SnapWidget

A small update to add some customization to hashtag campaigns. Companies can now specify assets for the campaign landing page like logos, backgrounds and colors. The welcome text is also customizable.

A company can now also create a campaign without a hashtag, and set a hashtag per widget. This allows for social influencers to join 1 brand campaign, and have their photos linked to different widgets.

Social proof! Something that a lot of websites have been implementing recently.

A new widget type has been added to SnapWidget that allows users to embed a small popup in their page, that displays their most recent photo and the number of likes. This popup displays after a few seconds in the bottom left of the page and allows the visitor to see that the website is active on Instagram.

I should have probably added this feature much sooner. Lots of users create and embed this widget. The growth is much bigger than any other type of widget on SnapWidget.

Since privacy is obviously a big concern when displaying photos from others, I had to find a way of letting brands and companies create widgets that could display photos from their followers.

For this, I added hashtag campaigns. Companies and brands can now create campaigns that their visitors can join, and give SnapWidget permission to display their photos tagged with a specific brand related tag on their websites.

This gave SnapWidget a huge boost in new users and also increased the follower count of our users.

Moved the business to South Africa.

After having been with Stripe for the past 5 years, I had to, unfortunately, find an alternative that supported payouts to South Africa. Luckily, Paddle made this very easy.

Something a lot of users have requested, and which is pretty tricky to do when you have photos contained in an iframe, has been the ability to show photos in a Lightbox. This keeps the visitors on their page.

Added a new feature today that allows users to add links to their photos so visitors to their website can buy their products straight from their photos.

Just a small update to add support for some basic analytics to SnapWidget Pro widgets. Customers can now see which photos are most clicked, liked, viewed and shared.

With Instagram making some major changes to their API, it was as good a time as any for a complete rewrite of the app.

I decided to use the Laravel framework, with Angular on the front-end for the rebuild. This also allowed me to add proper caching to speed up the app and reduce some of the API calls.

I also added support for Twitter and Facebook widgets.

Monetizing the app via ads worked, but lots of users were requesting an ad-free, paid version.

Adding user accounts and subscription billing via Stripe allowed me to add premium features and remove ads for subscriber widgets.

After 2 weeks of late-night coding, the first version of SnapWidget is launched. Trying to keep it simple and easy to use, it only offers the most basic widget and options, with no user sign up.

Big mistake! I should have added user sign up right from the start. Trying to contact users about product updates became impossible after that.