Featured Startup Pitch: Joognu is on a mission to help parents capture, preserve and share childhood memories

By Lovekesh Sharma, Joognu co-founder and director

Elevator Pitch: A parent-focused web-based platform that allows users to store, organize and share their children’s experiences and memories.

Product Overview

Joognu is a one-stop solution to the emotional need of a parent to document childhood which is online, beautiful, and can be gifted to the child as and when they grow up. This is done primarily by weaving all the beautiful memories captured by a parent in the form of photos, videos, or written emotions (diary), and is supported by three more unique features: documents (upload all those certificates your child won), prayers (for all those beautiful wishes you ever asked from God), and video letters (make your own videos: see the picture speak the emotions).

Joognu is a firefly. It’s the only bio-luminescent known to mankind; the one which glows from within. We at Joognu believe that when a parent shares his or her memories with the child, it spreads happiness, hope, and most importantly, a glow.

Joognu allows you to keep memories with your child alive in various digital forms and to create a memory timeline. You can write a diary, store photographs, capture videos, upload documents and even log a prayer for your child.

There are multiple beautiful features for you to experience once you enter the magical world of Joognu. At the end of a selected tenure of your choice, you can hand over the keys (password) of your feelings to your child to read, listen, and see.

Founders’ Story

Anirvan Dam is the founder and I am the co-founder. We both have more than eight years of corporate experience in esteemed organizations. After reaching the senior management role and its responsibilities, Anirvan thought of Joognu while coming back from a road trip. He felt the need to preserve whatever beautiful happens in life, and one of the best things to happen to a human is becoming a parent. As a parent, we have missed so many beautiful moments of our child’s early years due to various reasons, and just watching them on a laptop or smartphone brings a smile to our face. There was no tool whereby you can gift all these cherished and blessed moments of life back to your child in a beautiful basket which tells you a story—and all had to be private and secure!

That’s when Joognu germinated in mind. It had to be unique, beautiful, expressive and easy-to-use. Ease should be such that anyone who can write an email can use Joognu. It should be expressive—that’s when the Joognu character came to life. It has to be unique—our features of logging prayers, uploading documents and making video are the example of that.

Launched in 2011, we have more than 20,000 members across 51 countries. Joognu speaks the language of emotions.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

We chose to focus our marketing efforts offline to start with, but then we realized that online marketing reaches a broader audience and yields a larger growth rate, therefore the choice to promote online was natural.

Market Opportunity

Businesses are always seeking innovative, efficient ways to expand into new markets. When growing a business, it’s vital to exude professionalism in order to gain customer trust. Since ours is an emotional market, we decided to launch our Android app. This happened in January, 2013, and after that we have seen an exponential rise in registrations and uploads. As of last month, we had crossed more than 110,000 uploads already. Considering that we are based in a still maturing Internet market—India—110,000 uploads is big. Now is the time that we want to scale up to the U.S.,UK and other countries.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

By far, there has not been any competition in the web space. With our features which are unique, and with the intent of gifting, the space has no one other than us. In the app market, we have seen the emergence of Tweekaboo and Memoir—both are iPhone apps. This gives validation to the existing markets in the parent-child space. At the same time, since we are in the Android market, we have a huge opportunity to tap.

Business Model

We are free and we are online. Our intent is to reach a broad audience across the globe. Let people love us. Once they do, we will incentivize and create our models. While we have launched our video letters as one of the first revenue models, we will keep on improvising in the future.

Current Needs

We have got an Angel investment of $100,000 and we are looking for investors for our global expansion plan.

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