It's amazing how my founder's story and what help I need can change in the span of two months, since the GreatAlbum Summary for Pitch at Cambridge Innovation Center

Seeking Advice

Best way to build a marketing engagement engine in front of the app, that we use to attract new users, follow-up on outstanding invitations, entice customers back when they haven't used the app in a while, and inform them of new/interesting customer engagement. 

The Origin Story

My son played on the same club soccer team for 6 years – that’s 200 games across 10 states and 3 countries. This team became a mainstay of our family’s social life. We amassed 20,000 photos and 200 videos of our experiences, on and off the pitch. We did our best to share them, but it was always disjointed via emails, texts and WhatsApp, with media spread across Google/Apple Photos, Google Drive, Dropbox & Youtube. There was never one place to see all these albums & playlists, and no way to get notified when new ones were created. Now, as we reminisce about the times we shared, finding the media is like finding needles in a haystack, and we’re starting to forget the amazing stories that accompanied these experiences. 

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We submitted our application to the MassChallenge Early Stage Accelerator today. Excited to see can make it into this cohort. 

In the spirit being open and transparent about our journey, I hope these answers may prove helpful to others following their own journey. 

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Seeking Advice

Decide how and when to raise money. How: friends & family, crowd sourcing, angel investor, strategic partner, or continue to bootstrap and start pushing subscriptions. When: considering this is still my side hustle, I’m about to launch the 3rd release of the minimum viable product (MVP3) and ramp up “real” user base.

The Origin Story

For the past 20 years, I’ve been the self-appointed photographer for all three of my kids sports teams. I love taking action shots and writing stories to capture their games and tournaments. But organizing and sharing those with team parents has always been painful, especially when a team spans 6 years and over 100 events. Apps like TeamSnap and TeamApp are clunky. Apple photos can be shared only with Apple users, alienating Google users. Sending via email/text/WhatsApp is horrific. The best I’ve found is using Google Photos collaborative albums, with album links and stories shared in Google Docs. But that’s still a bad user experience, so virtually no one does that. GreatAlbum will make celebrating and reliving youth sports team events easy and fun!

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Recently, I sat down with GreatAlbum leadership and talked about our goals for the next 3+ months, until the end of March. We've been making slow progress the last few months, as we've been completing an upgrade to OpenSocial 10.3.8 as part of our underlying foundation and making major enhancements to our integration with Google Photos. 

As we look forward, we decided to set some key goals for where we want GreatAlbum to be by the end of March. Here are some key highlights: 

  • Users

    • Invite all of Erik's 2600 target contacts

    • Get to 1000 active users, defined as at least 5 activities in a week

    • Erik seeds 10-20 albums from his relationships and media for those albums

  • Investors: Contact 50; pitch to 10

  • Partners:  Contact 20; present to 5

  • Accelerators/Incubators: Submit 5 applications; get accepted by 1

    • Pioneer - updated description, video

    • Mass Challenge Early Start-up

    • YCombinator (Spring)

    • #4? 

    • #5?

  • Have a well documented description of the key attributes of investors/partners that we are targeting

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As a follow-up on my post about our MassChallenge Early Stage Start-up Application, GreatAlbum was not admitted into the 2022 U.S. Early Stage Cohort. That wasn't a big surprise. I've heard from a number of founders who have gone through the program that they were admitted on their second or third application. It was nice to be able to attend the Boston Reception for the program on October 19th. 

Below is feedback we received from the seven judges on our application. 

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I am often asked how GreatAlbum is different from Google Photos or Apple iCloud Photos.  I discussed this a couple years ago in Why GreatAlbum is different from photo storage services, but I've realized it's not very clear, so I thought I'd try to make it more clear in this post how they are different, and especially how GreatAlbum makes Google Photos even better! 

