Ask HN: Review my bootstrapped startup, Moment Garden

[garbowza]

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!

http://momentgarden.com

[mikecomstock]

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.

[cjkundin]

Thanks for the feedback!

Privacy is a big deal for our users and we take it seriously. Only the people you elect to see your garden will see it. Data encryption for storage and transportation (SSL) is on the horizon.

We're currently working on an export feature to automate the retrieval of your moments but in the mean time, if you email us we'll zip them up for you.

It's funny you mentioned the relationship use case since we have a few users that are already using it for that. One of them is using it like a time capsule and giving it to her boyfriend for their 1 year anniversary.

[AmberShah]

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)

[cjkundin]

Thanks for the feedback! You can add family members to contribute and they can elect for immediate, daily or monthly digests. Although not "automatic" yet, you can choose to share individual moments (and only those) of your garden to Facebook and we'll even show the comments in your garden.

We hope you like it, and feel free to send any comments/questions our way!

[triviatise]

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.

[garbowza]

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement! We've created the timeline such that it looks beautiful on an iPad, filling up the full screen. However, we have our eyes on a native app as well.

[michaeldhopkins]

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.

[cjkundin]

Hi,

Great feedback and we definitely need to make that more clear on our site! Thanks.

We're working on a "family" view so you can see all your kids in a single timeline. If a user wants to email a moment for two kids, they could add them both to the "to:" field and we'll show it in each of the recipient's garden and eventually combine them in the family view. However, you're right - from the web, this is not possible yet. We tried to keep things as simple as possible, but this is something we'll have to consider going forward.

[JonLim]

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!

[cjkundin]

Thanks! We use the LAMP stack with a few frameworks (CakePHP, jQuery) and wrote some custom video processing code. Feel free to email us at [email protected]

[vipivip]

Like it, what's the revenue model?

[garbowza]

We're working now on integrating product purchases, such as photos and photo books from the moments saved in the garden.

Additionally, we're exploring a premium version with more advanced features that our users have asked for.

[iworkforthem]

easy to click: http://momentgarden.com

[cracked]

What are some of the advanced features you might provide?

[garbowza]

We've gotten a ton of requests, but among the most popular are photo albums, family gardens (showing all of a parents' children together), photo editing, and custom backgrounds.

[jvdmeij]

Great idea. Reminds me of memolane.

One suggestion: Put up a real example, so people can play with the app immediately.

[garbowza]

Thanks for sharing Memolane. I hadn't seen that before, but it definitely looks cool.

And I really like your idea of putting a real Moment Garden on the home page to allow interaction. You're right, that would help visitors grok the concept.

[abbasmehdi]

I am recommending it to about 10 people right now!!! This is very very useful!

[garbowza]

Excellent - we really appreciate it! If you have any suggestions for making it better, we are all ears.