Shootday Co-Founder Samer Bejjani on Building a Global Photo and Video Business

Most people who start a photo or video company come from behind the camera. Samer Bejjani didn’t. He trained as a software engineer, spent a decade building ventures (including a growth marketing agency), and teamed up with his brother Serge, a civil engineer turned MBA, to launch Shootday. Neither had a photography background, and that’s what Samer credits with giving them an edge. They approached a creative industry the way an operator would approach any other market: as a business problem waiting to be solved.

What they’ve built since is a global production partner that handles event photography, video production, and corporate headshots in more than 150 cities across 40+ countries, with over 5,000 shoots delivered for brands like Amazon, Google, and Meta. The business is entirely bootstrapped, does millions in annual revenue, and runs on a model that intentionally rejects the marketplace approach most of their competitors chose.

In the interview below, Samer walks us through the early experimentation, the hard decision to abandon consumer work, the turning point that revealed the real business underneath, and the philosophy that’s guiding their next chapter.

Tell us about yourself and your business.

I’m Samer Bejjani, co-founder of Shootday, a global photo and video production partner for businesses. We provide event photography and videography, video production and corporate headshots in 150+ cities across 40+ countries. We’ve delivered more than 5,000 shoots for over 1,000 brands, including Amazon, Google and Meta, and we hold a 4.9/5 average client rating.

I run Shootday with my brother, Serge, who is our CEO. I started out as a software engineer, then spent more than a decade building ventures, including a growth marketing agency where I helped startups grow and win customers. Today I lead growth, tech and product at Shootday: how we win customers, and the systems and automation running underneath.

Serge comes from the other side. He trained as a civil engineer, did an MBA and spent years in corporate and management roles. As CEO, he runs the company and keeps operations, delivery and the team moving in step. Our skills fit together, and neither of us came from photography. That turned out to be our edge: we approached the industry as a business problem to solve, not a craft to master.

How does your business make money?

We’re a service business. Companies pay us to handle their photo and video coverage end to end, anywhere in the world’s major business hubs.

What they pay for is much more than the shoot. We own the whole chain: the brief, choosing and briefing the right crew, the shoot itself, editing, delivery and the customer experience in between. The client deals with one partner and gets the same standard whether the shoot is in London, Dubai or Singapore.

What was your inspiration for starting the business?

Serge and I always wanted to build something together, in a space where we had a real edge. That mattered more to us than any single idea. We tried a few ventures first and treated each one as an experiment: does it play to what we’re good at, can we run it better than the companies already there, and is there a real business underneath?

Shootday was the first one that answered yes on every count. Businesses that needed photo and video had two options: expensive agencies that couldn’t scale beyond their home city, or marketplaces that handed them a list of freelancers and left all the risk with the client. We were sure there was a better way: one partner that owns the whole job and delivers the same quality in every city. That needed exactly what we each brought, growth and tech on my side and operations and management on Serge’s, so we went all in.

How and when did you launch the business?

We launched Shootday in the MENA region. Our very first shoot was a business event in Abu Dhabi. In the early days we kept things broad and served both businesses and consumers while we learned what worked.

How is the business funded?

Shootday is 100% bootstrapped. We have no investors and no outside capital. Our clients fund us, which keeps us honest: we grow on merit, not on a funding round.

That forces us to be frugal and efficient. We don’t waste money, and we lean heavily on automation and AI to run the operation. Today the business is fully self-funded and does millions in revenue a year.

How did you find your first few clients or customers?

Our first clients came from our own network in the MENA region, where we launched. From there, it was word of mouth. We worked hard to understand what each client actually needed and to deliver more than we promised, and those clients recommended us to their colleagues and to other companies.

What was your first year in business like?

A lot of experimenting. We said yes to almost everything, consumers and businesses, every type of shoot, because we were still working out where we fit. That taught us a lot, but it also spread us thin.

Being bootstrapped made it harder. Cash was tight, the business came before our own salaries, and we were betting the model would work before we had the proof. What kept us going was that clients were happy with what we delivered. That told us there was something real underneath.

What strategies did you use to grow the business?

From the start, we treated growth as a series of tests. We tried multiple channels to acquire customers and measured which ones were actually profitable, not just which ones brought volume. Then we doubled down on what worked and cut the rest.

