I Built a Photo Booth That Finds Your Soulmate
Somewhere in Saskatchewan, doing 110 down the Trans-Canada in a rented Prius, my phone buzzed.
It was the booth. Two thousand kilometres away, on a sidewalk in downtown Toronto, a little wooden hut I'd built with my own hands had a problem. It was a Saturday night, and there was a line out front.
I pulled up the booth's status app, connected through the Starlink riding on the dash of the Prius, and remoted into a PC sitting inside a box on a street I couldn't see. A few minutes later, it was back up. The line kept moving. Nobody standing on that sidewalk had any idea the guy who built it was in the middle of the prairies.
That was the moment I realized I'd actually built something real.
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The line in New York
It started a few weeks earlier, at 11pm in New York, in a line we'd been standing in for 45 minutes.
Not for a club or a restaurant. For a photo booth. You paid $15, answered a few questions, took your pictures, and it matched you with a stranger it thought was your soulmate.
When we finally got in, took our strips, and walked out, my buddy and I looked at each other and said the same thing: this is so dumb, and it's a fucking great idea. It's 11pm on a weeknight and there's a line down the block. This would kill in Toronto.
That night, we sat on the floor of his apartment and mapped out everything it would take to do it ourselves. By the end of the night we had a plan and a split. He'd take the location, the marketing, and the signage. I'd build the thing.
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Finally, something physical
Here's something most people who know me through work don't know: my favourite things to build aren't made of code.
I've always been a tinkerer. I wrench on cars. I build furniture. I built an on-prem server in our office for fun. Give me a problem I can hold in my hands and I'll lose a whole weekend to it. But every single thing I've ever built that made money has been software. The hardware stuff was always just for me.
This was the first time I got to take all of that tinkering, the carpentry, the wiring, the "how hard could it be," and turn it into a real product. Something physical, out in the world, that strangers would walk into and use without me standing there to explain it.
I'd never built a photo booth in my life. When we got back to Toronto, my first stop wasn't home. It was Home Depot.
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Building the hut
The booth was going to live outside, on a sidewalk, in front of a convenience store in downtown Toronto. That meant it wasn't really a photo booth. It was a tiny building.
So I built it like one. I framed it in 2x4s, sheathed it in OSB, and wrapped it in house wrap to keep the weather out, the same way you'd build a shed. I ran the power, mounted the lights, and hung a curtain. The result was a little hut on the sidewalk where people would walk in single and walk out with a match.
Framing it was the fun part. Making it think was the hard part.
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The guts
Inside that hut sat a small hardware stack I had to turn into one working machine.
The camera was an old DSLR I had lying around. The brain was a used office PC. The printer was a proper dye-sub photo booth printer, which, I learned, runs about $1,500. Fucking hell. Everything hung off that PC over USB: camera, lights, printer, and a separate webcam just for the live preview.
That webcam exists because of the first real hardware lesson I learned. DSLRs aren't built to run live view all day. Leave one streaming a preview for hours and it overheats and shuts down. So the DSLR only fires when it's time to take the actual photo, and a cheap webcam handles the preview on screen. Two cameras, one experience, and nobody inside the booth can tell.
That was the theme of the whole build. On paper, a photo booth is simple: take a picture and print it. In reality, it's a pile of consumer hardware that was never designed to run together, twelve hours a day, unattended, outside.
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Designing for the sidewalk
Software on your desk lives in a perfect world. A box on a sidewalk doesn't. The Wi-Fi drops. The power flickers. Someone trips over a cord. The printer jams on a Saturday night with forty people in line. So I designed the whole thing around one assumption: everything will fail, and the booth has to survive it without me.
The quiz lived on a web app. When you finished it, you got a QR code, and that code wasn't just a link. It was a hash of your answers. The booth kept a local copy of the entire pool of people it could match you with, so when you scanned your code, it worked out your match right there on the PC. No internet required. If the Wi-Fi died, the booth didn't notice. It just kept matching and printing.
Then I stacked the backups. A cellular modem inside the booth, in case the store's internet went down. A UPS to ride out power blips. The BIOS set to boot the PC the second power came back, so an outage never meant a trip downtown. If a print failed, the booth refunded the person automatically. And a companion app on my phone showed me the booth's status from anywhere, with remote access when something needed a human.
Which is exactly how I ended up fixing a photo booth in Toronto from the middle of Saskatchewan.
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The month
We ran it for one month.
Over 4,000 people walked into that little hut. Our Instagram passed a million impressions. Across the videos people made on their own, of themselves lining up, doing the quiz, and opening their strips, we're somewhere around three to four million views. We never paid a single influencer. People just showed up, filmed it, and posted it because they wanted to.
We learned some things you can't read about anywhere. The biggest was that the dating pool is lopsided in a way I never would have guessed. Women outnumbered men five to one. Five to one. The women showed up, filled out the quiz, and lined up. The men just didn't. You can hear people talk about that, but you don't really believe it until you're staring at the numbers every night.
And the part that still gets me: at least six couples came out of that month. Strangers the booth matched, who met, liked each other, and are dating now. A hut I built out of Home Depot 2x4s is responsible for real relationships. That's insane to me.
To close it out, we threw a thank-you party for everyone who'd been part of it. Hundreds of people showed up, and the line wrapped around the block. Same as that night in New York, except this time it was ours.
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What's next
The booth isn't done. We're packing it up and taking it to another city in Canada to do it all over again.
And I'm not done with hardware either. This project scratched an itch I didn't know how badly I needed scratched. There's a specific kind of satisfaction in building something you can walk up to and touch, that works out in the real world, in the rain, with strangers, while you're two provinces away. I want a lot more of that.
It started as a dumb idea on the floor of an apartment at midnight. It turned into my first real piece of hardware.