Software Developer Leonardo Almeida Introduces His People to People Project

How did you get to your industry? What career moves did you make to get to your current position?

Since before I started my bachelor degree in Computer Science, I already knew software development would be the most pleasant job I could get involved with. I also liked to learn Mathematics and related subjects since I was very young and I´ve never stopped studying it during my whole career.

I have been a software developer for more than 20 years. I have been involved with many kinds of software development projects, since CMS platforms to digital certification libraries. A strong involvement with computer graphics has risen since I started attending college.

I live in Brazil and here there is no strong game development market. It was a natural move to get involved initially with digital image processing, and later with all aspects related to research and development of artistic photo effects and filters.

Can you tell us more about the Picture to People project?

Picture to People is a computer graphics project that aims to offer high quality, innovative and even exclusive graphic design applications to everyone, since common people that need create graphics sometimes to people that work with graphic design.

Despite the software used in this project started being developed almost 20 years ago, the project has a portal since December 2008. That site was created to let people use most of our graphic design tools directly on browser. The users themselves started to call the project “P2P” since its site was published online, and I kindly accepted this nickname.

One of the most interesting features of P2P is that everything is created totally from scratch. All graphic software libraries used are planned, researched and implemented to be applied in the project. This way, we have freedom to use our creativity and develop many innovative and exclusive graphic apps that cannot be found in any other design software, free or commercial.

After more than five years online, we have collected hundreds of suggestions from users, which resulted in dozens of improvements and new releases, so now I believe currently we have a mature product with thousands of free online graphic design apps that can be really useful to everybody that needs to produce high quality graphics.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve encountered related to your business and how did you overcome it?

Despite computer graphics software development is a very complex area that many times requires an advanced Mathematics knowledge, the biggest challenge concerning P2P project was giving it publicity. We needed to struggle a lot before finding some good ways to make people around the world knowing about it.

In the current online market, no matter you like it or not, everybody is very dependent on the search engines to get noticed by the general public. This means you really need to learn about SEO and related subjects to have a change to improve your business for long-term success. The biggest problem is that a lot of important information is very hard to get, no matter if you spend a lot of time reading online marketing sites and books.

Where do you see your business going in 2015?

We plan to release dozens of new online photo editor and text logo generators this year. Besides, our schedule has the development of graphic apps in new segments, like photo frame generators and animated Ajax loader creators.

After all these new releases, possibly we will end 2015 having kind of 2 million page views per month. This traffic level would consolidate us as the biggest and most important graphic design apps portal around the world.

If you could leave our readers with one last piece of business advice, what would it be?

Everyone that leads an online project or company must spend a good part of his time involved with learning about SEO and online marking. Never get totally apart of these areas, because they are among the most important subjects concerning your business success.

In a more general sense, no matter what kind of business you have, always make a big effort to hear your customers or users very carefully. Every single complain or suggestion is very important and should not be neglected. Our most important goal must always be to offer a product or service to surprise our customers and make them as satisfied as possible.