Luke Beard is the CEO & Founder of Exposure. Exposure is a beautiful website for your photo stories (and the platform we use to share beautiful stories of some of our favorite entrepreneurs). From England to San Francisco to Atlanta, Luke's journey has been filled with hard work, a touch of luck, good timing, a solid circle of support, and a creative eye for design.
On March 28, he joined a packed house of fellow SaaS professionals to share more on the past four years of Exposure, his love for MARTA, and founder lessons learned along the way.
Check out the video recap and our photo story below.
Um no, zero-trained photographer! Or is it YouTube trained Photographer? I have never had formal training in anything I’ve ever done. I'm much more the self-teach/tutorial website generation of people. YouTube University--I graduated with honors, I think!
Learning anything has never been easier, as long as you have the time. I was fortunate enough to have a lot of time.
Being part photographer helps me build photography related products a lot better.
Exposure doesn’t have any atypical startup story to it, apart from I built it 'cause I needed it.
It all began in Estonia, while shooting chairs in a prison.
I took all these pictures of Haggard-ass chairs and when I came home, I didn’t have anywhere to put these photos and the story around the prison.
There was nothing that was going to be easy to tell this story, which kind of is the whole emphasis of Exposure.
In 2013, Luke put content front and center, which allowed everything else to fall away.
If I’m able to display content in such a way that people are emotionally connected to it through just layout, there’s a bunch of stuff there.
To get their first customer, they did a sketch, beta, business model.
Sketch: You only show your close friends
Beta: A small group of people that you think might be ideal users
...and if that works, turn it into a Business
After this is where Exposure’s story deviates from the traditional “startup” story. Most "hustling" entrepreneurs focus on growth business practices like customer success and marketing -- Exposure focused on the product. This product-focused mentality brought in their first 800 customers.
Virality is built in. 89% of the use cases are ‘I want to publish this content and share it with the world.’
We created an avenue for people to tell stories but in a very specific fashion, visually based.
Both Atlanta United and the Atlanta Falcons utilize the Exposure platform.
In Atlanta, Luke talks a lot more about this business and metrics vs in San Francisco, which is where he focused more on product.
Atlanta Tech Village has lots more business and client people. [In San Francisco] I don’t think I ever have one conversation about churn.
Building for a reason is 100 times better than building for an opportunity.
© 2026 Atlanta Ventures
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