1. GreatAlbum drives increased usage of Google Photos

First, GreatAlbum expects you will still keep your photos/videos in Google Photos. You trust Google way more with your precious original media than you ever will GreatAlbum. GreatAlbum simply imports the meta data for photos/videos at the user's request, including date, time & media ID and saves a low resolution image of the media item, since Google currently doesn't allow third party apps to display Google photos though the API for more than 60 minutes. If a GreatAlbum user has their photos saved on their local device or another photo service, GreatAlbum requires you to save it to a Google Photos account, where the user will then authorize GreatAlbum to access it. 

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As we prepare to ramp up the beta program for GreatAlbum, we're focused on the use case that enables you to Cheer Your Kid’s Team. This contrasts the challenges "before GreatAlbum" vs the benefits of "with GreatAlbum," and guides you through how you can Cheer Your Kid’s - in real-time!

Below is a summary of what this use case is important, what it enables that is not possible without GreatAlbum, and a short video demonstration. 

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We just submitted our application to the US Early Stage Accelerator of MassChallenge. In the spirit of open sourcing our start-up journey, we've shared it below. If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment below, or email us at [email protected]

 

Customer Pain and Solution

Problem - Please describe what problem (customer pain point) you are trying to solve.

Smartphone owners take over 7000 pics/year to capture & share experiences with others and relive later. But most get lost in time because people are overwhelmed by the sheer volume spread across devices/services and the difficulty with organizing & sharing. Popular services like Facebook, Instagram & Twitter share with all friends and poorly support real world structures of groups, individuals, events, places, stories, discussions, and they require all content hosted on their platforms.

 

Solution - What is your solution? What is innovative about your solution, technology, business model, etc?

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Today we submitted our application to Y Combinator. In the spirit of sharing our journey with other founders and business leaders, below are key elements of our application. We'll see how YC responds...

See our GreatAlbum Product Demo and my Founder's Video.

 

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less. 

Share life as it happens. Bring memories to life.

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do. 

The "average American" takes 7300 pictures/year (20/day). They do so to capture the experience, because they want to share it with others, and to relive it again in the future. Yet, most photos get "lost to time," because there are so many, and because it’s actually hard to organize that much content and to share with specific groups of people time and time again.

GreatAlbum solves these problems. It’s designed to be a fresh, unique approach to capturing, sharing and reliving experiences through a structure that represents real life events, individuals, places, stories and discussions, and groups/communities in which these are experienced (greatalbum.net/node/69).

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After a 6+ month slog to rebuild GreatAlbum with MVP2, we're finally relaunching our Private Beta today! As I in my July post, things have gone much differently during than expected in our transition from MVP1 to MVP2.  Some major changes have included:

  1. Rebuilt on top of Open Social
  2. Implemented the ability to import Google Photos... 
  3. And to organize clusters of photos into events with the click of a button
  4. Transitioned from Pantheon to AWS, due to some key Pantheon limitations
  5. Implemented a completely new user interface design

While we still have tons of bugs and feature gaps, we're excited to restart our Private Beta today and reengage with our most trusted users while we work feverishly to fix bugs and help our customers realize our dream!

DRUPAL TAGS
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I just realized that today, November 12, is my 17th anniversary of being a member of the Drupal community. Back in 2005, I was a member of the reunion committee for the Class of 1986 at Crater High School, planning our 20th reunion. I was the technology lead, so I decided to build a class website! Why not?

I spent a week or two researching various open source content management systems, including Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, and a couple others. In the end, I chose Drupal, because I felt it had the best range of functionality and the best community. We built that class website (no longer running) on Drupal 4.x with CiviCRM 1.x. What an experience that was! 

Seventeen years later, I still think Drupal is the best open source content management system on the market. I've been incredibly impressed with the way it has matured, with the help of great leadership by many volunteers, including founder & Project Lead Dries Buytaert, investments from companies like OpenSocial, Acquia, Lullabot, Pantheon and many, many others.