We did the same with customers. We analyzed which types of clients were the best fit for us, and that led to our biggest move. We had been serving both consumers and businesses. Consumer work didn’t have enough retention, and it didn’t spread the way business work did: one good corporate shoot leads to the next event, the next office, the next country. So we went B2B only, and walked away from a significant chunk of revenue to do it.

On the B2B side, the strategy was simple: outcompete everyone on service. That meant being clear about what we are, what we do, and what we don’t. We’re not a tech platform or a marketplace where you browse and pick a photographer. We’re an end-to-end service. The client gives us one brief, and we own everything from A to Z.

We also narrowed what we offer. Instead of covering every type of shoot, we focused on a few core categories, starting with event coverage, then video production and corporate headshots, and went very deep on each. Every improvement to the brief, the crew, the editing or the way we manage expectations compounds when you do the same kind of work thousands of times.

Finally, we made sure clients could book us in every major business hub. That unlocked multi-city events and much bigger contracts, because a global company would rather work with one partner than manage a different photographer in every city.

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?

The biggest challenge came from our own decision not to be a marketplace. A marketplace connects a client with a photographer and steps back. We chose to own the whole experience instead: as automated and tech-driven as possible behind the scenes, while also being people-centric and relationship-driven.

That’s harder. When you own everything from the brief to the delivery, every mistake is yours, and you can’t please everyone. What we can do is own it: get on the call, fix it, and build the fix into our process so it doesn’t happen again in another city.

What have been the most significant keys to your business’s success?

Focus, more than anything. Once we committed to serving businesses and to a small number of categories, everything got sharper: our marketing, our operations, our hiring.

Tell us about your team.

We’re about 40 people, fully remote and spread across time zones. On top of that, we work with a wide network of talented photographers and videographers. We also have a big in-house editing team, because owning the experience end to end means owning the edit too. Because we’re not funded, we grow the team slowly. Every hire has to fit the culture, and we’d rather grow carefully than lose what makes the team work.

What was the turning point when you knew your business was successful?

When we moved to B2B and clients started coming back. Early on, retention wasn’t great, because we were trying to be everything for everyone and cover as many categories as we could.

The real turning point came when we narrowed down to our core: photo and video coverage for business events. That’s when we knew we were onto something. We doubled down, and clients started returning event after event. Each one pushed us to improve how we capture an event, how we write the brief, how we manage the client and their expectations, and how we run operations.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned growing the business?

Focus on one problem at a time. Pick the right problem, the one that matters most right now, and give it most of your time until it’s solved.

The catch is that as a founder, you can’t become a bottleneck while you do it. Other people depend on you, so you still have to unblock them and deliver what they need from you. But the big problem gets your real attention. Solve them one at a time, and the results compound.

What separates your business from your competitors?

Many of our competitors raised and spent millions. We didn’t. We’re bootstrapped, so we grow slow and steady, and we’ve grown every year. It also means we can experiment fast without asking anyone’s permission.

We’re two brothers running the business. It’s a family business in the sense that we trust each other completely, but nobody else on the team is family. What we have instead is a loyal, efficient team.

And we’re hands-on. There’s very little middle management. We’re close to almost every decision, each of us runs several departments at once, and we stay as close as we can to our team and our customers.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

Know which customers are right for you, and go all in on them. We lost time trying to be everything for everyone. Growth came when we narrowed down to the clients and the categories where we had a real edge, and gave them our full focus.

And solve one big problem at a time. It feels slow, but it compounds.

What is your favorite quote?

“Whatever you are, be a good one.” (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

It’s how we think about Shootday: we’d rather be excellent at a few things than average at many.

What are your future plans for the business?

We’re entering a really interesting phase with AI and automation, and we’ll use it in two ways. First, to make the business even more efficient: any workflow an AI agent can run, we want an agent running it. Second, to serve our customers more humanly, not less. Every hour we free up goes back into our team being closer to the client.

On the tech and marketing side, we still have a lot to build and a lot of room to grow. We know who our customers are now. We’re just getting started, and we want to keep growing and partnering with more businesses. The goal is to be the first name a company reaches for when it needs photo and video done right, in every region we operate.

If you had to start from scratch, where would you begin?

I’d start by serving businesses, and I’d move fast on it. I’d cut most of the categories, focus on events and make sure we nailed that one category before adding anything else. There are a lot of details in getting event coverage right, and it took us years to figure them all out.

I’d also automate more of the behind-the-scenes work from day one, and keep the client conversation human.