Looking for collaborator to build a Shopify Slideshow iOS App
I'm helping a relative setup her brick and mortar store, and there will be a 55" Flatscreen (SmartTV) Display mounted to the wall playing a photo slideshow of her Jewelry pieces.
She already has a Shopify online store, and her products are organized into collections. She wants to keep the Shopify product catalog as the "single point of truth" for her product data. Rather than duplicate the product catalog into iCloud Photo albums (or Dropbox folders or Google Drive folders), I think it makes sense to drive the slideshow directly off the Shopify product collections.
I searched the iOS App Store and didn't see anything like this. Also, I posted to the Shopify ecommerce university asking if this exists .. so far nothing back yet.
It seems like a great candidate for an Indie Hacker project because:
- It's a very simple idea -- I can describe the entire product in a single sentence
- It has a great distribution channel -- getting listed somewhere in a Shopify app directory would get a lot of the right eyeballs on it
- It has a market -- if I had seen something in the App Store that did this, I would have easily paid $49 bucks for it.
- It's scratching an itch and meeting an actual market need (as opposed to a solution looking for a problem)
About me and why I'm looking for a collaborator: I'm a full time software engineer, and on top of that I already have a side project related to cloud management that I'm putting all my free time into. There's no way I can take on a new project of trying to build an iOS app!
I do have experience of building iOS apps before in ObjectiveC and Swift, and have released an app to the App Store, and so I can definitely help out a little on the tech side. I can definitely help out on the product side too, because I'll be using the product on a daily basis by helping my relative put this in her brick and mortar store.
If you have some iOS development experience and have some time to push this forward, let's talk!
Interesting, why an iOS app and not just a website that play slides on a Shopify account?
Check my answer to tbrown.
I'm also curious as to why an iOS app is necessary. If he/she is using a smartTV, it should be able to access a browser, in which case a website might be a more convenient solution.
If he/she prefers connecting an iPad or iPhone to the TV, the site would still provide an accessible solution.
@tleyden: any particular reason why you prefer an iOS app solution?
Great feedback! Maybe a browser based solution would actually work, especially if it could use caching / local storage so it's not re-downloading the high-res images over and over.
I do see a few unique advantages to doing this as an iOS app though:
She will almost always be carrying her iPad with her and thus always be able to show a slideshow to any prospective customers, even in offline or nearly-offline situations. (but I guess with local storage + image caching this would also be possible with the browser too?)
A potential additional feature of an iOS app could be the ability to sync Shopify collection photos to iOS photo albums. That way the user would get the built-in slideshow functionality of the iOS Photos, and get iCloud sync so the albums would show up on all devices, and have the ability to easily text / email images of products to people. This is something I don't think is possible via a website, you'd need some native app support for it.
Btw I do realize these are whole new features that I didn't originally mention :-)
But yes, for the original use case a web based solution might be a lot less effort and work effectively in most cases. I will look into it and report back to this thread if I manage to find anything! Thanks again for the insightful feedback.
This comment was deleted 10 years ago