Ask HN: Review my bootstrapped startup, Moment Garden
My co-founder and I created Moment Garden as a simple and secure site for parents to save and share memories of their children with their close family & friends.
We allow parents to save stories, photos, and even video by simply emailing their moment to their child's custom Moment Garden email address (e.g. [email protected]), much like Posterous does for blogs.
All data is private by default, and parents have complete control over which family and friends have access to view their Moment Garden timeline and receive updates of new moments.
We have not officially "launched" (as in sought out press), yet through word of mouth we have seen some good, early growth.
We'd appreciate feedback from HN regarding the site, the messaging, usability, and usefulness. Any other ideas are welcome and appreciated as well!
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @garbowza details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
Very cool idea. I've been wanting something like this for a while, but for my own memories.
I have a pretty horrible memory, and I'd like a simple site what I can email or SMS or enter posts about things I do, or random memories from my childhood. When I get older, I'll wish I had entered them all somewhere.
Privacy would be my main concern - I'd want to permission it only to my wife and children, and maybe a few others. I'd want my data encrypted, so admins can't even see it.
Something like this would also be great for couples - documenting relationships over time and being able to look back on them later. Emails could automatically go out on a certain date every year to remind you of something that happened on that date.
Also important would be getting my memories out. If the system ever went defunct, I'd want my data emailed to me or something.
I have a few small children and I like the idea. However, I ran into a snag when I attempted to set up an account. First of all, I can't add all my children at once. I have to add a child, skip the invites, click on the child's name up top, then click "Add garden." So, unless I misunderstand, it looks like I can't have all of my children in one garden. What do I do if I want to e-mail in a vignette about two of my children or all of them? And how will my family view the timeline of all children at once? If you have an answer for this, you could make that a little more clear.
Love it. I'm a mom and I already know I'd use this.
Currently we use a combination of Facebook and email to get stories and pics out to people. So it would be nice if we could continue using them that way (ie. family members subscribe via email, and when we post something it automatically emails them the new text/pics AND it also posts on our facebook accounts)
My husband's response when I showed him the link: "thats brilliant / why didnt i think of that / damnit / its awesome" (over IM)
I love it, we do this with facebook but it is clumsy and facebook is constantly trying to make the stuff public.
I would love an ipad app so stuff I shared would show up on a dashboard for grandma and grandpa who arent competent at using the internet (i.e. picture frame which shows the newest stuff from the kids)
I also saved a bunch of events like first food etc that I lost during a hard drive crash, love the idea of emailing to mark the events.
Very cool idea! Well designed and presented, definitely something I will be recommending to a few friends and family who have kids.
Question: on the technical side, what languages/frameworks do you guys use?
In addition, I'd love to talk to you about providing outbound transactional emails.
Good luck with this, cheers!