This is now a portfolio project demo site as the Panda Snap service has shut down. Read more here.

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About

Panda Snap was a 'design capture' service that enabled users to take and store snapshots of beautiful websites. It featured an extension (Chrome & Firefox) that provided a convenient way to snapshot full landing pages or specific elements on the webpage itself.

Sadly I shut down the Panda Snap service in 2023 and built this page to showcase how it used to work. Check out the following demo pages:

Timeline

Panda Snap was a side project I built in July 2020 during lock down whilst stranded in Guatemala. It was one of my '12 start-ups' projects which I built for enjoyment, learning, and as potential businesses.

Panda Snap was my most successful project at the time and led me to meet some amazing people and even future clients.

Ultimately I did not grow Panda Snap into a business but I learnt a ton about what building a start-up entails. This page summarises the life of the project.

The beginning

I started the project to solve my desire to design beautiful interfaces. I often looked to others for inspiration and decided to make a 'design capture' tool.

Here's one of my earliest tweets showing the early UI of the project.

Reddit launch

After I built an early version of the product I followed some advice and pre-launched on Reddit. I got 300 sign-ups within a couple of days and had more attention than I knew what to do with.

Technical Deep Dive

This was one of the more interesting technical issues I had to solve. Posting issues like this on Twitter led me to meet great people.

Multi-platform Support

One of the big challenges with building an extension is supporting more than just a server and front-end. I wanted to support Chrome/Firefox and potentially mobile too, but these all add complexity and require separate codebases, authentication, and UIs.

Testing that all of these components worked together was a challenge.

One feature I'm proud of was how I built an end-to-end testing suite using Selenium. It made sure everything worked together by loading the extension at runtime, logging in via the server, then testing flows in a unified way. This took some work upfront but once it worked I could build quickly without breaking stuff.

Pretty Snap

In an effort to do marketing via side projects I built a spin-off site to spice up screenshots. I had a blast filling it with fun animations and integrations to give users a unique and memorable experience.

I decided to open source it and overall both users and developers seemed to like it.

Contract work

During those few months of building in public I had met a surprising amount of smart and talented people. I was even recommended to companies quick frequently and I ended up taking on contract work with numerous start-ups in New York, San Francisco, and Australia. I never expected posting on Twitter to be such a rewarding experience but I'm glad I gave it some effort.

Sadly though, my ability to maintain Panda Snap and other project slowly waned...

Shut down

March 2023

After two years of operation I decided to cease operating the Panda Snap service. The extensions had become outdated due to changes in browsers, and I no longer had the time to add features or even maintain them in a changing technical landscape.

In order to showcase what Panda Snap was like I decided to make this website where I host a demo version of some Panda Snap features. My hope is that other can take inspiration from it to build their own products in future!

If you were a user of Panda Snap and would like to access your data, please email me here.