Tiny Diary (Babydagboken in Norwegian)

"I haven't been good with milestone pics lately." That's what Faiza, a new mom told us. Tiny Diary is a photo journal app where parents capture their baby's first moments with fun push reminders.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was https://www.mosaicjournal.com/, it's a yearly photo journal for everyone and at the end of the year you get to print it out as a physical book. I thought the idea was really nice and thought what if we do the same thing but just center it around babies and their 1st year. I had previously spoken with friends who were moms and managed to get one of them. Ada is a nurse who is currently on maternity leave with her baby Mio. Together we decided to go to the drawing board and see what we can design for new parents.

What it does

With the Tiny Diary(Babydagbok in Norwegian), new parents can upload a daily/weekly picture of heir child and add milestones if there are any first moments such as first tooth, first time sitting alone or first steps. We also added a baby wall feature where they can easily add these pictures there and share it with family/friends securely. Another thing we also did was to add a "Explore" page where parents can take their babys to events that are happening for them in the city. Then they can also take picture from that event with their baby and add it to their diary.

How we built it

I built it with Figma, Claude and did some content design in Canva. Ada worked on the content creation and getting traction. We first put together a whatsapp group with friends who are moms and then shared it in testflight with them. This really shaped the app in such a great way and we took every feedback to heart and improved it quickly. From a technical pov we wanted the app to be naturally quite secure as it's childrens photos so the diary itself relies on iOS' own file and cloud encryption but for the babywall it is using a end-to-end encryption in the browser. Each photo, caption, name, and comment is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it ever leaves the device, using a per-wall key that lives only in the invite link's URL fragment. It is never sent to the server. (We are still optimising this and learning more on how we can keep it secure as this is a new area for us).

Challenges we ran into

We first wanted to set up a separate company for the app so we spent a few weeks on that. It took a bit longer so we just decided to skip it. Because of this challenge we only managed to get Revenuecat in the app on the 24th of September. We wish we skipped the whole company setup earlier. That is why we only 1 have user who activated a trial for a annual subscription for 55usd. 💵

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We weren't sure if anyone outside our friends would use it to begin with but then all of a sudden after we started posting on instagram and we started getting slow but steady traction. We now have 117 users from 4 different countries. The majority is naturally from Norway since we only added US,UK,Canada and Netherlands last weekend(26th sept).

We managed to get a brand partnership with a Pilates gym for moms. Ada usually trains there with her baby and she walked up to the manager and pitched the Tiny Diary. So on the 27th of September we had our very first event. Ada even managed to get a babyfood brand to sponsor the participants with baby porridge and energy drinks. 😍

We also have landed another brand partnership with Mikrolekeriet.com, it is a playground for parents and their babies. We agreed on them promoting us on their instagram and in return we added their venue on our "explore" page in the app. Mikrolekeriet have around 10k followers on instagram so we are excited for when the partnership goes live in October. We do think we can finally get more paid users then too as they have a great reputation.

The best feedback we got from a user was on email "Wow, really a super nice app 🥹 Lots of great features, so refined and visually pleasing 😍. I think this is such a good job and would be happy to give further tips about the app🫶🏼" This was from a owner of another baby playground venue in Oslo and we asked her to test it out. We think this really helped get us more traction too.

What we learned

We learned how to set up a iOS in the app store, it was our very first app and it was the first time we also naturally used Revenuecat. It all went quite smooth and still a bit in shock that it only took us 2 days to get accepted. We designed basically in 2 weeks before that. We've been live with the revenue cat paywall about a week now for a few features inside the app, the explore page and the baby wall where they can invite family/friends to see pictures. For the existing users only 1 have activated a trial. What we are testing now is to see if we should make the whole app paid to see how much value it brings for the existing users and if new users still download it and pay. I think only then we know which of the features are actually worth paying from the users perspective.

The building it self is quite smooth the only thing we want to learn more on is how to design better paywalls and also make app super secure and see if there are any security vulnerabilities.

What's next for Tiny Diary (Babydagbok)

Since we started late with Revenuecat due to bureacratic issues we definitely want to start experimenting with the paywalls. We also want to launch a Android app as we got a request for that. In addition we played it a bit safe and didn't launch in all the countries in the world so that's next too. We want to improve localisation as this originally started as a Norwegian app and even start a social media account in English. In order to also potentially get another income channel, we are playing around with the idea of adding a photo calendar feature since the pictures are already in the app. We found a way to add it automatically where the user only has to click "order" after seeing the photo calendar with their pictures in the app. We really think this could be a good income stream. We are also really looking forward to the brand partnership with Mikrolekeriet in October. We will share on Twitter and tag for any results later. :)

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