Portrait of Tekin Tatar with the "inkify" effect applied

Since SCHMOOZY FOX helps companies with business development and brand building projects aimed at helping them create funky brands, no wonder the site called befunky.com attracted my attention when I was surfing the web.

Befunky.com is a web application that allows create great effects for your photos – in a funky way. Today, SCHMOOZY FOX is happy to publish the first interview of the new year with the founder of befunky.com from Istanbul Tekin Tatar and learn about his plans for this project.

SCHMOOZYFOX: Tekin, in a couple of sentences, what’s befunky.com all about?

Tekin Tatar: BeFunky is an easy-to-use web application that allows anyone to create amazingly rich, professional-quality artwork from digital photos with a single click.

SCHMOOZYFOX: There are other photo editing sites out there, how does befunky.com differ from them?

Tekin Tatar: First of all, we look at photo editing from a different perspective. Our perspective is “One-Click Creative Photo Edting.” At BeFunky.com, anyone can create great-looking artwork from photos simply by uploading images, clicking on the desired photo effect and letting BeFunky take care of the rest. On the other side, traditional photo editing sites or software take a lot of time to achieve the same result and you need photo editing experience/talent to complete all those steps.

Second, some photo effects like cartoonizer, impressionist, oil painting use very sophisticated state-of-the-art image processing and computer vision engine techniques developed entirely by BeFunky. It is nearly impossible to reproduce these effects on other photo editing sites. We are certainly ahead  of them in terms of quality.

SCHMOOZYFOX: Do you earn money based on subscriptions? The free option of your site is nice, but it’s accompanied by banner ads. Do you have to pay to get rid of them?

A befunky.com screenshot

Tekin Tatar: It’s been only 3 months since we started to charge for premium features. We call this service BeFunky Plus. BeFunky Plus service makes it easy for individuals and businesses to benefit from high-end, professional looking photo creativity with minimal impact on their bottom line. The service includes features like higher resolution editing, commercial rights usage, outputs without watermarks, and yes, an ad-free experience.

Yes, we are making money. We are not cash flow positive yet but we know we can be.

SCHMOOZYFOX: And what’s your personal funky story? What prompted you to create this business?

Tekin Tatar: I previously spent 3 years at McCann Relationship Marketing as a business development  director at Istanbul office.

We first started with the idea of drawing people’s cartoons manually and selling them through a website. Think about a street corner artist opening a web based shop. The artist was Mehmet Ozkanoglu – although he was not actually working in the street ! He is one of our co-founders and Creative Director of BeFunky.

An image from the befunky.com site edited using the "old photo" effect

We received positive feedback to this idea and then decided to build this business in a totally automated version. The challenge was, “How can we give the power of the talented person to an ordinary person?” We met with Tolga Birdal, who is our other co-founder and Chief Engineer of BeFunky. Tolga’s engineering talent, Mehmet’s creative vision and my business mind came together to form BeFunky.

BeFunky has achieved tremendous growth very quickly. To date, nearly 100 million digital artwork pieces have been created using the instant online service at BeFunky.com. We attract more than 1 million unique visitors a month.

SCHMOOZYFOX: As someone with passion for funky brands, I want to know what makes your brand funky, apart from its name?

Tekin Tatar: There are a lot of facts but the most important part is this: people love BeFunky, because they feel creative with their photos and have fun with their experience. This in a way goes against conventional wisdom telling us that an individual can’t be creative unless he/she has the talent and experience!

BeFunky shows that this is not true. We are changing the way people perceive photo editing.  We are empowering people to be funky and feel funky – that’s what it means!

SCHMOOZYFOX: Finally, what would be your advice to all entrepreneurs thinking of building funky brands?

Tekin Tatar: Find good people who will be your soul-mates through the journey. Every founder and employee should be passionate about the product. If there is no passion it becomes ordinary. When it is ordinary it is not funky.

Don’t underestimate details. People love details. Every funky brand is obsessively designed to be perfect in detail.

Marketing is not all about spending money on PR or creating campaigns. Marketing starts from the very beginning. Spend time on your logo, colors, mantra etc. Make sure that it sounds fun and/or makes people happy.

SCHMOOZY FOX: thanks for sharing your passions with SCHMOOZY FOX, and I wish you a lot of success with your funky venture in 2010!

Photo of yours truly with befunky.com effects applied. I tried to make it look foxy and I think I have succeeded!

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2. Thaneeya McArdle talks about her funky art and personal brand
3. Marlies Dekkers talks about her lingerie revolution
4. Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca.com, talks about his company’s brand values
5. Martin Bachmann, CEO of Maurice Lacroix talks about authenticity and achievement