The app has come a long way from creator Daniel Raffel’s initial inspiration to share a complicated sourdough bread recipe with a couple of his friends. The app has always been mobile first: the initial idea was to use the iPhone’s high-quality built-in camera to take a few snaps of the steps of your activity, then quickly tap in a few instructions, then upload to the site no matter where you happen to be. But now that the content is there, the team at Heavy Bits, which makes Snapguide, wants to broaden its user base — that’s where Apple’s iPad comes in.

“The iPhone is probably more natural [for uploading guides], but for consumption, the iPad is a bit better,” Raffel told me. “For us, we want people to create content regardless of platform.”

Snapguide not only has been embraced by users, but Apple has heavily featured it in the App Store as well. Still, Raffel doesn’t want to be just an iOS app. He foresees an Android app someday, but also wants to be a resource for those on the web too. That’s where the big opportunities for expansion is going to come, he said.

“I’d love to see us in first couple Google results. To me, that’s what success ultimately starts to look like — when people on the internet are stumbling on our content when they’re trying to learn to do things,” Raffel said.

The way he envisions doing that is hooking up with a big brand or publisher to share content. He has nothing to share on that just yet, but it’s a good hint about what to expect next from the app. “You can imagine a large magazine or brand creating content on our platform and being promoted; being able to click and find out where to buy the supplies [in a guide] … we want to leverage a bunch of awesome content creators that have existing networks and brands to distribute their content here as well.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• How to stand out in the app development game

The Series A round comes from Atlas Venture, Index Ventures and CrunchFund, and arrives not too long after the app’s debut in late March. Snapguide was an insta-hit with DIY-ers, and recently kicked off an integration deal with the other service popular with the creative set, Pinterest. In late April, CEO and co-founder Raffel said the app had “hundreds of thousands of users” who were spending an average of 23 minutes within the app.

Snapguide is one of several recently launched apps and services that tap into the creative and productive potential of mobile devices, particularly the iOS platform. Snapguide and its ilk are part of a larger trend, something that has only begun to be realized with powerful mobile devices. As Raffel told me in April when talking about Snapguide’s sometimes surprising appeal: ”What I didn’t realize is that we were building a platform for people to participate in a public talent show. They can share all these things they’re good at — it’s something that’s clearly been missing.”

Here’s a video Raffel did with GigaOM recently where he explains how to hire the right people:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to stand out in the app development game
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

To get Pinterest integration, Snapguide users have to have the latest version of the Pinterest iOS app installed.

Pinterest has not yet released its API to the public, and Snapguide worked with Pinterest to make the integration happen. “I am confident they are doing everything they can to give developers high-quality APIs to interact with,” Snapguide founder Daniel Raffel told me. “I’m sure some great news will be coming soon and that when they launch developers will be very happy.”

Raffel said that since its launch, Snapguide has gained “hundreds of thousands of users” who spend an average of 23 minutes within the app.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Best practices in optimizing content for social engagement

In this episode of See Founders Run, Raffel shares:

• What you need to do before you even think about hiring
• How you can research potential hires
• How getting personal can help you compete for top level talent
• The team-building philosophy he learned from Thomas Keller

Want more great guidance from a startup founder? Check out our episode with Jetpac’s Derek Dukes on running product iterations.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 11 steps for scaling a startup
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• How to stand out in the app development game

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

During the same week the iPad got its own quickly embraced drawing and journaling app, Paper. Like Snapguide, the response was nearly immediate, and my Twitter stream filled up over the next few days with digital watercolors, drawing and paintings that were created by friends with just their fingertips on the iPad.

Snapguide and Paper have two things in common. Both appeal to the creative side of mobile users, and both are themselves beautifully made and deceptively simple to use.

I think it’s these qualities that are going to provide a roadmap for more iOS apps to come that will appeal to the artsy, creative side of people, rather than the traditional consumption-oriented theme of what have so far been the most popular types of apps on Apple’s platform.

At last count there are 585,000 apps available for download on Apple’s iOS App Store. And as has been true since the App Store debuted nearly four years ago, no category is more popular or important to the platform than games — they are half of the most popular free apps overall and half of the most popular paid apps. Angry Birds is the poster child for how to succeed as a gaming app on Apple’s mobile platform, but there are so many others: Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, Words with Friends, etc. In other words, people rightfully associate the iOS platform with games.

Other apps are on the rise too: News, weather and social networking apps are also big with iOS users. But like games, these are mostly consumption apps: reading news, following people on Twitter, checking the weather, or entertaining yourself.

