While memories may last forever, pictures saved on gadgets can completely vanish all of a sudden.

Inspired by his own experience of losing pictures from his cell phone, Kevin Osmond, CEO of digital printing service Printerous, invested Rp 100 million (US$7,501) to develop a smartphone application called Printerous Moments.

The investment is part of $1.4 million in funds the company secured from Singapore-based Golden Gate Ventures with participation from United States-based firm Sovereign’s Capital and Indonesia’s diversified group Gunung Sewu Kencana in February.

Kevin said the widespread trend among Indonesian millenials who often posted their latest pictures in social media like Facebook and Instagram had inspired the startup to further digitize its printing business with a smartphone app. Previously it had only offered its services through a website.

“After studying the market for a few years, we see that about 50 percent of users of our website access the service through a mobile browser. This is why we developed this mobile application,” Kevin said during the launch event recently.

The app aims to attract 200,000 users this year. With the app, users can upload photos from their smartphones to the Printerous system for printing on a wide range of products, such as photo paper, phone cases and tote bags.

Kevin claimed that the app so far had received a positive response from customers, as it had seen 5,000 downloads in Android’s Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store after its soft launching a few months ago.

Established in 2012, Printerous is a printing marketplace that connects users with about 50 online printing businesses.

The startup offers printing services under three categories, namely Printerous Business for business purposes, such as name cards, Arterous for artistic purposes and Printerous Moments for personal products, such as photo albums.

To expand its reach, Printerous is teaming up with Facebook and Instagram to connect their users with its system, enabling them to directly print pictures from both social media services.

Despite focusing its business on Jakarta, its biggest market so far, Printerous planned to reach new customers across the country, Kevin said.

“We aim to expand our business to other cities, namely Surabaya and Medan, by the third or fourth quarter of this year,” he said.

The startup gets 35 percent of its overall orders for all printing products from old customers, while the majority of orders comes from new customers.

The most popular products ordered by its customers are photo albums, canvas art, polaroid photos and name cards, with prices for its products ranging from Rp 35,000 ($2.63) to Rp 900,000. (ecn)

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