Guided photo editing for marketing teams

The moment arrives when a marketing coordinator needs to resize a product photo, swap a background, or adjust brightness for a social post — and their company's license is Photoshop, which was bought for the one designer who left six months ago. They spend 40 minutes on YouTube, produce something wrong, and either ask a contractor or just use the original bad photo. This happens every week.

The gap persists because Adobe's incentive is to keep professional editors paying for professional software. Simplifying the interface would cannibalize their positioning and upset their core buyer — the IT or creative director who selected Photoshop for power, not ease. The actual daily user (the coordinator, the social media manager, the small business owner) is invisible in that purchase decision. Nobody is complaining loudly to Adobe on their behalf because they're not the buyer.

Existing simple editors hand users a blank canvas with sliders and filters, which is fine for one-off consumer edits but useless when someone needs to apply a company template, maintain consistent color treatment across a product catalog, or resize fifty images to exact dimensions for a media kit. Users specifically say the problem is not just 'hard to use' but 'not intuitive' and requiring 'many steps to achieve a certain look' — meaning the issue is workflow depth, not just UI clutter.

This is a business because the need recurs constantly — new product launches, seasonal campaigns, social calendars — and the cost of not having it is either a contractor invoice or wasted hours from a non-designer. Marketing teams at companies too small to have a dedicated designer but too professional to use consumer apps are permanently underserved. Churn risk is low because the workflow becomes embedded in how the team produces assets.

What to build

Build a browser-based editor where marketing teams upload brand templates (fonts, colors, logo safe zones, output dimensions) once, and every subsequent edit — background removal, resizing, color grading — is constrained to those brand parameters so non-designers can't produce off-brand output.

Where to start

Start with e-commerce brands running on Shopify that need consistent product photography edits — background removal and resizing to marketplace specs — because those jobs are repetitive, the output dimensions are known, and the pain of getting it wrong (rejected Amazon listings) is financially concrete.

The hard part

Getting the template ingestion right is technically hard — teams store brand assets in wildly inconsistent formats (PDFs, old PSDs, Google Slides exports) and the first onboarding experience lives or dies on whether the brand setup takes 10 minutes or 2 hours.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per team (not per seat), tiered by number of brand workspaces and monthly export volume — starts around $49/month, expands as teams add product lines or sub-brands.