Editor’s note: this post is 100% biased. Please take it for what it is.
Hello folks! I haven’t moved to Mars. Or at least, yet. I’ve just been busy, as I’m sure you’re used to hearing by now. So before I inform you about my latest launch, Memiary, I guess I should give you a quick lowdown of what’s been happening with Nincha: we are close to completion, really excited about the economic downturn, and have lots and lots of bug/beta testing to do (passionate testers welcome) — we will be likely launching publicly at the end end of this year, or maybe start of next.
So with that, it’s time to talk about my latest launch, Memiary (pronounced ‘memory.’) What is it? As the homepage explains: “Don’t you wish you could remember five interesting things you did last Friday? Meet Memiary. Record up to five memories of your day and make them memorable forever. Memiary is the weightless pocket diary.”
I guess I could review it, but I think what you are looking for in these biased situations are insights, not opinions, so I’ll cover the problem, the story, the idea, and then tell you about what I’ve learned in the process. But before I do that, feel free to go to it, sign up, and try it out. (Biased: Easiest. Sign up. Process. Ever. Believe me, I’ve been through a thousand.) If you’ve tried it out and want to skip directly to what I’ve learned, click here.
The Problem
So here’s my problem: I have a bad memory. A really bad one. If you asked me what happened five hours ago, I couldn’t tell you to save my wallet, let alone day, week, month, year. I forget fast, and the pictures I take on occasional trips and my daily tweets are not enough for me to catalog my life. I can feel the ten-year-later Sid hating himself for not preserving the events, moments, and actions which surrounded his life in 2008.
The Story
Last weekend on a really really rainy Saturday night, I was sipping a cup of hot chocolate and staring at the latest copy of Fast Company magazine. And then I had this idea. But it didn’t just come to me in an instant — it was the result of constant subconcious pondering of the problem I stated in the above paragraph. I really had been thinking about this for months. I just didn’t know it.
As soon as I got the idea, I sent out a e-mail to a couple close friends of mine and asked for feedback. In this time, I got the chance to put it on ‘paper’ for the first time, and boy did it look promising. After getting some quick feedback, I started to work on it, spent all of Sunday drinking Coke Zero and writing code, and I had a pretty simple product built within 25 hours of conceiving the idea. On Monday, I launched it, let my friends and family know, gained a ton of feedback, have been perfecting it for the last week, and I am finally getting the chance to talk about it to the world here at Rev2. In other words: I became an entrepreneur over the weekend. And what was supposed to be a weekend project ended up occupying my whole week.
The Idea
Before I get to the idea, and before you tell me how bad it is, let me just debunk all the alternative solutions to my problem I mentioned above. I will lift this with great pride from the Memiary about page:
- Diaries are for 10 year-old girls and those with ample time and commitment.
- Twitter is too broad, current, and you can’t sort through timeframes or jump to a date.
- Text documents are too messy, insecure, and lack usefulness.
- Todo lists and calendars are there to plan your future, not remember your past.
- Blogging has evolved into journalism, demands commitment, and doesn’t feel personal.
So now with that settled, here’s my attempt to sum it up without copying the homepage pitch and trying to sound stylishly terse:
A minimal/simple/easy/quick way to catolog/remember/preserve/record five interesting/important/notable/memorable moments/thoughts/events/experiences that take place in your day-to-date life. Like a diary, but much, much better.
How it works: you enter an e-mail, choose a password, and list up to five interesting moments of your day that you would like to remember forever. You’re answering this question: What did you do today?. Your canvas: a 1 - 5 list with textboxes. These are saved, and you can come back and edit/delete them anytime today. But chances are, you are doing this at 11am, so you probably won’t need to. Tomorrow, you’ll have a fresh blank list, and you can do the same to things which happened to you or you did tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after. These will take two minutes to do each day, and a year later when you look back, you’ll be glad you did.
What I’ve Learned
Typically, like last year, I would be writing about a tool like Memiary. But this time, I created it. And it’s been out for about a week, in which time I have tried to get every family member/friend/colleague of mine to try it out (as I said, I am talking about it for the first time to the public.) So obviously, there are things I’ve learned.
First Lesson: You Are Your Bestest User.
I created Memiary for me. Only for me. I wanted this to exist, and since it didn’t, I made it happen. I believe a lot of entrepreneurs work this way, and for the ‘quick and scrappy’ kind of a project it was, it only seems appropriate that I did it just for myself. I don’t think this is selfish, I think it’s natural. Who else would you be able to better judge the wants, needs, desires of than yourself?
