TheLadders.com for Photos?

TechCrunch writes of a pretty cool company I'd never heard of -- SmugMug.

It's basically a photo uploading site (like KodakGallery or Flickr) that aims at the professional/serious hobbyist photographer.

And there's no free version.

Writes TechCrunch:

There is no free version of the service. People pay a minimum of $40 per year to upload photos to the site. Pro accounts, which are $150/year, give photographers a number of tools to add watermarks, and sell downloads as well as prints of their work. The higher level accounts also allow customers to use templates, fully customize the look and feel of their albums (or “galleries” as SmugMug calls them), and even use their own domain names.

Does this work? You bet, to the tune of $10 million in revenue a year, 19 employees, and never having raised a cent of outside capital.

I swear, is Marc C., our CEO running SmugMug in his spare time? Marc likes to say that we're not a Web 2.0 company, just like Don MacAskill does repeatedly in this TechCrunch writeup. And like SmugMug, we've created a niche in a sea of free websites (Monster, CareerBuilder, Hotjobs, etc.) that people are paying for. They pay for premium content (hand-filtered $100k+ jobs in our case ) and industry leading customer service (in both cases). Most importantly for SmugMug (and really the growth of any company with an narrowly defined userbase and a company that charges a premium for what others offer for free) is a laser-focus on listening to their customers and creating a community that people come back to time after time.

Kudos to the SmugMug team!