A few years ago I founded a company that did something very similar. The idea of Memeoirs[1] was that, back in the 2000s, some of your most thoughtful and interesting conversations happened via email. You could trace the story of your life collecting some of your most important emails with our webapp, which worked with Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, and then have a printed version mailed to you.
It all started in a similar way, around 2010, with a lot of free time in my hands and with the help of some fantastic friends who became co-founders. At the beginning it was more of an artsy thing (look at our manifesto [2]), definitely fueled by a love for books and a desire to slow down the merciless wheel of tech. The commercial vein only attracted us later. Fast forward to 2014 and we had a working product, we passed through the Startup zoo (2 incubators and various shows) and managed to raise about $500k.
But sales never took off. As we tried to expand the scope of the product by integrating WhatsApp and other messaging systems, it finally dawned to us just how small the market was. By the time we decided to pivot to a more visual product (ie: Photo-books), money were running out. When we finally closed the company in 2016, I think we had produced a few thousand books, but <10k.
It was a fun ride. Wish you the best of luck!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160131132208/https://memeoirs....
[2] https://www.jamez.it/project/memeoirs/
It all started in a similar way, around 2010, with a lot of free time in my hands and with the help of some fantastic friends who became co-founders. At the beginning it was more of an artsy thing (look at our manifesto [2]), definitely fueled by a love for books and a desire to slow down the merciless wheel of tech. The commercial vein only attracted us later. Fast forward to 2014 and we had a working product, we passed through the Startup zoo (2 incubators and various shows) and managed to raise about $500k.
But sales never took off. As we tried to expand the scope of the product by integrating WhatsApp and other messaging systems, it finally dawned to us just how small the market was. By the time we decided to pivot to a more visual product (ie: Photo-books), money were running out. When we finally closed the company in 2016, I think we had produced a few thousand books, but <10k.
It was a fun ride. Wish you the best of luck!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160131132208/https://memeoirs.... [2] https://www.jamez.it/project/memeoirs/