Memories As A Product Revisited

Since I wrote Marriage, a 60th Birthday and memories as a product, This idea that we don’t get to say the things we want to or that we don’t get to re-live the best of memories enough has stuck in my head.​

​At the turn of the new year I decided that instead of thinking a product into existence I would hack on an Airtable and try and build my own archive.

Why Airtable? Well you can store rich media (audio, video & images) incredibly easily. In the future I could also automate collection or distribution of memories.

So I tried this: 

​I set up an Airtable with all the people I care about on one sheet (can add profile images)

​I created a list of questions on another sheet

And then I whatsapp-ed all the people asking them a question one by one and when they answered in a voice note I would add it to the Airtable.

Was it a success?

​ Not really. There’s still some nuanced pains to work out.

• I have to manually ask all the questions
• I have to save the audio files to my phone and then airtable
• Some of the questions I asked were too dark/emotional/hard for people to answer (note to self - bring joy)
• There was no deadline or time pressure to answer
• Some people obsessed over the perfect answer and submitted nothing
• I gave nothing back - it feels like my friends should be able to revel in the joy I was experiencing 

But the positives?

I got to ask my 3 best friends, brother and brother in law what their best memory of us was/is.

I and I got the answer.

With these small voice notes I have bottled up moments of joy I can and have returned to. Any bad day, any set back I can open up my Airtable and cry with laughter as I relive a great memory as told by a friend.

It’s still not clear to me where to take this, or whether it should even be a product, but I can guarantee you there is something here.

This digital bundle of joy is priceless. 

Further thoughts

Having thought about these problems I think there's room for a product that does this:

• To celebrate an event - asks one question about you to many of your friends
• They all answer in an app/web browser that records audio (is it possible on mobile?)
• This is given as a gift for the event in one big digital scrapbook. This could even be an email.
• All questions need to add joy - no hard questions... yet
• For a more intimate experience you can do 1on1 and just ask several questions

Key takeaways

• Memories as a product can be a thing
• Memories need to be joyful
• The digital bundle of joy is priceless
• Will keep hacking away and update​

For better or for worse you can follow me over at twitter as I continue to document my journey.