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One stop solution to buy button pins!
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Try out your pins on Snapchat before buying it or use it to represent yourself!
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Moment Badges to store all of your moments in one place! Scan these QR codes and check out your moments (AKA Virtual Album).
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Share your moments on Snapchat!
Inspiration with Founding Story
We believe button pins are one of the most coolest and affordable way to show the world what you represent and what you believe in. We started a facebook page to sell cool and customizable pins and within a year we sold over 10,000 pins. That basically motivated us to expand it with a mobile application 📱where customers can browse through our collections, create their own pins and do a lot more with button pins.
Talking about our inspiration on Snapkit Integration ? Well, Most of our targeted users are GenZ and Snapchat is the language they speak. 💁♀️
What it does
Core of our application is to let people represent what they believe in. And we are doing it by letting customers buy button pins that represents them. We work with a lot of local communities, schools etc and design button pins that our customers can proudly wear. ✊
Unfortunately, due to unforeseen pandemic we are seeing a lot of our customers aren't able to wear them on their clothes or bags in their day to day lives. So we were thinking, what would be the best way for these Gen Z to express what they believe in ? And answer was of course. Snapchat!! 🕶️
Our integration with Snapchat let them share the pins they are proud of as a Snapchat story so they can keep representing everything they are proud of even while staying at home. 🏠
How I built it
In general, our entire application is built on react-native and backend is on Play Scala which is hosted on AWS EC2 instances for high scalability and availability.
Snap Integration
We built it by integrating Snap SDK to our platform. We create an iOS bridge for react-native with Objective-C and Android bridge with Java. On the backend, we added a new Snap dedicated end-point to support sticker and background image generation based on our internal productId. In order to create stickers as fast as possible, we also integrated a caching layer to give seamless customer experience.
Challenges I ran into
We had Product Challenges to find a coolest way to integrate Snapkit on our Platform. We went through a lot of iterations with different Snapkits, where to put those integrations, what to call those buttons and how it will align with our product in general. We also reached out to few of our power customers. After data, some feedback and with gut feeling we eneded up integrating Creativekit for mercNmore Products and Moments.
Talking about Engineering challenge, Our application is built with react-native. Since Snap SDK is available only for native iOS and Android one of the biggest technical challenges we had was to build a react native bridge that can support native SDK on our react-native application. Learning little bit of Objective C, some great tutorials on Medium and help from super awesome Github community, resulted into a successful integration.
Accomplishments that We're proud of
Our goal is to let our customers represent what they are proud of. Some of our Accomplishments that gives us goosebumps:
- Selling over 10,000 button pins using Facebook Page 📈
- Recently moving our Facebook page to a full fledge application and launching it during pandemic 😷
- Getting Amazon Active Credits for starting and surviving business during pandemic 🙏
- Integrating Snap experience so our users can keep representing what they love while staying safe at home 💛
What I learned
We launched our business during pandemic and biggest thing we learned is to have faith during uncertain time, find a way out and most importantly enjoy the process. 🙌
What's next for mercNmore Snapkit Integration
We have many exciting and innovative plans with Snapkit. Next we are planning to do integration with "App Stories" so our amazing customers can link their Snapchat account with mercNmore and just take a Snap and we'll instantly print a button pin and mail it to them! 📸 We also have plan to go big with our deliveries and go global from India only once things start getting back to normal. 🗺️
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