Premo is a premium content management app for Snapchat. Premo allows Creators to monetize their exclusive content while also providing a management utility for fan subscriptions and monthly renewals.
Inspiration- With the onset of Covid-19 millions of Americans lost their jobs and were often looking for new ways to make money online. Some were creating courses online with teachable, selling music on Patreon, posting content on Onlyfans, etc... However, a lot of these platforms were disjointed from where most users spend their time like Snapchat/Facebook/Twitter. As a person in tech I have app fatigue even the thought of downloading a new app like Tik Tok annoys me. Having to learn a new platform just to enjoy new content from a band I follow, or an artist I like, would likely loose me in the sales funnel. Also creators often gripe about the disjointed processes using platforms like Patreon and teachable. Fans gripe about usability of these platforms. The average person is not an integration specialist. Most people want something that just works well where they can monetize their content easily. So Premo was born. A platform built on top of a familiar app like Snapchat where people can monetize their premium content with ease. after initial setup creators do the same thing they do today when posting to their snap stories, instead when they want to flag exclusive content, they send it to their Premo stories. This is not a new idea I've seen plenty of users offering premium memberships, but most have disjointed processes to try to solve this problem or they are offering a one-time life access fee which hurts the creator long term. Imagine paying for 1 Beyonce CD and having access to her discography forever. That's insane. The innovation here is in the integration and the ease of use for the future workflow.
What it does- Premo is a premium content management app for Snapchat. For creators- Premo handles subscriptions: Allows fans to subscribe for a monthly fee, automated billing, and payouts via an integration with Stripe. For Fans- Premo is a place where they can view exclusive content from their favorite artist, creators, and teachers. Fans can also search for new creators and subscribe to their content.
How I built it- I'm a product guy with a strong background in API design and development. I have a very in depth understanding of how APIs work, and what I wanted to design and build but I'm not a developer. So building the actual apps would be a challenge for me. I discussed what I wanted to build with contractors and how I wanted it built. My developer resources were able to assist me with the integrations after I delivered the UI and process flows. Premo is built into two native apps(IOS, Android).
Challenges I ran into- The major challenge I ran into was with the initial flow of how I wanted Premo to work with Snapchat. Initially I wanted the app to be as non-intrusive as possible. The initial design was to have users download the app. Premo creates a new story via the API and controls the subscription management to that story on the Premo side. when creators posted a promo sticker via the creative-kit we could capture fan GUIDs that wanted to subscribe and assign them to the story. When fans cancelled their subscription, we would remove the reference. For instance when a Creator downloaded the Premo app we would store their Snap user GUID, Create the Premo Story GUID, then as fans subscribed associate their Snap user GUID with the Premo Story GUID making it viewable in snapchat. The creators would only use Premo to manage subscriptions, view earnings, and schedule payouts. This was not possible, so we re-designed Premo to handle all the subscription references in the Premo app and actually show fans the premium content in Premo via StoryKit. However, Still creating a pretty easy process flow for creators to post original content to fans. This method also allows us to show the content in our app so in the future an integration with the snap ad network could be another way to monetize.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of- I'm proud that we were able to build something that may be a possible source of income for people all over the world. I'm also proud that we were actually able to finish the app to the current state with the storykit. It took some time to work through approval, but this was a key feature to being able to bring the app together. Gervis and Seema were a huge help making this possible.
What I learned- I learned a lot about the snapkit platform and I'm sure I will be creating additional apps in the future for some concepts I think Snap users would enjoy. Maybe not as ambitious as Premo, but still something with great substance. This experience has me thinking about a number of apps that would be great for the Snapchat platform.
What's next for Premo- Next for Premo is public Launch. I still have a few items in the app and design I would like to clean up including additional promotional stickers. Long term I would like to see Premo grow into a platform for different peer to peer monetization items such as paid live classes like a yoga lesson, Spanish lessons, or math tutoring. Paid celebrity shout outs and messages. An integration with Shopify for creators to sale products, and a few other wild ideas. My day job is an Integration Product manager so I'm constantly taking disjointed and silo'd software and making them work together to improve workflows. Hopefully Premo will grow and become a platform that helps a lot of people.
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