Going to the chapels: weddings are a marriage made in heaven for Raleigh photo-sharing app.

• Author: Huler, Scott
• Position: FEATURE

Justin Miller and a co-worker recently took a lunchtime stroll along trendy Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, eventually passing a group of suit-jacketed executive types. Miller, 6 feet 4 inches and heavily tattooed, turned to Andy Heyman--a co-founder of Raleigh-based Deja Mi Inc. and also plenty inked--and laughed. "Do you think they're saying, 'Those are the guys with the wedding-picture-sharing app?"

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Probably not, but there's nothing funny about the growth of WedPics, a mobile-device application that allows wedding guests to share photos on a Web-based album--a single-event, invitation-only, micro-Facebook. In April, Deja Mi raised $1.1 million from investors, including Bob Young, co-founder of Raleigh-based Red Hat Inc. and founder of lulu.com, a self-publishing website. Combined with money that WedPics raised a year ago, Miller and his team are racing through the first part of modern tech success: creating an app that shows enough potential to lure investment. "We're growing at a rate of 100,000 guests a month," Miller, 32, says. "Over 75,000 couples have created accounts with WedPics, which is 5% of the American wedding market. Upwards of 2,500 weddings every weekend use WedPics." It has a user list--those with albums or visiting them--of about 400,000.

WedPics started through the "freemiurn" model--the app is free but users pay for greater function--but is now completely gratis. That pushes into part two of today's tech success: finding a way to make money. WedPics will be one of the first partners of Picture.com, a new arm of lulu.com that turns online photos into a physical album. The collaboration will allow customers to collect wedding photos into saleable products, which start at $34.95. Deja Mi will get a cut of that, though Miller won't disclose the share.

An N.C. State University School of Design grad and former art director at Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp.'s internal advertising agency, Miller waited in line to buy the first version of the iPhone. He saw apps as the next big thing but admits weddings were not in their sights when he and three others started Deja Mi in his Raleigh basement in December 2010. Its first app, also called Deja Mi, was a crowd-sourced content generator that enabled concertgoers to share pictures and videos during a show. It never caught on. So they thought about who might be attracted to unlimited sharing within a single, invitation-only event. "Then we laser focused on...