Comment by jamez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamez | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I founded a company that did something very similar. The idea of Memeoirs[1] was that, back in the 2000s, some of your most thoughtful and interesting conversations happened via email. You could trace the story of your life collecting some of your most important emails with our webapp, which worked with Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, and then have a printed version mailed to you.

It all started in a similar way, around 2010, with a lot of free time in my hands and with the help of some fantastic friends who became co-founders. At the beginning it was more of an artsy thing (look at our manifesto [2]), definitely fueled by a love for books and a desire to slow down the merciless wheel of tech. The commercial vein only attracted us later. Fast forward to 2014 and we had a working product, we passed through the Startup zoo (2 incubators and various shows) and managed to raise about $500k.

But sales never took off. As we tried to expand the scope of the product by integrating WhatsApp and other messaging systems, it finally dawned to us just how small the market was. By the time we decided to pivot to a more visual product (ie: Photo-books), money were running out. When we finally closed the company in 2016, I think we had produced a few thousand books, but <10k.

It was a fun ride. Wish you the best of luck!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160131132208/https://memeoirs.... [2] https://www.jamez.it/project/memeoirs/

That’s great experience raising $500k and going through the incubator experience. The (I’m guessing late) 2000s was willing to gamble on consumer plays like this, you don’t see that often at all today. HN used to have more stuff like this.

I think the closest real world (as in wide scale commercialization or deployment) of your original idea was Facebook’s automated video they made for each account (assuming they had enough content) playing back your history via photos, friends, events etc. Cant remember the name of that video feature just now.

There’s always a core idea in each product that has some practical value somewhere.

Yes, it was a great experience. I too have the impression that investors these days are looking for a more proven track record before buying in, especially for B2C products, but I think some markets are still open to "gambles".

As for real world products: Shutterfly/Snapfish are still looking healthy, and Google Photos is pushing hard their print store, which is where we were eventually heading to. And in the category "real world products that never were" - WhatsApp reached us shortly after the acquisition by FB. They were interested in partnering up with us, until all of a sudden they weren't anymore.

The core idea, as you say, is always there. For us it was the importance of Memory, which will keep on cropping up on many products to come. You just got to be riding the right one. :-)

This is a great story thanks for sharing, and I think it can be useful for the poster of screenbreak above. My knee jerk reaction when I saw the product was, wow I can create a book of all the articles I read in 2020 and make it a coffee table book. It is a good gift to give close friends as the articles that shaped your year, or one to reminisce on, but above all this book needs to be picture heavy, it needs to feel like a magazine or coffee table book to have mainstream appeal. I hope OP tests this out, there is def a market here

Hey, OP is taking notes! Coffee table value is definitely a thing

Wow, thanks for sharing! Really interested to know more about memeoirs story, will get in touch!

Awesome story! Reminds me a bit of Groovebook.

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