What was the goal?

A new technology only works at scale if the people using it trust it before they fully understand it. Photographers weren't being asked to try a new tool. They were being asked to change how their entire business operated, with no other business in the industry to point to as proof it worked. I was hired as in-house CMO to build a marketing structure that could earn that trust across every lab we touched, without the capital to buy market share the way a larger competitor could.

Trust doesn't scale the way advertising does. It scales one consistent experience at a time, repeated until it becomes the expectation.

Solution

I ran the full marketing structure, selling both the software and the physical equipment through every channel available. Growth had to come from consistency, not spend, so every lab and every photographer needed the same experience regardless of scale. That consistency was the actual product being sold, more than the technology itself.

As the network grew from 50 labs to 100, that same trust-building approach became the thing that drew serious acquisition interest. Two of the largest players in the industry evaluated the opportunity directly, a signal that the market itself had shifted from skeptical to convinced.

Results

Eastman Kodak acquired ProShots, and the deal closed within about a year. Eastman Kodak became a client of mine after the acquisition, a relationship that grew directly out of the trust built during the ProShots engagement.

‍