Snappie co-founder Mihael Melnic. Image: Conor Mulhern/EyeOn Photography
Founded last year, Snappie is a digital platform for creative agencies which aims to remove the complexity in making websites.
Around two weeks ago, four Dublin start-ups were recognised by the New Frontiers programme at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) Media Cube.
Funded by Enterprise Ireland, New Frontiers aims to accelerate early-stage businesses with strong employment, growth and international potential, which would contribute to job creation and economic activity.
One of these start-ups, Snappie, got the award for the best pitch. And now, its founders Mihael Melnic, Ivan Cardillo and Robel Abraham are all gearing up to move Snappie’s headquarters to NovaUCD, which sponsored their award.
Founded last year, Snappie is a digital platform for creative agencies which aims to remove the complexity in making websites. It gives designers the knowledge and tools to use best practices when studying their clients’ brand and design language and apply them to specific examples.
In keeping with a trend most businesses are now aligning themselves to, Snappie uses artificial intelligence paired with custom algorithms to generate a fully functioning website the agencies fully own.
“We are targeting creative agencies that have an in-house design team and marketing agencies with no design team,” Mihael Melnic tells SiliconRepublic.com.
“If we were to consider the current agencies that use Figma as a tool to create wireframes and prototypes, we are talking about 50,000 companies. We plan on reaching 500 of them in the next three to four years in order to generate €7m in sales.”
Melnic’s ambition for Snappie is backed by more than six years of experience as a software engineer. Having previously worked at IBM and PatchAI – two very different organisations in terms of size – Melnic has a passion for all things design.
“I’ve worked with creative agencies and have been part of one. Ivan’s background is similar, we met each other while working for IBM. Robel has a background in marketing and sales and lately has discovered a new love for computer science,” he said of the team.
The idea behind Snappie is to remove the complexity in creating websites. It does so by using its platform to allow agencies to work independently on the different business processes that are part of the website creation workflow.
This means that, using AI and algorithms, Snappie will automatically create user interfaces (UI) and layouts for a fully functioning website.
“In other words, agencies will study their client’s brand on our platform, define the information architecture and define the design language, and Snappie will put everything together and generate a fully functioning UI,” Melnic explains.
While the three co-founders are the only employees of the start-up at the minute, they are on the lookout for two more to join the team. Melnic said Snappie already has three non-paying pilot customers and one paying end-user.
The start-up also recently secured the €100,000 Enterprise Ireland pre-seed investment and accelerated as part of the New Frontiers programme.
“Our journey has been a journey of pivoting, learning and changes,” Melnic said. “We have realised [we should] not be too attached to our assumptions. We have also realised the importance of building and nurturing relations in our start-up journey.”
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