The average person looks at his or her smartphone a whopping 50-100 times a day. But what do you see when you go to unlock your phone? Nothing but blank space or stagnant wallpaper. 

HelloPhoto is a new mobile app that brings awesome photos to your boring lock screen.

With HelloPhoto, your lock screen is transformed from blank space into a window of your favorite memories, hobbies, and the world around you.

The mobile phone has evolved by leaps and bounds over the course of the past few years, but of all the incredible things we can do with our smartphones, there’s  no denying that one of our favorites is take and share photos.

Need proof? Just look at the meteoric success of Instagram, or TimeHop, the app that shows users photos and other flashbacks from that day in their social media history. TimeHop is at 12 million users and counting, plus they’ve inspired their very own Facebook clone, On This Day.   

Why the Lock Screen?

There were 1.68B Android phones sold in 2014. If each of those people looked at their phones just 50 days per day, that would mean they are seeing a stagnant, empty space 85,000,000,000 times a day, 30,660,000,000,000 a year! 

This brief second of neglected, missed opportunity has the potential to become something great- to reactivate joyful memories, inspire hobbies, and even sell great products of interest. 

"I'm fascinated by lockscreen apps. It's arguably the MOST VALUABLE piece of digital real-estate, considering how frequently we use our phone every day." 

- Ryan Hoover, Founder of Product Hunt.

With HelloPhoto, we’re taking the smartphone-photo connection to the next stage in its evolution.  

Using the HelloPhoto app couldn’t be easier. Just:

HelloPhoto can pull photos from a number of sources, including your phone’s photo library, your social media accounts, and the HelloPhoto marketplace, our in-app store where everyone from professional photographers to brands to other HelloPhoto users can upload collections of photos for other HelloPhoto users to enjoy.  

We’ve seen some incredible progress with HelloPhoto already, and the momentum is building toward even bigger and better things to come.

The first minimal viable product (MVP) version of the Lock Screen photo concept is already fully developed and available for download. Currently, our MVP app is getting several MILLION lock screen photo impressions a day (we hate the work impressions, as that usually means displayed on some banner no one really sees. Our photos are shown smack in the face of our users).  We’ve seen over 150,000 downloads to date and counting, with an average rating of 4.14 and loving fans. 

The HelloPhoto name is an official trademark, and we’ve filed a patent for user-generated content that gets displayed on the lockscreen of a mobile device.

With the next stage of the app fully developed, we’re ready to set our sights on the future and explore exciting new ways to expand the HelloPhoto universe, including pursuing partnerships with leading brands and photography giants like Getty Images to expand the HelloPhoto content library.

Tamio Stehrenberger | CEO
Tamio is a father of three (soon to be four), hockey-playing entrepreneur. He’s your typical sentimental dad who loves to look back at family photos and just happened to realize that your lock screen would be a great way to quickly reminisce old photos. Once he went through most of his photos on his phone within a few weeks, he thought about what other things he would want to see on his lockscreen, and how it could benefit brands, athletes, celebrities, to get in front of their fans several times a day and ultimately convert to some sort of revenue.

Tamio has been involved in several startups as a founder and developed other creative mobile, web, and hardware apps — so his mind is bursting forth with creativity and knowledge of the app business.

Pargat Dhillon | CTO

Pargat is a software engineer who has grown his own software development firm to 50 engineers. He is now thrilled to develop and maintain software for HelloPhoto and build an awesome business.

Scott Warner | Co-Founder, Designer
Scott is a father of eight, award-winning conceptual and industrial designer. After an executive career building products, getting into big-box retailers,  and winning awards for others, Scott decided to break off to build his own creative ideas.