Wiithu

Preserve Love

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Why Wiithu?

Current social media, like Facebook and Twitter, is not an adequate place to share and preserve your most precious memories, thoughts and lessons of life. These meaningful, emotional messages are extremely important, we call them “high value content”. High value content includes stories about our lives and the experiences that end up shaping who we are. It includes valuable lessons we want to share with loved ones. It is photos and videos we want to preserve for future generations. It is letters and notes of appreciation, love, and life advice. High value content captures who we really are, what we really think, and how we really feel. This is completely different from the sometimes artificial images some people project in social media. This content is the story of our lives, and in this highly connected digital world, it is ironic that this high value content does not have a clear home online. Everyone needs a place to connect with our children and grandchildren and preserve our life’s legacy.

What is it?

Wiithu is a private social network that provides parents and grandparents a loving space to share what matters most to them with their loved ones. Wiithu is both a mobile and web application where parents create individual memory vaults for each of their children, grandchildren, relatives and close friends. When someone shares a message, it doesn’t get posted on a wall where it gets lost in a few hours. In contrast, each message is deposited in someone’s memory vault, and that person can unlock it now or in the future. Parents can create a memory vault for their babies and share emotions and moments as they grow. When their children grow up, they can create an account and unlock all the messages their parents shared with them, accessing an incredibly source inspirational content to benefit their lives. Messages can also be locked for an specific date to when parents think their children will be ready to read them. This feature allows parents to give their children deep and precious life lessons that they might not be able to comprehend at a young age, preserving the emotion, purity, and essence of such moments.

How did we build it?

The first version of Wiithu’s has been built by listening to parents and grandparents, starting with the initial concept to a fully developed application. Over one hundred target customers have been consulted in the prototyping process, resulting in dozens of iterations and several pivots. During the first 12 months, we focused on understanding our customers. We iterated through many versions and product features until we arrived at our MVP. Currently, the first version on iOS is approaching a private beta launch in December, and a public beta in January 2016. Wiithu changes the way people record their life’s history. Instead of providing a blank journal or an empty box to storage photos, Wiithu connects parents to their children in a conversation that can lasts decades. Children can unlock what their parents shared with them years from now, staying connected to their roots, and obtaining the precious moments and lessons their parents shared with them years ago. 

What are we most proud of?

Our biggest challenge has been to understand what is the right user experience for a product in this space. Currently there are many solutions that try to preserve memories in different ways, but no solution has really become massive and relevant yet. We tried to understand the main factors that were affecting the adoption rate of current solutions, and to accomplish this we talked to moms, dads and grandparents outside the genealogy segment. We are proud of the user experience we have created because we believe it has the potential of attracting millions of people around the world, far beyond genealogy enthusiasts, taking family history to segments it hasn't reached yet.

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