In your life, the only person you get to know best is yourself, and if you want something, chances are, so do many others in the world. But if they don’t, that’s more than okay. You spent a weekend creating something you want. What could be more productive than that?
Second Lesson: Quick + Scrappy != Year’s Work + Perfect
The process of building Memiary was extremely different, and in many ways opposite, of the way we have been working at Nincha. Nincha is something I have been working on for the past year and a half, and other than my co-founder and myself, nobody in the world has seen it yet. We purposely chose to work this way as we’ve believed from the start that our duty is to deploy to the world a perfect product, not something half-baked. Having written about 1,000 startups at Rev2, I have seen a lot of half-baked products fail, and my goal with Nincha from the start has been not to make it one of those.
I still believe in the philosophy I have been following with Nincha, but Memiary was different. Unlike Nincha, it is not a grande idea, it is a personal tool; a weekend project, and I intentially kept it as simple as possible. So in this case, I wanted to be a weekend entrepreneur, and this is the only way I could have best done it. And I did it. And I can tell you, no one way I described is better than the other. Infact, they don’t even compete. It all depends on the scale of the idea and the amount of time you are willing to spend on it. If it’s big, you want to do it right, if it’s personal or something you thought of over the weekend, you might as well deploy it to the world, start collecting feedback, and reiterate like crazy over the following weekends.
Third Lesson: Define Success
For Nincha, I am not going to lie and tell you that my definition of success is to be a bootique service used by mother. My definition of success for it is high, and probably higher than what is humanly achievable. But for Memiary, I have no shame in telling you that my definition of success was strictly restricted, from the start, to two things: make a service that I use everyday and love, love, love, and make a service that my mother uses everyday without me having to remind her about it.
And I am delighted to say this: I have succeeded. I love the service, have used it for the past six days, and so has my mother. What happens to it from this point on is purely unintentional and beyond my wildest imagination. My only focus is for me and my mother to keep using it for the next ten months, and I have no benchmark to reach on Alexa or Google Analytics. By seeing even 10 pageviews per day, I have surpassed it. Bottom-line: different ideas, different scales, different amounts of effort, different definitions of success.
Conclusion
I recommend each and every developer to become a weekend entrepreneur. If you’re not one, learn PHP or Ruby on Rails and become one! It will teach you most things entrepreneurs spend their lives discovering, and it will do so in a week. Additionally, you will have intellectual property that you yourself created, own, and are extremely proud of, and something to tell and show your friends, family, and anyone you meet with great pride. When you wake up in the mornings, you will get a tingly feeling as you check your Google Analytics account and see whether anyone new has signed up to try it out, or if a blogger has covered it. It will make your life better in ways unimaginable, and more importantly, lives of people you never intended to ever affect. And your mom will be proud. Go for it.
Add New Comment
Viewing 21 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Tell me, where is the data stored?
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
I've shied away from diaries, writing for two days and skipping, then again writing for two days and skipping. This looks like the thing that'll do for me.
And yeah I aspire to be a weekend entrepreneur. :-)
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
i'm form china and introduce memiary in my blog :
http://www.zhuobing.com/?p=128
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Data integrity will be key here, I will be pretty pissed off if I keep this up and you lose the data! Do you have a strategy for that?
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
So two features that would add tons of value too me ... and keeping in tune with your positive protocol of limiting five 5 events per day is to
1) provide up to five (5) user defined or Memiary allowed drop down catagories so users (me) do not have to have multiple Memiary accounts and sign-in's to capture Personal; Business; Technology; Other1; Other2 . This recognizes that if one shares the account it is visible for all to see.
2) make it exportable the easiest way for you you can so database can be backed up and open in another app
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Re: 1) That's an interesting idea. With the 'public diaries' feature, you'd be able to toggle specific items as being public or private, but I guess the 5 item limit would limit your use. Instead, I think what would make it work is an 'upto 10 item' limit as I suggest below, allowing you to click 'add another' 5 more items after you enter 5 items. Couple that with the #hashtags feature I'm working on, and you'd be able to enter 10 items, categorize each however you wish, and toggle their public/private status accordingly. How about that?
Re: 2) It's currently exportable in RSS (see RSS icon in Past pages), and I'm working on building export in the iCal format. Stay tuned!
