Some­times, the old­est ideas in the tech world are the best — if they have endur­ing appeal, they can gen­er­al­ly be mined ad infini­tum for new twists and spins to keep them fresh and cur­rent; and that, prod­uct man­agers take note, is pre­cise­ly what a new iOS app called Repix has done…and with spec­tac­u­lar suc­cess, too.

An app to make artists of us all

Repix allows users to remix pho­tos with a ver­i­ta­ble artist’s palate of dif­fer­ent effects. Hav­ing debuted in the App Store just over a week ago, it was down­loaded 1.5 mil­lion times in the first sev­en days alone. Now that’s the kind of suc­cess rate that might have the aver­age prod­uct man­ag­er or chief rev­enue offi­cer hug­ging them­selves with jubilation.

Repix’s devel­op­ers have clev­er­ly built on the pho­to fil­ter­ing tech­nol­o­gy which did so much to fuel Instagram’s suc­cess. And they seem to have sur­passed pre­vi­ous stan­dards: users can take a pho­to with their smart­phones, or access one that’s already in the device or their Face­book accounts, and then paint over facets of the image using Repix’s suite of paint­brush­es. And boy, do those paint­brush­es work: the image can have its col­or enhanced in a range of styles (cur­rent­ly, Vin­tage, Hol­ly­wood and Bleach), it can be ‘pos­ter­ized’, or giv­en a mas­ter­piece paint­ing look in the style of Van Gogh and oth­er artis­tic mas­ters. You can even add a lens flare.

And it doesn’t stop there: dif­fer­ent brush­es can be added on top of one anoth­er and, if you think you’ve over­done it, there’s a neat “undo” brush to edit the excess away.

A sim­ple busi­ness model

The ques­tion on the lips of most prod­uct man­agers and chief rev­enue offi­cers at this point is: so what’s the busi­ness mod­el?  The app comes with a set of free brush­es, but users who want to add a lit­tle more to their artis­tic reper­toire can make in-app pur­chas­es of addi­tion­al brush­es.  They cost $1.99 singly, or $4.99 for a bundle.

While some deft PR has undoubt­ed­ly helped to dri­ve the tor­rent of down­loads, the major fac­tor appears to be Insta­gram and oth­er social sharing.

Repix isn’t anoth­er pho­to-shar­ing site: cre­ate a mas­ter­piece with its app and you can share it on Twit­ter, Tum­blr, Insta­gram and Face­book by using the hash­tag #repix.  Maybe that’s why it’s
gone viral.