Memento

/ Capture, share, and relive the moments that matter to you

Opportunity

At Memento, we strive to spark creativity, build genuine human connections, and bring joy to the world. We recognize that people’s lives are busy, but with busy lives come a lot of memories – many of which will be forgotten. Some people try to remember memories by taking photos but often forget at crucial moments. Others, despite wanting to, have never created physical keepsakes with the photos they take. We want everyone to remember the past without any of the time investment and stress.

Potential benefits

As a customer, Memento ensures that every moment that matters to me is never lost. I don’t have to worry about my pictures going unused or being lost. Because my days are generally quite hectic, I feel like I don’t have the time or mental space to reflect on my experiences and share the best ones with my friends. With Memento, I’ll take more photos that are meaningful to me and reflect more often in a safe, low-manner setting. I will become more emotionally fulfilled by focusing on taking photos that matter.

Mock customer case study/interview

While conducting our experience prototypes, we found our prototype for personalization quizzes to be particularly insightful. After completing a quiz and being recommended a scrapbook theme (even without actually receiving a scrapbook), we found that: (1) users take great care when answering questions they deem are a reflection of their personality, (2) users appreciate the interactivity of the quiz, and (3) the resulting suggested theme is critical and has an effect (both positive and negative) on how the user feels about the experience. This indicates that the quizzes and personalization will be a core component of the Memento user experience – we will carefully craft high-quality themes that users identify with and closely monitor user satisfaction with recommended themes.

Areas of uncertainty (ranked)

1. Does consistently uploading photos feel like a burden to users? / Will users use our product over the course of weeks, months, and years if they are not immediately rewarded with a physical product?
2. Do daily prompts help with identifying meaningful photos and moments, especially when compared to traditional scrapbook/photo album creation?
3. Does the physical, automatically-curated scrapbook maximize the amount of joy someone can get from photos? / Are there more effective ways to use photos?

Exploring the uncertainty

1. Consistent uploads
   1. Conduct a longitudinal experience prototype asking users to send a prompt-related photo for a period of 30 days
      1. Subjects should ideally be people within our target user group (college students with an affinity for physical photos) previously unknown to the team
2. Identifying meaningful moments
   1. Conduct an experiment where users are asked to send a photo representing their day without a creative prompt for a certain time period. Then, in a separate time period, ask them to send a photo but with a prompt provided. For each person, give them a free scrapbook with either non-prompt or prompt photos and measure satisfaction (also ask if they would want to trade their book for the other one).
3. Maximizing joy
   1. After having people submit photos for a week, present them with a scrapbook, framed photos, printed photos, etc., and allow them to choose one item to keep. Track these decisions to get an indication of which item users perceive to be most valuable, how valuable the product is to them, and when they see themselves using the product.

Prior research

• Our target market is relatively large, with, ambitiously, 13+ million potential 18-25-year-olds interested in physical photographs (Best Colleges, Lifestorage, Marketing Charts)
• Many competitors exist in the space or adjacent spaces (Google Photos, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Mixbook, Etsy, BeReal, etc.). Memento is different because it emphasizes the physical product, encourages social interactions via shared scrapbooks, and actually saves users’ time.
• Human behavior has changed post-pandemic (MedicalNewsToday, PNAS, Harvard SEAS)
  • Shift to remote work: making the day more mundane. This makes increased reflection more essential and can be guided by thoughtful prompts.
  • Decreased travel: when we travel, it will be more meaningful
  • Increased outdoor activities: more active moments to capture
• Physical objects provide more significant meaning than just experiences (Vox, PubMed)

Leading signals

• Customer retention over longer periods of time (months, quarters, years) – quantified through daily active users (number of submitted prompts/photos) and number of scrapbooks purchased per year
• Number and severity of customer complaints
• Number of pictures submitted and number of consecutive days with submitted pictures

Other options & competing benefits

• Digital scrapbooking: easier to develop and lower costs (for user and company) but lack of physical component makes memories less meaningful; also more direct competitors
• Event-based timing for each scrapbook: more distinct scrapbooks and easily retrievable memories but lack of day-to-day memory-keeping which is core to our value proposition. Scarcity could also possibly make a scrapbook feel more meaningful.
• Social media service: lack of physical component makes it easier to ship and the product can be more social but the space is a red ocean that users may latch onto as a fad but later abandon

Why now?

As the world resumes greater activity in the wake of the pandemic, people are returning to a state of normalcy. In fact, we imagine that people’s lives are even more hectic than before as they want to maximize their time doing everything they couldn’t during the pandemic. We believe a tangible product will make these new memories more valuable and that people will want to value these memories as the pandemic made people more sentimental after needing to live vicariously through old photos. Moreover, if competitors like Google Photos, Shutterfly, CVS, and Snapfish move first with their existing infrastructure (both digital and physical), the opportunity could decrease rapidly.

Involved technologies

For the digital component of our service, we have used React Native and Firebase to build an automatic notification, random prompt, and file upload system. The notifications are using the react-native-push-notification and react-native-notifications libraries. We also aim to use machine learning to identify and rank photos that users may most want in a scrapbook. Potential resources for this include the OpenCV and dlib libraries. For the physical component, we will need industrial printers and shipping services.

Estimated time frame

Within one month, we aim to develop a minimally functional mobile application with notifications, prompts, file uploads, and theme customization. We should also have basic, predetermined themes created. Within 3 months, we should have shipped some basic scrapbooks to early adopters and begun considering feedback.