From COVID Pivot to AI World Building: How Snapbar Reinvented the Photo Experience

Guests

Sam Eitzen, Co-founder & CEO, Snapbar
Joe Eitzen, Co-founder & CPO, Snapbar
Patrick Ellis, CTO, Snapbar

You'll hear how they:

Pivoted from physical photo booths to a cross-platform virtual product in spring 2020 using WebRTC—built from first principles out of necessity
Integrated Stable Diffusion 1.5 as their first generative AI model and ran custom LoRA fine-tunes on H100/H200 GPUs to produce brand-quality outputs nobody else in their space could match
Evolved from negative prompts to reasoning model long-form prompts, giving brands more precise creative and safety control
Built a meta-prompting pre-processing pipeline to ensure user likenesses—including non-obvious details like disabilities—are accurately represented in generated images
Designed an experiential marketing platform that lets brands "world build" at conferences, trade shows, and live events by bringing fans into branded creative worlds
Added participatory user inputs through Mad Lib-style prompts and prompt injection, turning photo experiences into co-creation moments between brands and their audiences
Used Claude Code and Codex to build and ship features rapidly as a small bootstrap team, and developed a four-pillar agent orchestration framework: context, tools, verification, and workflows
Are building customer-facing "vibe coding" using the Claude Agent SDK so brands can configure and create experiences themselves within Snapbar's platform

Resources & Links

Snapbar — AI photo booth and experiential marketing platform
Patrick Ellis on YouTube — Patrick's channel on AI engineering and agent orchestration
Sam Eitzen on LinkedIn — Follow Sam for experiential marketing insights
Claude Code — The AI coding tool Patrick and Teresa both use heavily
Stable Diffusion — One of the generative image models in the mix Snapbar evaluates for its AI photo experiences
Black Forest Labs / Flux — Another model family Snapbar tests and can route activations to, depending on the creative style needed

Chapters

00:00 Meet the SnapBar Team
00:59 From Photo Booth Side Hustle
02:31 Pandemic Pivot to Virtual
08:06 What AI Photo Booth Does
11:03 Why It Works at Events
13:15 When AI Entered the Product
14:26 Early GenAI Tech Stack
17:43 Patrick’s Learning Path
20:44 Why They Bet on AI
28:25 Building with Necessity
34:25 Applied AI Beats Models
36:01 Prompting Got Easier
37:53 Arcades to Home Shift
38:58 Commoditization vs Application Layer
40:58 Experiential Platform Overview
42:33 World Cup Activation Examples
45:34 QR Flow and WebRTC
47:51 Capture to Display Pipeline
49:24 Dark Factory and Vibe Coding
55:38 Brand Safety Prompting
01:00:23 Meta Prompting and Representation
01:03:22 Experiential Marketing Momentum
01:06:12 Agent Orchestration Framework
01:10:02 Claude Code and Fable Rant
01:12:48 Wrap Up and Where to Find Them

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