The debuts of Snapguide and Paper are showing that not only are developers making apps that make the iPhone and iPad more of a creative tool, but that users are responding. We’ve written a lot about the iPad as a productivity tool, thanks to apps for annotation, creating presentations and reports, data visualization and more. These are mostly aimed at people using the iPad in a specialized business or education context. But I think we’re starting to see that developers and consumers see iOS devices as fun and casual ways to create things as well.

Even Snapguide’s Raffel wasn’t totally sure of the widespread appeal of his app until after it was released to the public and people started creating their own guides.

“What I didn’t realize is that we were building a platform for people to participate in a public talent show. They can share all these things they’re good at — it’s something that’s clearly been missing,” he said.

At least for DIY stuff. There are equivalents of these virtual talent shows all over the web and in plenty of fields, he points out.

“There’s Github to show off how you can code, Flickr to show off pictures you take, Dribbble for creativity and designers to show off,” Raffel says. “There hasn’t been a generic platform where people feel comfortable showing off … YouTube is the closest thing, but it’s a hard place to create and edit a video. The bar has been too high” to participate for most people.

He’s talking about his own Snapguide, but that willingness to embrace an app that helps users unlock or show off their creative expression can apply to other apps too.

June '09 edition of The New Yorker

Creative expression through apps is not new on iOS. Apple demonstrated the platform’s potential with a mobile version of GarageBand early on. And Brushes has been around for several years. It had its big break when the iPhone app was used to create the cover of the New Yorker in June 2009. But since then, though more specialized apps for artists, like Sketchbook Pro, have gotten great reviews, there haven’t been many big, instant hits in this category.

A similar idea can be found in a less traditionally “artsy” field, but one that still requires an enormous amount of creativity: building apps. Codea, which we’ve profiled in the past, takes the idea of creating apps or games for the iPad and flips it a bit: you use the iPad to create apps and games for the iPad, through a simple, touch-oriented programming language.

Codea’s creator, Simeon Nasilowski, also saw the potential of the iPad as a creation tool early on:

“I didn’t understand why people were saying it’s just for consumption. You can run any tools you like on it, you just have to think about it from a different interaction viewpoint — not mouse and keyboard, you just need tools optimized for touch. Then it becomes quite a good creation tool.”

As more developers look for “green pastures,” as Raffel put it — unexplored categories of mobile apps — I think we’ll see more people realizing how creative the iPhone and iPad — and even other mobile platforms some day — can be.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues
• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space

Although there is a web version of the service, Snapguide is clearly designed to take advantage of mobile devices like the iPhone, which for many have taken the place of the manual or cookbook they look to for help with a project. The guides that users create — which can contain a combination of audio, photos and video — are formatted so they are easy to see on a small screen, and the app also makes it easy for users to browse through existing guides and to “like” or comment on them. And since the iPhone has a camera that also does video, creating a new guide is almost as easy as viewing one (the company says it is working on Android and other versions of the app).

One of the obvious categories for such easy-to-consume mobile guides is recipes and cooking, and Snapguide offers a number of those already, including some created by an award-winning chef. Cooking also played a key role in the formation of the company: the idea for Snapguide came together after chief technology officer Steve Krulewitz — a former engineer on Google Chrome — gave co-founder and CEO Daniel Raffel (a former chef and also former product lead for Yahoo Pipes) a book on bread-making. At that point, Raffel says he realized there was no easy way to create or share step-by-step instructions with photos and video for relatively simple tasks.

Although Raffel has created a number of guides himself that involve cooking — including “How to make a marinara and margherita pizza” and “How to barbecue teriyaki tofu” — he also a wide range of other fairly eclectic how-tos, including one on how to fly a dual-line kite and another on how to replace the battery in the key fob for a Prius. The service has been seeded with guides created by a number of other users as well, including Bouchon’s Chef de Cuisine Rory Herrmann, gardener and nursery owner Flora Grubb, and a beekeeper who has created a guide on how to clean and render beeswax.

Like most people, I hardly ever turn to how-to guides unless I am completely stuck — and then I usually just Google the term I am looking for (faucet dripping, etc.) and then click through whatever looks good and try to memorize the key steps. The nice thing about Snapguide isn’t just that the guides have photos and videos included, so that you can see exactly how to do something (the guide on catching Dungeness crabs is quite good) but it is really well designed for the phone and tablet. I could see myself holding the app on my iPhone or iPad — or having someone else hold it — while I try to execute whatever maneuver I am working on, or prepare a recipe for something complicated.

Snapguide, which is based in San Francisco, closed a $2-million round of funding last year from a group of venture funds, including Index Ventures and SV Angel, as well as individual investors such as former Facebook staffer Dave Morin and former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.