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I had a great time celebrating my 30th reunion this weekend at my alma mater, Northwestern University. It was amazing to catch up with classmates - some of whom I hadn't seen in literally 30 years. It was amazing to see how some people seem very similar to the way I remember them back in school, whereas other seem completely different. The act of getting classmates together after a bunch of years can be tricky. In school, we each developed certain identities – an academic, an athlete, a class clown, Mr/Mrs. Popular, the wallflower, the stoner. And with those identities came pretty strong cliques. Kids tended to hang out in groups where they identified with each other. And once those identities became established they were nearly impossible to change. 

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Well, it's been just over nine months since GreatAlbum Joined the Pioneer Incubator Community and three months since our six month update In that time...

  • Weekly Updates - we've submitted updates 42 out of 43 weeks - 37 week streak
  • Our Pioneer score - has gone from 30,917 to 45,336
  • Our global rank - we broke the top 100 on 30-March to 54th in June to 15th the last two weeks
  • Our US East rank - we broke the top 50 on 26-January to 17th in June to 5th the last three weeks

We've reviewed a many Pioneer player's sites/apps multiple times and enjoyed following their progress over time. 

In that same period, I've attended over 40 weekly Pioneer Players Thursday zoom calls. While I've met with 15-20 players across these calls, in the last several months I've found a really nice rhythm with four other players in particular:

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In previous blog posts, I've described the fresh new approach to digital albums that GreatAlbum enables, how to import Google Photos into GreatAlbum , and how the Media Cluster Recognition (MCR) engine can automatically recognize clusters of photos by date/time and organize them into new events. Now, let's bring them all together with a more complete guide on how to use GreatAlbum to organize your Google Photos in GreatAlbum and share them with the greatest of ease. 

1. Import Photos - Three Step Process

First, you have to import your photos into GreatAlbum. Let's assume you're like me, and you have about 20% of your organized in Albums and the rest have no album association.  This presents a challenge, because you want the albums you've curated to be represented as events in GreatAlbum, and then analyze all the other photos and auto-create events based on media clusters. So, right now, until this can become an ongoing process, there's a three-step approach to accomplish this. 

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When you read articles by experts on how to launch your product, they all say you should be able to build and launch your minimum viable product (MVP) within weeks or months, so you can gather user feedback quickly and determine if you have any hope of achieving product-market fit (PMF).  I knew this, and yet our journey for GreatAlbum has still grossly violated this guideline. Some of the factors were by choice, and some very unexpected.  

Built MVP; Launched Private Beta

When I assembled a small team to develop the GreatAlbum MVP, I thought it would take us about six months to get the MVP up and running. I knew it would be longer than experts recommend, because my team would be learning Drupal on the job, with help from an expert consultant. And then of course COVID impacted the team's productivity. So, it took us 8-9 months to launch our MVP in November 2020.

Priorities from User Feedback

At that point, we ramped up our first 15-20 users and we did start to get some good feedback. From that, we knew there were three major features that were missing:

  1. Media Import: While users could manually link individual pictures from Google, we needed to create much more scalable ways to import and organize media from Google Photos 

DRUPAL TAGS
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After cracking the global top 50 in the Pioneer Incubator yesterday (see previous update), we received our first feedback from a "Pioneer Expert." Here is what they said. 

Interesting idea—how do you think about the improvements that Great Album makes over existing solutions (like iOS's "memories" or "albums" feature that uses location/image metadata to group like images). I think there's a few dimensions to this problem: need, effort, and scale. On need, I'm guessing that this problem is something that most people would bucket into a "nice-to-have" and a small number of people view this as a pressing problem. How are you finding the group of people that are already doing this manually who would benefit most from Great Album? This is closely related to effort as I'm sure many people enjoy going through the Photos app on their iPhone and seeing some of the nice compilations Apple has made (trip to Japan, times spent with your cat, etc.). but wouldn't go out of their way to create these albums. Lastly, it depends entirely on your desire to turn Great Album into a venture-scale business vs. a lifestyle business, but in either case it'd be interesting to get a sense for what market size looks like.

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Well, it's been just over six months since GreatAlbum Joined the Pioneer Incubator Community. In that time...

