The standard advice on a new attraction is that you know inside a week. If people use it, it works. If they walk past it, it does not.
Our first photo booth vending machine has now run for a month in the Don Taft University Center at Nova Southeastern University. That advice turned out to be wrong. Week one told us almost nothing except that the machine switched on and people were curious. The month produced more than 300 paid sessions and roughly $2,400 in guest spending. Almost everything useful we learned came from the parts that went sideways.
What the first month produced
- More than 300 paid sessions across 25 days of operation.
- Roughly $2,400 collected from guests.
- $7.99 a session, after a change we made on day five.
- Nobody assigned to it. No staff hours, no host, no supervision.
Those are our numbers from one lobby on one campus. Still, I want to be careful about what they are worth to anybody else. A university center in August is not a bar in February. However, the shape of the result transfers even when the volume does not. In other words, the shape is what a venue owner is actually buying.
In other words, the useful claim is not that your room will produce $2,400. Instead, it is that an unstaffed machine can produce revenue at all. Nobody has to sell it, explain it or supervise it.
We cut the price on day five
The machine launched at $9.99 a session. Four days later we moved it to $7.99, and it has stayed there since.
That was not a reaction to weak numbers. It was a read on the room. A campus is price-sensitive in a specific way. After all, a student choosing between a photo strip and most of a coffee will stop and think about it. Meanwhile any hesitation at the screen is a session you do not get. Lowering the price widened access on a campus where access was the entire point.
I cannot prove the cut is what moved the volume, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It landed in the same week as move-in, which is the busiest week of the academic year. Two large variables changed at once. In practice the price feels right. However, the data cannot yet separate it from the calendar.
What I will say is that guest pricing belongs to the venue and the room. A rate card is the wrong instrument for it. We set it with the partner, and we change it when the room tells us to.
Weighing whether a machine makes sense in your own space? here is what a permanent installation actually involves.
The giveaway did not work
Every guest who prints a strip can enter a monthly prize draw by posting it and tagging both the venue and SmileMore. On paper it is the best mechanic we have. A guest gets a reason to use the booth, and the venue gets an authentic tagged post from a real customer instead of an advert nobody asked for.
However, in its first month it underperformed badly. The reason turned out to be dull. The instructions were too long, and nobody standing in a lobby holding a warm photo strip is going to read a paragraph. We are cutting them down to something a person can act on in a couple of seconds.
Meanwhile the entries we did get behaved exactly as intended, which is why we are fixing the mechanic rather than dropping it.
What guests told us
We spent much of the month standing next to the machine asking people what they thought. In fact, two compliments came up far more often than any others: the camera quality, and how fast the strip prints.
Guests also described it as simple, and they meant it as praise. That is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to build the opposite by accident.
The most useful thing we saw was not something anybody said. Watching people approach, there is a small hesitation before the first press while they work out what to touch. By contrast, ask them about it directly and nobody mentions it. Stand there for an hour and it is obvious. As a result we added on-screen guidance for starting a session partway through the first week, and the hesitation went away.
One question keeps coming up unprompted. Is this permanent, or is it here for an event? When we say permanent, people react well. That reaction is the earliest signal we have on repeat use, and it is what we care about most going forward.
What we changed during month one
| Change | Why | When |
|---|---|---|
| Session price moved to $7.99 | Widen access on a student campus | Day five |
| On-screen start guidance added | Guests hesitated before the first press | Week one |
| Hardware fault corrected, affected guests refunded | A fault surfaced during the opening weeks | Weeks one to three |
| Giveaway instructions cut down | Too long to read standing up, so entries suffered | End of month |
That is four changes in a month on a machine we designed and built ourselves. By contrast, an operator reselling somebody else’s hardware would still be waiting on a vendor for at least two of them.
What a venue should take from this
Not the revenue figure. A campus lobby in move-in season is a generous room, and I would rather you discounted our number than have it quoted back to me in six months.
What transfers is narrower. A photo booth vending machine is an attraction first. People walk over to it on purpose, and a good share come back with somebody they want in the photo. It happens to earn money while it sits there, and it happens to give people something to do in a room where they were already standing, but neither of those is why it works. It works because people want the thing it makes.
The second transferable part is the absence of downside. We build it, we install it, we service it, and we move it if you need the floor back. If the machine fails, one guest is out the price of a session and we refund them. Nothing in that sentence requires a member of your staff to care.
Curious what your room would produce?
We will look at your space and tell you honestly whether it is a fit. Plenty of rooms are not, and it is better to say so early than to install a machine that disappoints both of us.
What month two has to answer
Repeat usage. That was my worry before the machine went in, and it is still my worry now.
After all, getting a student to try something new during welcome week is not hard. Getting that same student to bring three friends back in October is the entire business, and one month cannot tell me whether that happens. Anybody claiming otherwise from a single month of data is selling you something.
So we will publish month two the way we published this one, including the parts that do not flatter us. If the number goes down, the number goes down.
Questions about photo booth vending machines
How long does it take to know if a photo booth vending machine is working?
Longer than a month. In practice, a first month is dominated by novelty and by whatever else is happening in the building that week. We treat month one as a setup period and look to the third or fourth month for a baseline worth planning against.
Who services the machine?
We do. Servicing, consumables, repairs and relocation are ours. A venue that has to think about the machine is a venue we have failed.
How is the guest price set?
Together with the venue, before the machine goes in. The right number on a student campus is not the right number in a hotel lobby, so we do not publish one figure and apply it everywhere. At Nova Southeastern University a session is $7.99.
Does the machine need staff?
No. It ran for a month at NSU with nobody assigned to it. Guests pay at the machine and take their prints without anyone else being involved.
Related reading: what the opening weeks looked like, and how the NSU partnership came together.
