ClickASnap

I recommended building Videscape as a small working prototype rather than committing heavily to the original “YouTube meets Facebook” concept upfront. We took it live with video upload and transcoding, streaming infrastructure, pre-roll advertising and, later, a revenue-sharing model that paid creators when their content was viewed.

The prototype proved that the product could work technically and began attracting a small community, but it also exposed the economics behind the model. Video transcoding, storage and bandwidth were expensive, while meaningful advertising revenue depended heavily on audience scale, geography and access to better-paying ad networks.

That became impossible to ignore when a long-form video went viral. On the surface it looked like the breakthrough we had been waiting for, but most of its audience came from territories that generated little or no eligible advertising revenue. Videscape therefore absorbed the cost of serving a very large volume of video while still owing the creator their revenue-share payment. What should have been the platform's biggest success instead demonstrated that the underlying unit economics were unsustainable at our scale.

When we reviewed the outcome with the client, I was part of the discussion about what could be salvaged rather than simply abandoning the product. We already had a working platform, an established codebase and a small community. The key insight was that the community and product mechanics had value even if video did not.

We therefore recommended pivoting from video to photography. Images removed most of the expensive transcoding and streaming infrastructure, dramatically reduced the cost and risk of serving user-generated content, and allowed us to reuse much of what we had already built.

That pivot became ClickASnap.

My role was not simply delivering the original brief. I had pushed for the prototype as a way of testing the idea before over-investing, helped interpret what the resulting usage and economics were telling us, and then worked with the client and development team to turn those lessons into a more commercially viable product direction. I continued leading the product direction and coordinating specialist delivery as ClickASnap subsequently developed and grew.