Snappr: Building API-First, Last

Snappr has two business lines: Snappr Shoots and Snappr Workflows. Snappr Shoots is the photography marketplace business that’s open access, self-service, and asks customers to book and pay for one shoot at a time. Snappr Workflows is the visual content SaaS and infrastructure offering for enterprises. With Workflows, enterprises can... See more

Working with high-volume enterprise clients like Instacart, DoorDash, and Bring A Trailer having to do each one of those steps up to distribution on their behalf, Snappr built internal tools to make everything run more smoothly. They built:

• Automated ways to trigger photographer bookings from business events


• AI-powered photo editing tools to lighten

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Workflows integrate with the software clients already use, from Salesforce to Photoshop to Amazon S3. Clients can create workflows using their existing tools and Snappr’s. For example, for one of the big food delivery apps, the flow might look like:

Building good SaaS and APIs is really hard. Snappr is dealing with huge volumes of big files and thousands of unique client workflows and brand guidelines and quirks. Its DNA is as a marketplace company; success in one doesn’t guarantee success in the other.

new restaurant onboarded → book photo shoot → edit photos → post to Sheets for approval → post to app

For Snappr, the risk is obvious: execution.  Building a marketplace business and operating it at scale is really hard. It’s hard to keep both sides of the market happy. It’s hard to maintain quality – what happens when there’s so much demand that Snappr needs to drop its quality bar from the top 10% of applicants to the top 20%?   

The secret to Snappr’s success is that the Shoots business feeds the Workflows business, in four main ways:

1. Enterprises need national supply (photographers and editors) overnight, which is impossible to build on its own. When they call, you need to be ready, or you blow your chance. So you might try to build up the supply network ahead of demand, bu

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Companies face two main types of risk – market and execution – and if they’re lucky, a third: competition.