About
I'm Michael Petrov — a stock photographer with over 11 years in the industry. Currently a top-300 contributor on Adobe Stock out of hundreds of thousands worldwide, with previous peaks in the top-50.
For the past 4 years, I've focused exclusively on AI-generated photorealistic content. During that time, I built a proprietary in-house production system that delivers top-tier, commercial-grade visuals at industrial scale — quality benchmarked against the best work on Adobe, Shutterstock, and Getty. Every asset on SiftStock comes from this system, and every asset is hand-curated before going live.
The AI stock space today is flooded with low-quality output — and buyers have nowhere to go for premium AI content at a fair price. SiftStock fixes this. All content is generated in-house with full IP ownership, hand-curated through more than a decade of understanding what professional buyers actually need, with honest, predictable pricing.
SiftStock is currently in private beta. The content production pipeline and initial catalog are already built and operational. What's missing is the customer-facing platform: the website, search, billing. That's the next step, and that's why I'm looking for a technical co-founder.
I'm looking for a senior backend or full-stack engineer to join as technical co-founder and own the platform side end-to-end. The ideal partner has 7+ years of experience, has shipped production SaaS products (ideally marketplaces, content platforms, or media-heavy systems), and is comfortable owning the full stack solo for the MVP — backend, frontend, infrastructure, billing, search. Experience with object storage and CDN at scale is a strong plus given the catalog size.
More important than the stack: ownership mindset and the ability to make architectural decisions independently.
The opportunity is to build on top of a system that already works — not start from zero. Equity reflects the existing foundation and is open to discussion.
If this resonates, let's talk.