After a wedding, graduation, or significant event, wouldn’t it be nice if folks could upload their phone pictures and videos to a single gallery?
Alexandria-based entrepreneur Elizabeth Kukla did just that. In the spring of 2021, Kukla’s cousin was getting married. As a gift to the happy couple, Kukla designed a card based on the wedding invitations and printed out cards with QR codes to be placed on the guest tables for the reception. Guests who scanned the code uploaded their favorite pictures to one place, and a week later, the bride’s younger sister reached out and asked for the same services at her own nuptials that summer. With that, SnapSpaces was born.
Kukla is also the founder and Chief Technology Officer at Tech Foundry, an Alexandria-based software product development company that primarily works with tech-driven startups. Both Tech Foundry and SnapSpaces operate out of The Link coworking office (215 N. Payne Street) in Old Town.
“I’ve pivoted more toward trying to focus on being a tool that wedding planners or the photographers themselves can use,” Kukla said. “In terms of who our customer is, we’re shifting more toward the vendor that’s already a well-established, integrated part of event planning.”
Buying disposable cameras for guests and developing the film can get pricey. It costs $19 for a personal SnapSpaces account, and monthly subscriptions for businesses range from $39 to $79.
“The only person that’s required to have an account is the event host,” Kukla said. “We also send all static images through an AI that looks for explicit content, which is like sexually explicit content, and it catches it. We didn’t want that to get abused, to ruin someone’s event or embarrass someone.”
Kukla says that SnapSpaces accounts hold half a gigabyte.
“Any sort of social media or messenger apps will compress the images, because they don’t want to pay to store full-resolution files,” Kukla said. “If you have a video that’s raw footage that’s several minutes long of a toast or something, you should be able to upload that without a problem. But at the same time, we’re not trying to have your videographer upload your entire two-hour-long wedding ceremony or something really long. It’s more about the little memories and moments throughout your event.”
Incidentally, if you’re impressed by SnapSpaces, Tech Foundry is looking to take on one or two new clients by the end of this calendar year, Kukla said.
“We do have some openings,” she said. “We’ve made this decision more recently, but we do everything pretty much through word of mouth. But I really like working with local businesses, so I figured I would mention it, since ALX is now local.”
