Shopping on Instagram | Squarespace Hack Week

The main thing that's different about Hack Week is that people choose their own projects, and as a result, you really kind of get a glimpse of what sparks people's interest, and you see a side of people that sometimes you might not otherwise see.

The thing that was great about shopping in Instagram was this— there was an idea that the 2 people on the team had around how to integrate our product catalog with Instagram, and they were able within Hack Week to create a proof of concept and get it really, really far along.

So there had been this product export feature that I think had actually been from the previous Hack Week. There was a Facebook feature where you could basically have your products sync with Facebook, and then from there they would appear as products you could tag in your Instagram. So kind of figuring out those logistics of how to use our features to intersect with the Facebook and Instagram ones.

Folks do a little role play. Imagine I'm a shopper. This is how it happens. And then it ends up being very entertaining as well as fun from a technical perspective. but also entertaining to watch them do it. Everyone saw it and was like, yes, let's do this.

Part of what contributed to the momentum is that everybody was so excited about it and wanted to make it happen. And so afterwards, the same amount of planning that went into Hack Week also went into from Hack Week to GA. We also had kick-ass engineers, so that helped.

As a, you know, regular Instagram user, I'd seen shopping on Instagram before, but then like after we shipped the feature, like every small business that I follow, especially if I knew they were a Squarespace customer, I would like go and every time I'd see like a tagged product post, I would be like, oh, are they using our feature? And it was so cool to see like brands that I knew using this feature that we had built. Yeah, that's like— I still do that. This Hack Week thing, it's real. Like, if you build something during Hack Week, like, you actually can ship it. We're not just saying that. Like, that's a real thing that happens.