  • Weekly Updates - we've submitted updates 27 out of 28 weeks (we forgot to submit an update the weekend after New Year's Day, when we were still on holiday).
  • Our Pioneer score - has gone from 30,900 to 41,094
  • Our global rank - has gone from so high it was unreported to breaking the top 100 on 30-March to 54th this week (we were actually 50th after Monday's scoring, then dropped to 54th after feedback star scoring)
  • Our US East rank - has gone from too high to be recognized to top 50 as of 26-January and top 20 as of 30-March.

We've reviewed a number Pioneer player's sites/apps multiple times and enjoyed following their progress over time. And see our first feedback from the Pioneer team and my response.

In that same period, i've attended 25-26 weekly Pioneer Players Thursday zoom calls. Where possible, the Pioneer facilitator for each call tries to group the same players together week after week. While I've met with 15-20 players across these calls, I've found a really nice rhythm with three other players in particular:

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No Media in OpenSocial

It's been a challenging sprint. As I mentioned in this blog post, we had to pause our Private Beta in order to rebuild our app on the OpenSocial distribution of Drupal. I think in the end this will be a good decision in order to take advantage of all the great communications features that the OpenSocial team has built over the past five years, but it's proving rather challenging right now because OpenSocial doesn't use Media, which is so central to GreatAlbum.

DRUPAL TAGS
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I've been a member of the Drupal community since 2005, when I built my first website on Drupal 4.x with CiviCRM 1.x. It was for my 20th high school class reunion. A few years ago, I was thrilled to discover the OpenSocial project, built by the team at GoalGorilla. They were a consulting firm that developed Drupal sites and got so focused on community based sites, they productized OpenSocial around 2016 and then actually renamed the company to OpenSocial in 2019. They enable exactly the kind of networking/social website that I built in 2005-6, and a few since then. 

So, when we first started prototyping GreatAlbum two years ago, I seriously considering building on top of OpenSocial. I even managed to have a call with OpenSocial CEO, Taco Potze, to discuss it. But at the time, I felt like the vision and requirements for GreatAlbum was sufficiently different from that of OpenSocial, that we needed to build our own site using a plain version of Drupal. 

DRUPAL TAGS
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Google PhotosOne of the unique differentiators of GreatAlbum is that we don't compete with dominant photo storage/sharing sites - Apple iCloud Photos, Google Photos, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook. Instead, we work with them by expecting you want to keep your photos/videos there and then catalog all of them in GreatAlbum, where you can organize by event/theme and share in different Albums with distinct member groups. This gives you the best of both worlds. 

A previous blog post explains how to organize your media into auto-created events using media cluster recognition (MCR). This post will explain how to import all those photos into GreatAlbum, so that the MCR engine can do its magic. While we use the word import, it's important to note that GreatAlbum stores only low-resolution copies of media items for quick viewing, with links back to the original media that still resides in Google Photos for safekeeping.

When importing Google Photos, there are two sets of options to consider:

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As described in a fresh new approach to digital albums, events tend to serve as the main organizing construct for media, better than boring old albums. It's straight forward for users to create an event in an album and upload or import media to be part of that event. Many users are doing this already during our Private Beta.

Beyond that, GreatAlbum offers a unique and exciting feature, where it can auto-create events based on media that you import from remote sources (like iCloud and Google Photos) or upload directly to GreatAlbum.  Here are the basics of how this works...

DRUPAL TAGS
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As part of cultivating a support network on my journey to build GreatAlbum, I've gotten involved with the New England Regional Developers (NERD) group over the past year. I attended NERD Summit 2020, where I got some great insights on a few topics relevant to GreatAlbum.

Pioneer App LogoThis year at NERD Summit 2021, while I expect to continue to learn from others, I also wanted to contribute something back to the community, which of course if it stimulates any interaction will also end up generating further insights for my team as well. I'm actually planning to present one session myself, and then have one of my team members co-present a second session, which will then continue into a Birds of a Feather Session on Day 2. Below are the session proposals, in case you're interested. I'll update this post with presentations once they're available. 

