User:Kozminski46335/sandbox

Foap.com is an online platform and marketplace that connects brands with a community of over 4.5 million creators worldwide, offering creative, diverse and video content. It allows brands to collaborate with photographers and videographers, who can respond to and enhance brands performance through creator-generated content. Foap provides tools for brands to scale up content production, build community engagement, and effectively market and submit their content.

Key Aspects
The platform was launched with the aim of democratizing stock photography, providing an opportunity for smartphone users to earn from their photos while offering businesses access to relevant and diverse images.

Business Model
Foap's initial business model revolved around selling photos uploaded by users. Photos can be uploaded by users from their phone to the Foap Market via social photo apps on iOS and Android. Photos then pass through a community-check before the photo gets published on the Foap Market. Photos are rated five times from five other "Foapers" with a rating of one to five. If a creator gets to score an average rating of 2.5 or more, their photo is published. Buyers can then search and license these photos for $10 each with a 50/50 revenue split between Foap and the users if a photo sells.

Additionally, the company offers Foap Missions, where brands set specific image-related tasks for the community, and Premium Missions, which are similar but with higher rewards and more winners. Brands can write a description, add a mission title, and state the deadline and reward, which can be hundreds up to thousands of dollars. This is the amount that the brand will purchase the best image for.

History
Foap was founded in 2011 by David Los and Alexandra Bylund, with its first funding round on November 13, 2012. Foap has raised over $5M over 4 rounds. It's latest funding round was a Series A round on Dec 08, 2014 for $2.3M. 5 investors participated in the last round, including Gary Vaynerchuk, Jordan Rednor, Jeff Zucker, Niklas Ostberg.

Challenges and growth
As of 2014, Foap had 500,000 active users and was adding about 130,000 approved photos every month. One of the biggest challenges in its early stages was creating a minimum viable product that was good enough for launch. The company has continually worked on new features and improvements to enhance its service.

Clients
Since its launch in 2012, the list of clients Foap has worked with has been growing, including Google, Heineken, Volvo Group, Pernod Ricard, MasterCard, VisitSweden, Sony, Lufthansa, Priceline, VisitEngland.