A letter from the founder

Hi, I’m Rohan. I built Tellisto, and I’m writing this from Sydney. Tellisto runs the back-office for photography studios in Australia and New Zealand. It handles the enquiry, the booking, the GST invoice and the gallery, all under your brand instead of ours.

It started with two of my closest friends, both working photographers. The same story kept coming up in our chats, year after year. A good tool gets popular, then it gets bought. The price goes up, the support gets worse, and the photographers who built their business on it get treated like a line item. I watched it wear down people I love. I never got over how powerless they were, with their work stuck inside someone else’s quarterly targets.

So I built the thing they wanted. It handles the unglamorous work: the enquiry that arrives at midnight, the booking, the invoice, the follow-up a year later. Galleries stay live as long as you keep them. The white-labelling is thorough enough that your clients will think you built it yourself (which is the point). Tax and payments work properly in Australia and New Zealand, because I live here too.

I’m a photographer as well, though probably not your kind. I point my camera at the night sky, where there are no clients, no deposits and nothing to deliver. The business know-how came from my friends. The software is my part, and Tellisto puts the two together.

I started with galleries, and the rest of the back-office grew around them. I’m not stopping there. If something makes your business a little fairer or a little easier, I’ll consider building it. I do well when you do well. This is a business, not a charity, and I’d rather say so up front.

We grow when you do.

It’s early, so there’s no wall of customer quotes here yet. What you get instead is a dated pledge on the pricing page, a real person who answers email, and twenty-five founding spots at A$25 (NZ$25) a month for the photographers who want to help shape it and a real person who answers email. If that’s the kind of company you’ve been waiting for, come build it with me.

Rohan