The Story Behind Scrnshts.club
🤔 Why I built Scrnshts
When I was still working at Sounds, the App Store optimization (keywords, descriptions and screenshots) was one of our top priorities to improve the onboarding.
Indeed the App Store is already part of your onboarding process since that’s one of the first marketing assets users will see from your app. We have to make them memorable. I spent a lot of time doing research to create efficient and beautiful screenshots to help users understand the value of our app. What’s our user’s main problem? How does our app solve it? Imagine you’ve only got 5 seconds to pitch your app to a potential user, how would you describe it?
It’s really painful actually to search on the App Store for applications to benchmark and look for inspiration. I’m a big fan of Mobbin for the quality of the content and the simplicity of the interface, I couldn’t find something similar for store screenshots so I decided to make it a product. I thought that all these screens that I saved could be used by others designers.
👨🏻🔬 How I built Scrnshts
I decided to built the project during a week-end. I don’t like to spend too much time on early versions of side project to be sure to finish them (we all have these 2834 folders with unfinished projects).
The first thing I did was to centralize all that stuff I had on my laptop. At this time I had about 80 apps (and between 3 to 10 screenshots for each) so that’s a lot of screenshots… 🧐 ok let’s call the project “scrnshts”.
I started designing the website on Figma with a very minimal interface, and added a quick logo I made with an IconFinder icon (a rocket because App Store is where everything starts right?). I kept it clean with just a sidebar with the categories and the screenshots bold on the right.
I thought it was useful to have a Search feature to look for a specific app and a Best Practices page with some insights to create a sort of encyclopedia with the basics for App Store screenshots.
Once the design finished I bought the domain name on Gandi and installed Wordpress on it. Why Wordpress? because that’s one of the only CMS I know how to customize a bit… 😅 I started the HTML & CSS for desktop and mobile and then made a theme with all my custom fields on Wordpress.
The big part of the project is the curation, so I spent most of the time of the week-end by entering content manually on Wordpress. At that moment, I said to myself I really hope people will use this. 🥵
🚀 Everything’s ready
It’s Monday morning and everything’s ready: I fixed some bugs, I have a lot of content online, I did some changes with the feedbacks I had from some designers friends (👋 Florian Charnacé, Loïck, Julien Perrat, Louis Malfoy) and I did all the marketing assets for Product Hunt, Dribbble and Twitter. Let’s publish it and see where this thing goes.
💪 Keep working!
It’s been 2 months since I launched the product and I updated a bit the product since I saw people using it (YAY!) and tweeting about it (about 20k people used the website already).
I added a monthly newsletter you can subscribe here. I decided to post only once a month to avoid spam, just to stay up to date with the new app I posted. You can also stay up to date with new submissions on Twitter.
I also did some design & code fixes for responsive and added +50 new apps since the launch.
