A picture uploaded for the perusal of close friends and family with 34 ‘likes’ and a string of comments discourages social media enthusiasts from creating a digital archive of moments and memories. Creating a digital scrapbook to preserve important moments from your newborn’s life on a regular social media site a la Suri Cruise, daughter of Tom Cruise who has her own fashion page is a strict no-no if privacy is your priority. Enter Joognu.com, a website to create your own digital baby book without the fear of losing precious memories in a disk crash.
Established on August 15, 2011 by Anirvan Dam, the homepage welcomes its users with six categories under which parents can archive the cherished moments from day one of parenthood. Categorised into My Prayers – an attempt to connect the child to his or her cultural roots, My First – the first walk, the first word, the first dress and more, My Photos, My Videos to a more pragmatic My Documents – to store scribbles, paintings, birth certificates, report cards, insurance copies, property documents and the personalised, My Diaries, the website offers a one-stop solution to making growing up memorable for parents and children alike.
“The varied services we provide under a common head with an emphasis on saving memories rather than sharing it with public is our USP. This is where we differ from the regular photo and video streaming websites such as Flickr.com,” says Anirvan Dam. The 36 year-old banker turned entrepreneur came upon the idea drawing from his life as a busy parent. “As a young banker couple, my wife and I hardly got to spend quality time with our two kids. We wanted to gift our memories to our children so that when they grow up, they would get to know the effort parents put in to raise a child. This is when I hit upon the idea for Joognu.com on a largescale to help other parents like us,” says Anirvan who is based in Ahmedabad and has since given up on his day job to chase the venture. Set up at an initial investment of `25 lakh, the website which allows users to sign up for free though they are required to pay a one-time fee for upgradation or continuation of services after a certain period of time. “Our revenues come mainly through subscriptions and we have generated a good response,” adds the founder. The service which can also be downloaded as an app for Andriod devices has registered 10,000 downloads while the client base is higher. “On today’s date we have around 20,000 customers and one lakh uploads. It’s a fast growing base and we see nearly 5000 users registering every month. We have users from 650 cities across 45 countries. Our major users in India are from urban centres like Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad,” he adds. The website promises absolute privacy to users due to its tie-up with Amazon. “We provide a double back-up data. Amazon has been with Joognu.com since day one and it also provides us with server structure capable of handling large chunks of data,” says Anirvan.
However, the service comes with a catch. Unlike real life you can ‘burn after reading’ an account once created cannot be deleted though one can stop using an account.