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

July 10, 2026

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

Ever wonder how a company with 14 years in photo booths completely reinvented itself during the pandemic? That’s exactly what Snapbar did. Originally a wedding photo booth side hustle, they shifted gears overnight in spring 2020, building a virtual platform from scratch using WebRTC. But here’s where it gets wild — according to Teresa Torres, they dove deep into generative AI, integrating models like Stable Diffusion and custom fine-tunes on powerful GPUs to deliver brand-quality images. They even created an intricate prompt pipeline to ensure likenesses — disabilities included — were represented accurately. This isn’t just tech for tech’s sake; it’s a new kind of experiential marketing, letting brands build immersive worlds at events. And get this — using Claude Code and Codex, they built a flexible agent orchestration framework, making it possible for brands to “vibe code” their own experiences directly on the platform. So what does this mean? Applied AI isn’t just about models; it’s about creating new, interactive ways for brands and audiences to connect — and Snapbar is leading the charge.

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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.

Show Notes

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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