Proposed Session #1 - Non-Technical Founder's Approach to Agile Project Mgmt

Are you a non-technical Founder or Project Manager wondering how best to define the requirements and manage the development of a website or app? Attend this session to learn how one such non-technical Founder went about it - mistakes made, lessons learned, approach now being followed. A few highlights of the session:

DRUPAL TAGS
Group    Media    
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Today I attended a webinar on How to find a technical founder/CTO. It was hosted by Nelly Yusupova, a CTO with over 18 years experience, leading companies to technical excellence. She is a startup tech advisor, outsourced CTO, and the creator of TechSpeak for Entrepreneurs. The stated goal of the webinar was to learn:

  • Where to find a tech cofounder or CTO
  • How to build your tech network so you have a better chance of finding a tech cofounder or CTO
  • How to evaluate if someone would make a great CTO or tech co-founder
  • The strategy for building your MVP without a technical co-founder or CTO so you can attract them to your company

Overall, the webinar was worthwhile. She did share useful perspectives on the stated topics. She also pitched her online master class. As she explained, the class covers ten modules: 

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Pioneer App LogoAs I was reading through some blog posts by Daniel Gross, I stumbled up an app/community he helped build, called Pioneer. Pioneer is both an app and a community. It helps founders track progress, get advice, and get funded. In a nutshell, the way it works is members compete in the weekly Pioneer Tournament:

Step 1 - Join with your project

  • Register, fill out a profile about you as a person/founder
  • Fill in a detailed profile about your startup project or business

Step 2 - Compete in the Pioneer Tournament

Each week, there's a process that takes place

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I've very excited to announce the launch of the Private Beta for GreatAlbum. We're calling it GreatAlbum v0.8.0. Why that version? Well, as mentioned in Where is GreatAlbum?, we're starting with Private Beta (v0.8), followed by Public Beta (v0.9) and then finally General Availability (v1.0).

I want to offer my huge thanks to the development team that has been at this most of the year - Angel, Ashley, Kevin, Negi, Sahana, Shilpa & Thomas. 

If you want to join the list of people interested in being a Beta user, then see our Beta page.

 

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Boring Old Approach

Since photos started going digital around 2000 (I got my first digital camera in 1999), the approach to creating and sharing digital photo albums has remained largely unchanged:

  1. Organize your photos/videos into an album - these days, Apple Photos and Google Photos seem to be the dominant places for this, as they're tightly integrated with the two dominant smartphone operating systems - Apple iOS and Google Android. 
  2. Share your album with family/friends by specifying their email addresses, or by sending them a sharable link via text or email

If the collaborate option is turned on then anyone invited to the album could add photos to it. In Apple and Google, you can tag faces in photos based on contacts in YOUR address book, but can't share those contacts between users. In Facebook, you can tag people who are Facebook users, but you can't tag non-users (including long-deceased ancestors). 

The mechanics of sharing a photo album is such a hassle, many people don't even bother. They share a few pictures here and there, via email, text/WhatsApp or post (Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc.), and the majority of their photos never see the "light of day", buried in their photo storage.

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I was recently talking with another founder in the Pioneer community. He was questioning the viability of GreatAlbum and pointed me to the 2015 article Why every photo storage startup dies or gets acquired. Even though this article is six years old (a lifetime in high tech startup land), the situation is remarkably unchanged since then:

Apple’s Photo Stream is all but incomprehensible to me. Google’s photo product, while very good, is buried inside Google+. Amazon’s photo storage service, tied to Prime, is just getting started. Facebook’s service is designed more for sharing photos than for organizing them. Dropbox’s Carousel seems to exist for the sole purpose of helping people consume their Dropbox storage.

No wonder people keep building superior services: it’s impossible to store your photos with Apple, or Google, or Amazon, and not imagine you could do it better. And the need grows larger every day. Last year, trend forecaster Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins estimated that we upload 1.8 billion photos to the internet a day, up from 500 million the year before.

