18
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2017
Act.
18
de Gener
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2017
From the moment a child is born until it is about four years old it will experience some of the most important events in its life: learning to walk, to communicate with others... "And it is also when the personality it will have when it is an adult is formed," says Anna Cejudo. She is the CEO and cofounder of StepsLife, the startup presented on Tuesday that she set up along with Pau Garcia-Milà and Ferran Cáceres, the founders of IdeaFoster.
"It is a shame that we don't remember these first years of our childhood, which define who we will be," says Cejudo. This period is what psychologists call childhood amnesia, which is when the brain has still not developed the capacity to store life experiences.
If people remember a specific event from these years, often it is due to the recreation they have made through hearing about it from other people. However, she insists that "it is not a real memory," a problem that is easily solved with what the startup offers.
Messages for the future
Currently, the platform can be accessed by a mobile app. The parents create a user and post all the photos and videos they want to sharein the future with their child, but always with a message to provide context. That is because an image is not the same thing as words, "a photograph can tell a story, but the reality might be different," says the CEO, arguing for always accompanying images with text.
A trunk of digital memories
All of the content is produced by the parents –who are normally the ones to create the user account- but family members and friends can also make a contribution if the parents give them access. "We want all the content, instead of being scattered between different mobiles and computers, to be stored in a single place," says Cejudo.
Moreover, that ensures that the material is not lost. "I have an 18th-month old son, when he was two months old my phone broke and l lost a lot of photos," she says, "I felt really impotent about the fact I could not recover them."
StepsLife also preserves the privacy of the family and the future adult. The cofounder does not doubt the desire of the parents for "the child to grow up well," but she does not like the trend of posting photographs on social media: "Families post more than 1,000 photos on the Internet before the child is five and they do so publicly. "People love to share, it is a social need that cannot be changed, but what we can change is the place they do it." That is why the different users cannot interact; the communication is always in the direction of the child.
El regal perfecte
Cejudo was the guinea pig for her own idea, and she tested all of its functions and design before it was launched on the market, but the idea did not come when she was pregnant. "A friend had a daughter and we did not know what gift to get. We also saw that parents get to the point that they no longer know what they have bought and what are gifts, which made me think the best thing would be to get a useful present," she tells VIA Empresa.
Before launching, she and her two partners researched the market to find out if some other platform already covered this demand. "There were similar things, but all focused on social media," she says, which convinced them to embark on the new project.
The startup monetises the service through a subscription model. There is an initial free service so that parents can try out the tool. If they like it, they can pay for the service for a year or three years, two different packages that make an ideal gift for future parents. When they want to give up the subscription, StepsLife saves the content –without them being able to post any more- so that the child can have access to it in the future.
First incursion
The three partners designed the tool themselves, but the development of the software was done by a Madrid company. "They did the technical part, while we created the minimum viable product in order to test the concept," says Cejudo, "once we saw that it worked and that there was interest in it, we went ahead and this is the result."
The initial investment came out of the three founders' own funds and they hope to soon monetise the startup in order to keep it going. At the same time, the CEO points out that they are currently in the initial phase and that the tool will no doubt continue to adapt to needs, and they do not rule out new services to expand the business.
"It is a shame that we don't remember these first years of our childhood, which define who we will be," says Cejudo. This period is what psychologists call childhood amnesia, which is when the brain has still not developed the capacity to store life experiences.
If people remember a specific event from these years, often it is due to the recreation they have made through hearing about it from other people. However, she insists that "it is not a real memory," a problem that is easily solved with what the startup offers.
Messages for the future
Currently, the platform can be accessed by a mobile app. The parents create a user and post all the photos and videos they want to sharein the future with their child, but always with a message to provide context. That is because an image is not the same thing as words, "a photograph can tell a story, but the reality might be different," says the CEO, arguing for always accompanying images with text.
In fact, the text is a message addressed to the child. StepsLife's idea is for it to become a type of time capsule that the child will open years later. They can then read everything written for them and see the photos and videos taken of these major events that they no longer remember.
A trunk of digital memories
All of the content is produced by the parents –who are normally the ones to create the user account- but family members and friends can also make a contribution if the parents give them access. "We want all the content, instead of being scattered between different mobiles and computers, to be stored in a single place," says Cejudo.
Moreover, that ensures that the material is not lost. "I have an 18th-month old son, when he was two months old my phone broke and l lost a lot of photos," she says, "I felt really impotent about the fact I could not recover them."
StepsLife also preserves the privacy of the family and the future adult. The cofounder does not doubt the desire of the parents for "the child to grow up well," but she does not like the trend of posting photographs on social media: "Families post more than 1,000 photos on the Internet before the child is five and they do so publicly. "People love to share, it is a social need that cannot be changed, but what we can change is the place they do it." That is why the different users cannot interact; the communication is always in the direction of the child.
El regal perfecte
Cejudo was the guinea pig for her own idea, and she tested all of its functions and design before it was launched on the market, but the idea did not come when she was pregnant. "A friend had a daughter and we did not know what gift to get. We also saw that parents get to the point that they no longer know what they have bought and what are gifts, which made me think the best thing would be to get a useful present," she tells VIA Empresa.
Before launching, she and her two partners researched the market to find out if some other platform already covered this demand. "There were similar things, but all focused on social media," she says, which convinced them to embark on the new project.
The startup monetises the service through a subscription model. There is an initial free service so that parents can try out the tool. If they like it, they can pay for the service for a year or three years, two different packages that make an ideal gift for future parents. When they want to give up the subscription, StepsLife saves the content –without them being able to post any more- so that the child can have access to it in the future.
First incursion
The three partners designed the tool themselves, but the development of the software was done by a Madrid company. "They did the technical part, while we created the minimum viable product in order to test the concept," says Cejudo, "once we saw that it worked and that there was interest in it, we went ahead and this is the result."
The initial investment came out of the three founders' own funds and they hope to soon monetise the startup in order to keep it going. At the same time, the CEO points out that they are currently in the initial phase and that the tool will no doubt continue to adapt to needs, and they do not rule out new services to expand the business.