OneClickLayout has carved a niche in the user-generated content space, transitioning from a visionary project under Peecho to a robust, independent SaaS product. Its core mission is straightforward, to make the conversion of user-generated content into high-quality photobooks effortless. By offering a plug-and-play solution, OneClickLayout empowers platforms and apps to introduce a new revenue stream to their business. Users can now immortalize their digital memories into beautiful photobooks with ease.
The collaboration with Peecho brought together deep insights into the publishing world with cutting-edge technology. The result unlocked new potentials for content-heavy apps and platforms, enabling them to leverage their user-generated content in ways that directly impact the business’ performance. The road from an internal project to a standalone product underscores the impactful solution OneClickLayout offers.
How OneClickLayout started
Peecho operates on the nexus of digital creation and print, offering a unique business model that enables the distribution of printed content across the globe. By curating a network of high-quality printers, Peecho ensures that creators, from publishers and enterprise companies to artists and photographers, can bring their digital works to life in the form of print, produced close to its customers to reduce costs and environmental impact. Peecho works a lot with platforms and apps that are heavy on user generated content. While some had the development capacity inhouse to build a solution that can turn the content into something print-ready, many could not execute on this, resulting in them leaving money on the table. This revealed a new opportunity: bridge the gap between user-generated content and print ready formats to add a new revenue stream to these apps and platforms as fast as possible.
The challenge was clear. While the desire to monetize this content was clear, the path to doing so was hard for many. Although some methods of creating photobooks from user-generated content were available, these were quite cumbersome and required manual intervention that deterred both platforms and their users. This pain point was the catalyst for the collaboration between Eli5 and Peecho.
OneClickLayout emerged from this collaboration, designed to integrate seamlessly with existing apps and platforms. Its premise was simple, enable platforms to offer their users a frictionless way to convert their digital memories into high-quality photobooks. Beyond just an additional revenue stream, OneClickLayout promised to deepen user engagement by allowing them to interact with their content in a more meaningful, lasting way.
This venture was all about bridging the digital with the physical. By identifying the gap between the abundance of digital content and the enduring value of high-quality photobooks, OneClickLayout delivers direct business value to its customer by content monetization, enabling apps and platforms to grow beyond their digital business model.
Ideation to Validation
The process started with ideation of potential solutions, where both teams shared ideas on how to make this concept work best. We aimed for simplicity and utility, focusing on a solution that would fill a real gap in the market. While demand for the product’s proposition was evident, the true test of OneClickLayout's viability, however, came from putting it in front of users of these apps and platforms. These early demos and discussions were of critical value. They provided honest feedback, highlighting what users actually needed and wanted from such a service. This direct communication helped refine OneClickLayout, ensuring it was built in the right direction.
This approach—starting with a simple, user-centric question and then iteratively refining the product based on direct feedback—led to the development of OneClickLayout’s first version. We didn’t want to create just another photobook design tool, we were determined to provide a meaningful solution to apps and platforms to increase their user satisfaction while adding a new revenue stream to their busines. OneClickLayout is now able to serve a diverse range of apps and platforms, is highly customizable on the setup while being brutally simple for the users.
Building OneClickLayout
Setting out to build OneClickLayout, our team adopted a phased approach that mirrored the iterative nature of startup growth, focusing first on a prototype before advancing to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), then to Version 1.0, and finally moving into post-launch iterative development. This strategy allowed us to refine our product in alignment with real-world user feedback, ensuring that each iteration brought us closer to a solution that met our users' expectations.
Central to our development process were several key technological decisions. By selecting Node.js for our backend, we ensured a scalable, event-driven architecture capable of handling the diverse demands of photo book creation. CSS grid became the backbone of our layout design, offering a robust framework for building complex, responsive designs that look flawless across all devices. Microsoft TypeScript was introduced to catch bugs early in the development cycle, significantly reducing the time spent on debugging and enhancing the overall quality of our code.
The introduction of Google Puppeteer facilitated automated testing, ensuring that every aspect of OneClickLayout functioned as intended, while React allowed us to build a dynamic, user-friendly frontend. The result of this technology stack was our hybrid templating engine, a solution that connects standardized building blocks with customizable elements, thereby offering flexibility and scalability.
Taking OneClickLayout from prototype to a fully-fledged product came with its challenges, learnings, and adaptations. Yet, through a combination of technological tinkering and team collaboration, OneClickLayout now transforms how platforms monetize user-generated content.
Success and spinout
Following its launch, the product quickly gained traction, with customer integrations surpassing our expectations. Feedback from clients, a mix of excitement and constructive insights, underscored the product's market fit, making further refinements to the product a no-brainer. This was both a new feature for Peecho's existing platform and a standalone product.
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