Inside the Start-Up That Brings Your Instagram Pics to Life

There's bootstrapping your tech start-up and not taking "money from the man," and then there's extreme bootstrapping, which includes wooden sleeping boxes.

Social Print Studio co-founders Ben Lotan and George Sylvain say the sleeping box is suitably cave-like for engineers working around the clock. In fact, when they had a shared house of fellow artistic geek renegades, Lotan slept in a sleeping box in the living room and can vouch for the cozy experience.  

PCMag went to meet the team at Social Print Studio's industrial loft in SOMA and did the interview perched on bar stools around one of these sleeping boxes (after checking no one was asleep inside first).

Social Print Studio is a culturally high-brow tech start-up. Aside from the sleeping boxes, there's a library with pop art chairs and postmodernist theorist tomes, a music jam room with full-size drum kits, and four types of coffee machine in the kitchen. The bathroom is painted Pepto Bismol pink, and there are Victorian-era taxidermy animals on the walls. About two dozen 20-somethings in fleece and/or exaggerated knitwear are huddled around laptops on sofas or shared worktables. So yes, your classic San Francisco start-up, with a twist.

If you're not familiar with its products, Social Print Studios takes your photos—from cameras, phones, or Instagram—and turns them into artistic prints. Take that sunset snap and have it printed on a small square ($12) or magnet ($14). Or create a photobook ($25), calendar ($40), or photo album ($60), among other things. The company's products have become the sort of cool social currency previously afforded to MOO cards at tech meetups.

The whole thing started modestly in 2006, in Ben Lotan's dorm room at UC San Diego. He printed up his Facebook friend list as a poster and people soon requested their own. One simple e-commerce site later, and the orders came pouring in. "I'm not sure I could do it again, start a company like that," laughed Lotan. "I was very naive. But it worked and I learned a lot."

Meanwhile, Brit-born Sylvain was quietly languishing inside an e-commerce team for a major packaged goods company. "They were at the careers fair in London. I needed to get a job, and they said they'd give me a car. It sounded like a good idea at the time," he said.

A few years later, Sylvain started looking around for something cool to do with his newly acquired business jargon and hard-won marketing-communications credentials. He had just moved to the U.S. and saw a job ad Lotan posted on Craigslist. "I did a search and Ben had a bunch of press about printing up these posters so it sounded legit; a real company. I contacted him and we started Social Print Shop, which became Printstagr.am and then, finally, Social Print Studio, as it is today."

The secret to reaching a rumored $6.4 million in revenue for 2014, according to Inc's round-up of successful San Francisco start-ups, is that the products are good, produced on a high-end HP Indigo Digital Press rather than the standard photo print machines.

As a tech start-up, they are naturally data-driven but they take consumer and partner suggestions seriously, which often leads to new ideas, like the metal prints Social Print Studio just launched.

"Sometimes we just ask random people who drop by," said Lotan.

"We just want to delight our customers," said Sylvain. "Then they keep on coming back, buying our new products or re-ordering mini squares to have physical mementoes of their ephemeral Instagram feed."

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In order to pay the bills, the company has also become a creative agency of sorts, doing lucrative gigs for Mercedes Benz and other corporate clients. Bootstrapping means being clever with your resources. Plus they built some new code for the car job, which they could then re-use within their own web app.

So what's next for the company? Possibly a move to the Midwest, apparently.

"It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that you have to be in San Francisco, or more specifically, in SOMA, to make it as a tech start-up," said Lotan. "But we're not convinced."

"It's a very expensive city," agrees Sylvain. "We could do this from anywhere. Maybe even Kansas City."

The two co-founders paused and then shrugged. It was hard to tell if they were being serious. As Lotan pointed out, "We're a print shop with an e-commerce site and app, do we really need to be here?"

Anyway, the interview was drawing to a close. Someone on the tech team needed a nap; they'd been coding late into the night. We moved to the kitchen to get more caffeine and let them crawl into the dark recess and under a soft blanket.

Just another day in the San Francisco tech scene.