Seize the App!

What is the mission of your company or project?

Seize’s mission is to empower everyone to confidently seize life’s moments with great photos that capture it.

Describe the problem you are solving.

When at a popular tourist attraction, people want pictures. To get these pictures,  travelers are settling for the lackluster photo taking quality of selfie sticks, tripods, and strangers. Selfie sticks and tripods aren’t able to capture the full scene of the moment. Many resort to asking strangers, but strangers are not incentivized and sometimes lack skills to take acceptable photos. Solutions for booking professional photographers in advance exist, but people are satisfied with pictures from their smartphone because of the recent increase in smartphone camera quality. Therefore, they do not need to pay the high price point of a professional photographer for their “in the moment”/casual adventures. 
 

What is your company/product about and how does it solve the problem? 

Seize is a marketplace app that provides an in the moment photo taking service with photo takers that are readily available in scenic spots. We are unique because we can guarantee that people will receive “in the moment” quality photos safely. Photo taker skills are vetted through reviews and their portfolio. Photo takers take the pictures on their device, and we disable screenshots and the ability to save photos locally. With Seize, users are able to provide real time feedback to the photo takers as the photos are being sent during the shoot.

Why are you seeking funding and how will you spend the funding?

We are seeking funding to take our app to market. Because Seize is a dual sided marketplace, we will need funding for marketing and operational costs to begin our go to market strategy.

Who is on your team?

Al Tearjen and Dana Wiggins are avid travelers and software engineers that co-founded Seize. 

Al Tearjen 

• Al was recently featured in a business journal and you can read her article here. 
• Al is an avid traveler and a passionate entrepreneur. Al has always struggled to get the best pictures when she travels to the most amazing places. Strangers, selfies and tripods, just don't do it for her. When building Seize, she has made it her personal mission to understand her customers through her own pain points. She really hopes that everyone can really live in the moment with Seize and not have to worry about getting great pictures to capture it.
  Al graduated with two bachelor degrees from the University of California, Davis in Computer Science and Chemical Engineering. Besides traveling for fun, she has also traveled to Bolivia to work on an engineering project to provide sanitation infrastructure to a village in need.

Dana Wiggins 

• Dana is a technology entrepreneur who is passionate about solving everyday life problems. She first had the idea for Seize in 2019 when exploring San Francisco during her summer internship at Zillow. When she eventually worked up the courage to do solo traveling in the city, she realized the need for an on-demand quick photoshoot service. After talking about her idea to everyone that would listen, Dana discussed the idea with Al during a routine pandemic friend checkup which led to the birth of Seize. Dana is an alumna of the University of Maryland: College Park with a bachelor degree in Computer Engineering. She has over 2 years of experience working as a software engineer at Fortune 500 companies. When she's not coding for Seize, she's either photographing her home cook meals or traveling internationally to cross off "visiting all seven continents" from her bucket list.

Thank you for investing in Seize! With every dollar invested, know that it is going towards helping individuals in the world seize every moment.