Websites have become so routine in the commercial world now that little thought is given to the effort required to make sites look good and flow well. High-functioning sites take time to build , and a big chunk of any website designer’s time is taken up repeating a series of similar steps for every new site they create.
It was this repetition that inspired software engineer Mihael Melnic to co-found Snappie, a digital platform that removes the repetition, leaving designers free to work on the creative elements that make the difference.
Melnic and his co-founders, Ivan Cardillo and Robel Abraham, began thinking about Snappie following a conversation with an art director who was irritated by the amount of design work that had to be repeated with every new project.
“He felt it would make a big difference if there was some way to remove at least some of it,” Melnic says. “Snappie is essentially an engineering solution aimed at creative and marketing agencies. It removes the repetition by using proprietary algorithms and leverages AI to automatically produce user interfaces (UIs) and layouts to create fully functioning websites.”
In our view, Snappie will change how digital content is created
Taking a client brief in order to create the right kind of website can also be a time-consuming process as the different elements of the message and style are teased out. With Snappie, however, even small amounts of basic information about a company’s potential audience, its brand values and its preferred communications method are enough for the system to produce a suggested UI that reflects the information gathered and expresses it in a design language appropriate to the brand.
“Basically, Snappie puts everything together, and when we have shown companies this working in practice, they have been amazed at how accurately Snappie captures who they are within a very short space of time,” Melnic says.
“For creative agencies, we estimate that our system can save them around 60 per cent of all website design work and 100 per cent of the development work involved. Snappie allows a designer to optimise their workflow, thereby cutting costs and project time. For example, it is no longer necessary to rethink the UI if the text needs to be changed, the UI always adapts to the actual content.”
Before starting Snappie Melnic worked for IBM and AI-based start-up, PatchAI. Cardillo also worked for IBM while Abraham comes from a sales and marketing background. The trio established Snappie in September 2022 and the company has recently participated in the New Frontiers programme run by IADT Media Cube in partnership with NovaUCD. Investment in the business so far is just over €200,000, between self-funding, angel investment and support from Enterprise Ireland, including a pre-seed round of €100,000.
Companies have been amazed at how accurately Snappie captures who they are within a very short space of time
The platform had its Beta launch in October and Snappie Version 1.0 will be available by the end of the year. Ireland and the EU are the company’s initial target markets with the rest of the world to follow. The company currently has a combination of pilot and paying clients and Melnic says that once word about what Snappie could do got out, the company has had a steady stream of enquiries from the creative sector.
Snappie will make its money in two ways. It will charge agencies a subscription based on several factors including the number of designers using the platform. Then, when the site is finished, it charges the agency a once-off fee to take ownership of the site.
“This gives the agency a clear ‘deliverable’ to which they can add the customised creative parts and sell on to their clients. They can host the website themselves, host it on their client’s infrastructure or host it on our infrastructure, as suits,” Melnic says.
“In our view, Snappie will change how digital content is created, not only with websites, but also in the associated areas of advertising and promotional material.”
