Maybe you were on a first date, leaving for a vacation or downing a beer at a baseball game. Or maybe you were checking into the hospital with Pancreatitis. Timehop wants to help you remember whatever you were up to exactly one year ago.
The startup sends you daily emails with your Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts from one year ago.
Co-founders Benny Wong and Jonathan Wegener first developed the idea at a Foursquare hackathon last year, where the initial response was underwhelming.
“When pitched it at the hackathon, people were like, ‘Ok. it’s an email that tells you want you did last year,’” Wegener says. “Then they woke up the next morning with the email sitting in their inboxes, and they had nostalgic emotional experiences. Then they tweeted and talked about it, and we had several thousand users in a short time.”
The initial Foursquare-focused hack, 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, accumulated so many users that it began costing money for the team to send the daily emails. Meanwhile, they were pouring their time and energy into their “real” startup, Friendslist, as members of of Tech Stars’ inaugural New York City class.
“We said, [4SquareAnd7YearsAgo] was a fun little hill, but we need to build a mountain,” Wegener says.
To make a long story short, Friendslist didn’t work out. But 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, along with similar hacks the team developed to relive Facebook and Instagram posts, together accumulated tens of thousands of users.
Responses to these hacks were often emotional. One user said it reminded him of the night he first felt his unborn baby kick. Wired called it “a curiously powerful daily jolt of reminiscence.” Facebook liked the idea so much that it launched a similar feature in August and Wegener says, on average, users’ number of Foursquare checkins increase by double digits after they download the product. It appears they’re using Foursquare more often now in anticipation of remembering it later. Yes, this can backfire after a bad break-up, but Wegener promises a “burn this bridge” feature is coming soon.
The team’s engineered nostalgia concept was starting to look more like a mountain than a hill every day, and they decided to ditch Friendslist and instead combine all of the hacks they created, plus a Twitter feature, into one product called Timehop.
It’s not exactly a bullet-proof business plan. The team is “focused on building the best experience” and hasn’t articulated how the service will make money, a strategy that has worked okay for Twitter but can seem like a naive move for companies just getting into the social space. However, the quick adoption and positive response to the idea indicates they’re on to something.
The same user who recalled his unborn baby’s kick said the idea was the “most meaningful and soulful” part of his Foursquare experience. Considering the Internet is sometimes criticized for sucking those adjectives out of human interaction, at the least it’s refreshing to see a digital service that inspires them.
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