Unvalidated Ideas #007

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Your Year in Weeks - email to journal for everyone (Tier: B)

Humanity has never had the ability to journal their lives quite like today. As we move through time, memories and knowledge of who/what we were once like or what we did is slipping through the cracks, even with social media sites like Facebook and others around to try to record it.

Consciously recording how you feel and what's going on in your life should be a more widespread practice, done for the benefit of future generations, not blind vanity or advertisers.

The idea is so simple that I'm not sure if it's brilliant or terrible -- build a journaling flow for people that is easy for people to use by doing the prodding and getting them to record their thoughts.

Email, phone call, recording video/audio, writing phyical letters if they want -- let users choose the easiest/most comfortable way to record their lives.

People can record their thoughts, stream of consciousness, and attach pictures/video to times in their lives is a great gift, and automating it is pretty easy. Storage should also be pretty easy to ensure given the basically write-only nature of the service. Lots of people are using social media today, but not that many of them are using it in this particular way.

After enough time passes (let's say 1 year), generate a short book-quality PDF or dead-tree version of how the user's year went, and they've got something that they can share (which will likely go viral in many circles).

Outside of the normal B2C penalty, I think this idea is B tier because I'm convinced it sounds like something that people with too much money would purchase. That doesn't mean it isn't worth having or a good thing, but this is quite high up on the hierarchy of needs. It may be hard to find someone that needs this product enough to pay for it.

Read my raw notes >

NOTE Obviously, you do not want an ad-supported model here, to allow people to really trust this service, data privacy is key. Without sacrificing ease, the more locally the application can be used, the better.

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Victor (vados@vadosware.io)