Gfranq

» see gfranq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Gfranq opened on 2 March 2012. Artyom Orlov wrote it and Vlada Orlova marketed it, and the Russian coverage tended to introduce them as a young married couple rather than as a startup, which was accurate and also the reason nobody expected much. The product was a photo editor that ran in a browser before it ran on a phone, taking images up to 2400 by 2400 pixels, with forty-eight filters imitating film stocks and darkroom processes, and a personal page to keep the results on that the site called a pinakothek.

Then it grew faster than anything two people should be able to handle. Igor Ryabenkiy put in seed money that May. By September there were 500,000 registered users and 5 million saved photos. A November redesign took it to 920,000 users and 8 million photos, and in December it passed a million accounts and shipped collages. Nine months from launch to seven figures, in one language, on angel money.

Everyone called it the Russian Instagram, which was meant as a compliment and functioned as a death sentence. Facebook had bought Instagram in April 2012, two months after Gfranq opened, for about a billion dollars. Gfranq's own sharing buttons posted out to VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook and Twitter, so it was a satellite of larger networks from the first day rather than a place people lived.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the filters ~

The editor was the genuinely good part and it is what the reviews of the period spend their time on. Forty-eight filters is a lot for 2012, and they were built to imitate specific film and print behavior rather than to apply a color wash. A 2400 pixel ceiling was generous when the competition was squeezing everything into a square for a 640 pixel phone screen. Somebody who cared about photographs could use Gfranq and get a result they would keep.

~ what a million users is worth ~

A million registered accounts in nine months is a real achievement and it converted into nothing. There was no subscription and no advertising business worth the name, and the angel round was never going to fund a second act against a competitor with Facebook's balance sheet behind it. VKontakte already held Russian photo albums by default and Instagram localized into Russian while Gfranq was still growing.

Those million accounts were also almost entirely Russian-speaking, which is how a product with seven figures of users can be completely invisible from Ankara. I have no memory of Gfranq and no reason I would have. It never had an English interface worth using and it never needed one.

~ after ~

The service stopped on 31 December 2014, two years and ten months after it opened. In May 2018 somebody unconnected to the founders registered gfranq.com, and today the domain bounces you through a numbered subdomain to a page of parking advertisements. Eight million photographs were uploaded to a pinakothek that no longer has an address.

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