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open source swiss knifeBy the title, you would think I was talking about struggling with the decision to build GreatAlbum on open source software. Actually, that was a no brainer, as discussed in Why we built GreatAlbum on Drupal. Instead, I'm talking about the decision to be as open as possible about how we are building GreatAlbum, our journey, our mistakes, our lessons learned and our achievements.  This decision was inspired by a number of different reasons.

First, it's very much my style to be as transparent as I can. I tend to find that if people are truly interested in achieving success together, information enables them to understand what's working, what's not and how they can help each other to be more successful. 

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red question markYou might have noticed that all this wonderful functionality described in What is GreatAlbum doesn't appear on this site. So where is it? 

The Answer: The GreatAlbum prototype quietly under development in a hidden site. Upcoming plans include:

Private Beta - We will be launching a Private Beta program in November with a select number of users to try out both the GreatAlbum site and the Help site and give us qualitative feedback. We anticipate spending a 2-3 months in Private Beta, slowly growing the number of users to a few hundred as we work out all the kinks.

Public Beta - Then hopefully in January or February 2021 we'll go into a Public Beta, where anyone can create an account and start using the Apps. 

If you want to join the list of people interested in being a Beta user, then see our Beta page.

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Community customer serviceAs mentioned in The 3-Part Mission of GreatAlbum, while we were in the process of building GreatAlbum, we had to think about how we would support the users of the app. We looked at a lot of traditional customer service applications, like Jira Service Desk, Zendesk, Zoho, etc. The problem was that with all of them, the model was to have a small number of people providing customer service to end users. That didn’t feel right.

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Genealogy treeTwo of the most popular, revenue-generating hobbies for individuals and families - on and off the internet - are genealogy and family photography/social media. 

Genealogy is primarily focused on finding new family members, and documenting/proving key life events, like birth, death, marriage, & divorce, with citations to prove those "facts". Lately, the big push has been on DNA testing to help you find even more family members and learn more about "where you come from." The problem with this is it's focused on "data," with limited support for social media or stories about the individuals/families in your family tree.

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When I joined the Reunion Organizing Committee for my high school class, for our 20th reunion in 2006, I thought it would be cool to organize it on a website. WordPress v Joomla v DrupalKeep in mind, this was only two years after Facebook had launched, and a few months before it was available to the general public (not requiring a .edu email address), so that wasn't an option. I spent a week researching open source content management systems, narrowed it down to the top three - WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!, and ultimately decided upon Drupal - I think version 4.6 at the time. While I recognized that it wasn't quite as widespread as WordPress, and more complicated to learn, I liked that it seemed to have the most robust capabilities of the three. Thus began my journey with Drupal that has now spanned nearly 15 years and almost as many websites - typically as charitable hobbies for nonprofit organizations. 

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When I started to entertain my dream of creating the GreatAlbum application, I always knew there were two missions that were important: 

1. Community Content Development
2. Community Application Development

In the process of building GreatAlbum, we had to think about how we would support the users of the app. We looked at a lot of traditional customer service applications, like Jira Service Desk, Zendesk, Zoho, etc. The problem was that with all of them, the model was to have a small number of customer service people providing all the support to end users. That didn’t feel right. As a result, we created a third mission for GreatAlbum:

3. Community Customer Support

 

Below are deeper explanations of each mission...

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Erik's personal albums
The albums I made in my 20s & 30s

Obsession

For over thirty years, I have been obsessed with collecting “artifacts'' about my life experiences and those of my family members, especially my ancestors. Since at least high school, I’ve always felt someday I would create the platform to share all these photos, videos and documents with others, hopefully in the format of rich, multi-media stories. In my 20s, I made 20-30 albums from pictures, ribbons certificates and other things I had collected so far. About the time I turned 30, this interest intensified as it became connected to a new interest in genealogy. I discovered one of my dad’s cousins had built a family tree in Family Tree Maker software, and one of his brothers had done a bunch of research, collected lots of family artifacts and taken lots of detailed notes about them.

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