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In early 2012, Mike Davis’s 83-year-old grandmother bought an iPad, hoping it would record her voice. She wanted to recount events from her life and the lives of her relatives, especially those fallen during the Holocaust.
While plenty of voice-recording apps were available, Davis felt none could properly honor the sentiment that underlay his grandmother’s stories. Determined to fill that void, he decided to build an application that, he hoped, would capture an intimacy otherwise lost.
His efforts would manifest in StoryPress, a platform for personal audio narratives. Founded in late 2012, StoryPress allows users to record spoken accounts of their personal experiences and upload photos and videos to complement the chronicle.
“Nothing captures the authenticity of a story more than someone’s own voice,” said Davis. Adhering to this mantra, “I decided to build [a] storytelling application that could...help [people] share their story with family around the world.”
Originally, Davis had envisioned an app for recording family histories and biographies. “The original version was very simple,” he said. “We asked people to create audio books by talking and answering questions.”
Users could select one of two options: the “Interview Me” feature, in which they answered a series of questions on topics running the gamut of emotional tones (examples include “First Set of Wheels” and “Cancer Battles”), or the “Dictation” feature, which allowed users full narrative autonomy.
Now – two years later – the app has taken a new form. Inspired by social media news feeds, StoryPress’s latest version allows users to record their audio narration, upload photos and videos from their devices and social media accounts, save, and share their stories across social media outlets.
“[StoryPress] was updated for a few reasons...People care most about the stories from people they chose to follow and not our ability to suggest. Even people who may not be ready to create a story have a reason to open StoryPress and see what their network is up to,” Davis explained. “Secondly, we wanted to make storytelling even faster and more fun...we wanted to make the quick ‘in the moment’ use case more accessible. Both of [these] changes have to do with making our product more sticky for everyday use and getting users into the storytelling process faster.”
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The app also contains an internal social networking function, wherein users can follow others and “Like” each other’s posts. Stories are accessible within a user’s social network, and the user can adjust his or her privacy settings.
Davis hopes redesigning the app will prime StoryPress to evolve into a prominent source of information about social events. “We believe in time StoryPress can be a huge wealth of information about various topics, such as searching for stories about a possible destination for a honeymoon or a fraternity to join...Organizing all this information is the next big change in social media and we believe StoryPress can be at the forefront of that.”
The company, which raised $15,299 from 176 backers through Kickstarter last year, has raised $500,000 in seed funds and has four full-time employees. By the end of the updated app’s beta phase in October, Davis approximates, it hosted 2,000 active users. “In the next 90 days,” Davis said, “we need to establish traction with at least one demographic or market then leverage that for a series A round to properly scale the company quickly.”
Despite a new user interface and functionality tailored to an Instagram-accustomed user base, Davis contends that StoryPress’s core goal hasn’t changed. The new product, he hopes, will at once be a perennial tribute to his grandmother and a viable resource for a generation raised on smartphones – a universal way to tell a life story. “We still want to be the world’s largest repository of digital stories and memories. [We] believe this new focus on everyday moments in the context of a social network will get us there faster.”
