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Snappie

March 17, 2016

http://snappiesticker.pythonanywhere.com/

This was a project my friends from college and I worked on. It was a lot of fun and we even sold some snappie stickers. People also seems to really like the stickers and we put them up at several events and locations of interest in LA, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. In addition to selling stickers, I did the majority of the app development for both iOS and android and backend development. However, we have since stopped working on it for 2 major reasons.

Snappie

  1. iPhones don’t support NFC tags so our app only worked on androids. For iPhones, we used beacons yet they just didn’t have the same kind of tactile engagement and feedback experience. Its a shame because I think this is a case where apple has written off NFC as worse UI than beacons simply because they haven’t seen all the use cases. Theres no question that people far preferred our NFC stickers to the beacons. However, still no support in sight and I suspect the project has no chance until that happens.

  2. We tried to bootstrap app development. We built an MVP barebones camera that worked with the stickers and tried to use that. However, this made the app much less appealing to users and gave businesses more reason to be hesitant. It was a classic chicken and egg problem - we were trying to put up stickers at local events/businesses on the premise that people would use them. However they weren’t interested in an app that they could only use once. If we were gonna restart this app, I think it would have to be built from the ground up as a complete app experience - it would need a map, snappie stickers in the area, snappie stickers you’ve (the user) collected, a points system, user logins/profiles, etc. Then it would be a complete experience that a user could engage with and putting up stickers would make much more sense. Gamification is easy to say but difficult and expensive to develop. Bootstrapping looked so appealing especially because the NFC tags/stickers were so cheap but the truth is that the app was just as big of a part of the product.

In any case, a great learning experience. If you are curious about any part, don’t heistate to contact me. I’m happy to talk more about it.