Thomas Breen photos
Bruce Seymour; movie poster printed through his hot app (below).
After designing 500 apps, Bruce Seymour finally struck gold: He built one that rose to the top of the Apple and Google Play charts.
Now the New Haven app developer can proudly say that millions of photos that people nationwide have sent from their smart phones to be printed at CVS and Walmart and Walgreens have gone through an app that was coded primarily in the Elm City.
Seymour is the co-founder and managing director of MEA Mobile, a smart phone app and website development company with offices at 59 Elm St. and in New Zealand.
At the beginning of April, his company’s Photo Prints Now app, which allows iPhone and Android users to send photos from their phones to be printed out at CVS within the hour, reached the number-one trending spot on the Google Play app store charts. That same day, it reached the number six trending spot in the Apple app store, coming in just behind Apple and Google-designed behemoths like Instagram, Youtube, and Snapchat.
“Just dogged perseverance,” Seymour said during an interview in his second-story Elm Street office about what made a New Haven-designed app rise for a moment to the same level as those produced by international tech giants. “And just ignoring rejection, ignoring the no’s.”
With the CVS-focused Photo Prints Now, along with similar MEA-designed apps that send photos from smart phones to be printed at Walgreens and Walmart, Seymour said, MEA’s spin-off company Autopilot Print can now boast having the largest print network in the world, with photo print apps that connect users to over 30,000 retail outlets throughout the country.
New Haven Beckoned
Photo Prints Now’s website.
Born and raised in Plainville, Seymour moved to New Haven in 2007, and launched MEA Mobile in 2010. He and his family live in Wooster Square.
Currently his company’s only Elm City employee, he said he plans on hiring 12 software designers and product managers for the local office within the year. The other 30 members of MEA’s software development and design team are currently based out of New Zealand.
Seymour said he moved to New Haven in the first place for no reason other than the vibrancy of its tech culture. He described walking around downtown New Haven, immersing oneself in Yale’s campus, local museums, cafes, libraries, and co-working spaces as analogous to the “collision culture” that large tech companies like Apple and Google try to cultivate in their Silicon Valley campuses.
Those companies hope to build spaces where people with big ideas and tech know-how can serendipitously run into one another and start plotting the next big tech product, he said. But in New Haven, by virtue of its existing software design talent and the proximity of a world-class university, those entrepreneurial “collisions” happen all the time.
“There’s nothing like it in the world,” he said.
Tinder For Cats
Photo Prints Now hits the top of the Apple and Google Play trending charts in early April.
With a background in display technology, having worked for a company that designed 3‑D displays for car dashboards, Seymour launched MEA Mobile soon after the advent of the iPhone. He saw an opportunity to build a product and then immediately see how successful, or unsuccessful, it could be.
“You can launch an app and you can know the next day what your sales are,” he note.
The availability of comprehensive, real-time analytics spurred his company’s efforts to try and try and try out different apps until finding ones that stuck.
Quite a few did not. One app played music based off of a user’s DNA sequence. Another identified plant species by photo. Another served as a Tinder for cats, encouraging users to swipe left and swipe right depending on the cuteness of the cat picture on view.
But a few did catch, and have, proven successful. In addition to Photo Prints Now and the other phone-to-retail print apps his company produces, MEA has designed iArtView, an app that connects art galleries from around the country with interested customers, and PicsOS, tailored for student and school photography.
The key to his company’s success, Seymour said, is not just perseverance, but also an “AB Testing” development strategy: His company will hold focus groups with 100 different people for a question as small as whether a button in an app should be red or purple. Depending on what the group decides, that’s where the company goes.
“We’re very data-driven,” he said.
Along the way, his company received around $200,000 in loans from the state Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) as well as roughly $50,000 in state CTNext grants. Currently, Seymour said, all of the financing for his ventures comes from the private sector.
As for what’s next, he said, his company is looking into new canvas print and customized photo projects to build off of what Autoprint Pilot currently provides.
And with a trail of hundreds of apps in MEA’s wake, he said, there are likely many more in its future as the company continues to build, build, build and see what the market will bear.