United States for 10 years, and I know finding other people to work with me there will be expensive. You will not get a very good software engineer for anything less than a six-figure salary. You can find good resources in Singapore and outside of the US for much less than that.” 

Other factors that contributed to low cost structure included the founders’ decision to "virtualise" the service: iSyndica does not have a data centre but instead leverages the Amazon Web Services platform: "We have been running a business that moved from a proof of concept to a revenue-generating reality in four months: the platform now pays for itself!"  Mr Coursol said, adding: "Being in Singapore is useful in more ways than one: as a startup company, we get access to tax exemptions, development grants, mentorship programmes with local technology universities in a growing hub in Southeast Asia with a solid technological infrastructure. This is a great place to start a new business!"

iSyndica provides photographers, footage producers and illustrators with a single platform to manage and distribute their portfolio.

iSyndica’s VDS was officially launched in May, and its new updates are released every three weeks. For example, since its launch, new features which have been added include support for video distribution and vector art. In the pipeline are plans for more reporting functions, promotions and syndication of images to social networks.

VDS is currently offered as a subscription-based service for US$4.99 and up a month, but the company also offers a pay-as-you-go model, with a free subscription plan on which photographers pay as little as 1 cent to send a photo to an agency.    

And it is not just photos and videos. “We started with stock photographs but the distribution platform can be used for pretty much anything that is digital - stock video, audio, ebooks, music, and even for physical products.”

iSyndica has its sights on a market that is worth, by Mr Coursol’s estimates, about US$2 billion a year for stock photography, US$300 million for stock video, US$10 billion for ebooks and about US$100 billion for physical products. “iSyndica aims at facilitating a certain percentage of those transactions, taking a minute share of revenue as we do. By distributing across multiple categories we aim to be more resilient, as well as wanting to fully leverage the technology we are putting in place, to its maximal potential,” said Mr Coursol.