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

What does it take to reinvent a 14-year-old company—not once, but twice? In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Sam Eitzen (Co-founder & CEO), Joe Eitzen (Co-founder & CPO), and Patrick Ellis (CTO) of Snapbar about one of the most unexpected pivots in the generative AI era. What started as a wedding photo booth side hustle became a national events company—and then COVID wiped out the entire business overnight. What the team built in response now looks so AI-native that Teresa assumed Snapbar was a new startup. You'll hear how they went from physical photo booths to a cross-platform virtual product built on WebRTC in spring 2020, and then—pushed by declining repeat business—dove deep into Stable Diffusion, custom LoRA fine-tunes on H100/H200 GPUs, and eventually a reasoning-model-powered generative image and video pipeline. Along the way, they built an agent orchestration framework for their engineering process using Claude Code and Codex, and are now giving brand customers the ability to "vibe code" within the Snapbar platform itself. If you've ever wondered what applied AI looks like when you combine 14 years of industry knowledge, photography expertise, and relentless curiosity-led self-education, this episode shows exactly that. 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 - https://snapbar.com/ — AI photo booth and experiential marketing platform Patrick Ellis on YouTube -    / @patrickoakleyellis   — Patrick's channel on AI engineering and agent orchestration Sam Eitzen on LinkedIn -   / sam-eitzen   — Follow Sam for experiential marketing insights Claude Code - https://claude.com/product/claude-code — The AI coding tool Patrick and Teresa both use heavily Stable Diffusion - https://stablediffusionweb.com/ — One of the generative image models in the mix Snapbar evaluates for its AI photo experiences Black Forest Labs / Flux - https://blackforestlabs.ai/ — 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 Music License: 7YNNOYKP96OBQUKY