FotoPlace CEO: Live your life in a movie

Yang Liu, founder of FotoPlace. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Now, FotoPlace has reached a user base of about 30 million, and in July it has just finished the A round of fundraising, getting enough money to develop the app further.

Asked if the app could be the Chinese Instagram, Yang said the latter is already the perfect tool for catching moments and taking snapshots. What she wants with FotoPlace is to help people keep their memories alive by creating picture stories.

This August, Yang Liu gave an interview to China Daily. During the interview, she talked about the development of FotoPlace and its future. Below are excerpts from the interview.

Recording stories in your life

Q: You once said that Fotoplace is a product made by and for "artistic youth", what functions were included at first?

Y: We issued our first version on December 3, 2014. That version didn't have the movie mode picture processing tool. We offered users places where films were shot, where celebrities have been, and users may upload their creative pictures at these places. It was like making an e-version of a postcard. Or they can make it a picture within a picture, like my idol Christopher Moloney did.

Q: The movie mode picture processing tool in FotoPlace vastly increased its users base, does it now seem like a product for "common youth"?

Y: Literally speaking, many people are not "artistic youth", but every person has his own feelings and thoughts to express. When we travel, when we are watching a movie, we may feel something deep in us, the resonation with the place, the people or the story. I remember a Weibo user once said, "Not everyone is an ‘a(chǎn)rtistic youth', but no one would refuse a handy way of expressing their feelings and attitude in an artistic manner." In fact, many people like to take photos – taking photos itself is a way of expressing their feelings. Many people are not good at expressing their feelings, so we provide them a large sentence base to choose from. But for those who are good at it, they can write on the photo something more personal, more expressive. So I don't think there's a conflict in attracting different groups of users.