Back in 2018, I had been thinking about the tonne of the places I’d been to, the crazy amount of things I had seen and done, the myriad of people and random happenings that had influenced my life in some way or another. One bored afternoon, my organised brain urged me to start a simple spreadsheet to attempt to somehow document what I could remember, for future reference.
When the pandemic arrived in 2020, most of the World, (almost) ground to a halt. So with a lot of spare time, a little knowledge and zero experience, I set out to build an app to save the details, moments and memories from my entire life and also for my daughter, hidden away from the algorithms and negative aspects of social media. Somewhere for people to keep their memories organised, searchable, shareable and most importantly, private.
The lockdowns afforded me a window of opportunity, that is so rare these days. Some chose to make sourdough. some chose to learn a language. I chose to start a company and make an app. I did it for the challenge, for the experience, to learn something new and ultimately to create something that not only I wanted for myself, but to own something that my little family might benefit from in the future.
Since returning to relative normality, dedicating (very) early mornings and precious weekend time to solo-bootstrap-build a side-project, while working my demanding but enjoyable full time job in film has at times been tough, a little lonely and pretty tiring. But after a couple of years of learning, building, failing, tweaking and even releasing a completely new version, I now have a fully functioning web and mobile app that is pretty much what I envisioned back in 2018.
I also knew that it would be way more painful to regret not trying and continually ask myself “what if…” for the rest of my days !