Joognu.com - A New Site To Help Preserve Your Memories

Memories can be nostalgic, beautiful and something you want to cherish. Photographs and writing diaries have so far been the most relied upon method to keep good memories safe. But now with the numerous online options available, actual photos and diaries seem very old school. It was perhaps this strong pull of the online opportunity and his beautiful memories that made Anirvan Dam quit his well-paying job at Radio Mirchi to startup Joognu.com, to help people cherish their important memories. Anirvan had a strong urge to keep safe the values his father had ingrained in him, memories of his childhood plays and the music he loved from those years. While the intention was novel, doing the actual work to revive those past moments was anything but easy. But the entrepreneur in Anirvan egged him on and he decided to make sure there was a way good memories could be stored and maintained for life.

He started Joognu.com in August 2011 by bootstrapping, with an aim to make it a platform that can store the emotional journey of kids by the parents. Today the site can capture memories, help you maintain a diary about important events in your life, store conversations, etc. from different time periods of the growing up life. Joognu was earlier an offline store and Aniravan sold the concept through a bunch of direct selling agents or franchisees who believed in his idea of helping reliving memories. The venture made Rs 18 lakh revenue in the first year by selling membership at various price points. Later Joognu was taken online to test its true potential.

Joognu allows parents to create, capture, weave and store memories in a structured and a storyline format in the online version. Anirvan says Joognu’s endeavour is to help foster  emotional bonding, rather than social networking. The site want to be very differentiated from an eCommerce portal and provide convenient memory storage facilities. The key features on the site include all forms of memory storage, creating story boards, weaving memories across different age brackets of growing up, easy navigation across different time lines and the most important feature according to Anirvan is the possibility for a child to see the memories when he grows up – through the eyes and minds of his/her parents.

We quiz Anirvan, how different Joognu is from the traditional photo storage sites like Picassa and Yahoo! and he says on Joognu, they allow customers to upload important documents or write a diary thought which the other two sites would not allow.

Users can register on site through their email and with little relevant information. There is a help tab with each feature, which guides each customer on how a particular feature can be used and how all various features on the site is interconnected. The most interesting part of the website is using the ‘Weaver’ option which allows the customer to watch the kids growth from 0 to 15 years through the thumbnails itself. There are a host of other features, such as slideshow, selective sharing, spooling photos from the social media, drag and drop etc. which makes usage easy.

“Once a customer captures and upload their memories on our platform, it means we have been able add value to their lives,” says Anirvan. Joognu further understands customer behavior by taking into account the uploads done, average time spent in creating a memory, how many times they return to the site over their lifetime and so on. Depending on this stickiness of a customer, Anirvan plans to tap the customers to offer them more services like extra storage space, more tools to engage, faster uploads, print options, E-products and such.

The website, says Anirvan has seen exponential growth and gets hits ranging from 3,000 to 10,000 a day. He claims to have over 3 lakh page views and about 200-250 customers who visit the site daily. While Anirvan considers Tweekaboo from Ireland to be their closet competitor, there are many other indigenous sites like Little1, Kreating Keepsakes and Hiraj among others who are doing something very similar to Joognu. Joognu also has an Android app which allows users to share photos, videos and diary writing through the app.

Marketing of the website is primarily done online and via other social media websites. With a team of 9 people across product and marketing, the entire focus for the team at this point is to better customer experience. Joognu, says Anirvan has a customer base is spread across 45 countries. And to help them in their scaling plans, the startup recently partnered with IAN (Indian Angel Network). “We want to design a robust and more stable value system for our business. We want to be leaders in this space. Once we receive stability in terms of customer acquisition and more importantly satisfaction, we will launch a freemium model,” says Anirvan.