PhotoWall

Helping small business owners crowdsource quality product photos while connecting their local community and building brand loyalty.

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Inspiration

Entrepreneurship is hard. We are a trio who each have rich personal experiences working with and working in small mom & pop establishments. We have witnessed firsthand the extraordinary effort small business owners take to stay running. This can sometimes include exorbitant fees from vendors and creeping expectations for marketing and building customer relationships.

By tackling some of these pain points, we hope to help give time and energy back to local business owners so that they can focus on creating great products and services instead. When small businesses can flourish, society benefits from a richer marketplace with more options to fit individual needs and preferences.

What it does

PhotoWall is a platform for customers to post photos about their experience with a local business. Customers can use these posts to refer their social circles for special perks via loyalty programs, and browse photos to make better purchasing decisions.

Building brand loyalty

PhotoWall incentivizes customers to capture and share their experiences with their favorite businesses by rewarding the with Square Loyalty rewards.

Social trust through fostering a community

Customer submitted photos are specially tagged, providing a variety of perspectives and opinions from the local community. Customer submitted photos can often be more trusted than business uploaded ones because they are perceived as more authentic. This helps potential customers become more confident in their purchasing decisions.

Helping small businesses

PhotoWall helps small businesses in many ways. It provides small business owners with quality product photos they can reuse in their marketing materials. It also gives small business owners better access to connect with their loyal customers. Referral links that integrate with Square Loyalty programs empower small business owners to create micro-influencer programs, and our goal is to allow for social interactions on PhotoWall between business owners and other customers.

Problems solved

How we built it

Frontend
Backend
Square APIs used
  • /orders/ID (looking up receipt and items from receipt)
  • /catalog/list (getting all items for reviewing and online ordering, and item pictures)

What's next for PhotoWall

Additional features:
  • Build out referral link feature (integration with Square Loyalty API)
  • User accounts
  • Social interactions ("likes", "very helpful", etc.)
  • Search filter features
  • Connection and search feature across all local Square businesses
  • User recommendations based upon preferences
Other applications

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