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
You should check out controllers/memiary.php lines 97 and 98. When accessing associative arrays where the index may not exist, you need to use "array_key_exists" or "isset," otherwise you'll throw a notice.
Number 1 feature you *must* add: allow for more than 5 items on the list. If I had more than 5 things to note and you force me to pick and choose, I'm going to use something else that doesn't lose this valuable information (like a private tumblr)
Number 2 feature: when a "memory" field is in focus, tab should save and jump to the next.
Number 3 cool to do feature: If you're up for the challenge, allow me to add my twitter name. Then, you watch my twitter and if you see a post that begins with @memiary, you add that item to today's stuff. This is also a great way to spread the word of your product, as people will be wondering "what's this memiary stuff?"
Take care.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
The 'accessing associative arrays' thing has been fixed -- it was a simple case of error handling when no input is given, which has now been turned off.
Re: Number 1. There are a lot of alternative ways to do what you do with Memiary, but the beauty of the service are its constraints, not its features. Similar to the reason you'd want to have a blog AND a Twitter account to write more than 160 characters, I believe Memiary's "5 item limit" is what makes it work for what it is. If it were to be just one item and an "add another" button below, it would fail, because there wouldn't be a given standard to users so they would either be underwhelmed and enter just one thing ("um, I did this today. What am I supposed to write?") or overwhelmed ("how many things do I have to enter?!"). Either way, they would never use the service again because it is simply too broad.
But that said, there are plans in the future to extend the number of entries to 10. So below the 5, you'd have an "add another" button, and you'd be able to go to 10 entries. For most users, 5 should work, and for users who have much to say, 'up to 10' would be their canvas.
Re: Number 2. If you currently press enter after entering a memory, it should automatically jump to the next field.
Re: Number 3. Twitter integration is something I have been working on, but it likely won't be public (i.e. @memiary), because it's rare that you'd want to share your private memories with your Twitter friends. It would instead work through DM messages which is sad because it wouldn't have the viral effect you suggest, but then again, I created the service in the interests of the user in the first place -- not the service itself.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
I agree with the beauty of such a service being its simplicity and constraints. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea and I think it's awesome that you made it. However, one must consider the purpose of the application as well. I think in this case the user's desire, and I speak only for myself here, to have more than 5 items supercedes the "beauty of constraints" of the application.
Another way to look at it is the constraint is "just enter a list of things you did today" and the constraint is loosened to "try and make it exactly 5."
Number 2, I didn't pick up on hitting Enter, but you might want to reconsider changing it to Tab. I hope at this point you don't think I'm knitpicking, but Enter and Tab have much different expectations from the user. Enter generally means "submit this page" and tab means "go to the next item in the form." From my perspective I see the list of 5 items as a form, thus I expect hitting Enter would save/submit the entire page and hitting tab will jump to the next. That's just my personal reaction, though I highly suspect it to be true for most others.
Number 3, very good point about not making it public. I was just so excited about "discovering" a win-win-win situation for the user, his friends, and Memiary, that I overlooked the aspect of privacy. Thinking it over a bit more, I think "@memiary" and no DM is still the way to go. Here's why: First off, how much harder is it to log-in to Memiary than it is to write a message from Twitter? If the answer is "so much harder that I really would prefer to do it from Twitter" than you've got a usability problem. (One thing you should totally implement is "remember me" so I just go to Memiary.com and see the list for today). Second, is Twitter just one of many ways to append my Memiary? That is, can I txt or e-mail something to get entries added? If so, then I understand having Twitter be another alternative way to do this.
On the other hand, if I'm going to Tweet something, and it is something I'd like to remember in Memiary, a situation which is no doubt commonplace, doing @memiary is 100% awesomely convenient, viral, and well, cool. It's just like telling people "This Tweet is significant enough that I want to remember it later." And it's easier than Tweeting "at the mall" and then DM'ing it or logging in to Memiary and posting the same thing.
Basically, I see an overlap of purpose in Twitter and Memiary: short entries about something I'm doing or have done. If the tweet is significant enough to be Memiaried, then I just do @memiary. It makes perfect sense. (Note that the fact it's a tweet presupposes I don't mind sharing it publicly). If I want to make an entry to my Memiary privately, well, I log-in and do it... it shouldn't be more difficult than sending a DM.
Finally, all of these suggestions just come from my own personal interest in these types of things, I love tinkering with ideas like these. Do what you like, but if it were my pet project and I saw this opportunity of virality, I'd try it out and see what comes of it.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.