Remenis was a Twitter Bootstrapped, Facebook-like, web app that was written in Python using Django, hosted on Heroku, and used Facebook Connect for authentication. The site's goal was to encourage users to write the stories of their life and share them with their friends. The way it worked was:
The user would log in using Facebook so we could learn who was in their social network. The user would receive suggestions of stories they could write - such as "What was the most embarrassing thing you did in college?" "Tell us about your wedding reception." "What was a lesson your father taught you?" After the user wrote their story, they would tag everyone who was in the story. Those tagged would receive a notification, and not only have the story for their records, they would also add to the story things they remembered or their own perspective. These stories could also be shared with other friends, or with the public. People could like the story, make comments, and like comments. They could even share the story on Facebook.
Sounds like Facebook you say? Here is how we were different:
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Facebook
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Remenis
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Current.
All about the current stuff – what’s happening now.
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We
are all about the good ole days. We want to hear your best stories from the
past.
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Brevity.
Pictures and one sentence comment on what the picture is highlighting.
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We
want details, lots and lots of details! Tell us everything you can about the
story. Make it vivid.
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Busy.
Dozens and dozens of things to do – games, chat, videos, and the list goes
on.
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We
are about one thing and one thing only – Stories! We know the power of
stories, especially those of your friends and loved ones. They will inspire
us, teach us, help us appreciate life and others more.
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Garbage.
Lots and lots of garbage. I mean really who cares if you are about to use the
toilet right now, if you have entered in a home makeover contest, if you just
listened to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” what you just bought online, or if
you like weird and often offensive quotes.
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All
you are ever going to get here is stories! Really. Nothing else. It’s like
having your own personal Reader’s Digest.
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Superficial.
It’s about superficial relationships -- seeing how many friends you can add,
saying hello once you are friends with them, wishing them happy birthday once
a year, reading their weird posts for a few weeks before finally
unsubscribing from their feed.
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Remenis
is about celebrating and deepening the powerful relationships we already have
through stories. By writing stories about your friends and family you will be
reminded of the great life you have. By reading their stories or stories
others have written about them, you will learn new things about them that
will make you appreciate them more.
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There were three of us working on this project - two developers and me - I was in charge of PMing, UX, and UI. Nathan, Aswath and I met at a Startup Weekend on February 17, 2012. Nathan and I were working on Volunteer Around Me, a mobile app that was going to revolutionize service projects, that is until the judges sank our ship. Aswath was romancing an idea that would allow people to share hotel rooms, even with warning of it being against the law and all. After the event, since we all worked for the same Tech company and we got along pretty well, we decided to team up and work on our own idea.
We brainstormed a few Saturday mornings and discussed over a hundred ideas. We eventually landed on three that we liked - a collaborative journal, a wiki for the average Joe, and an app for inspiring people. Because we couldn't choose one we decided to combine them all and make Remenis.
Quite frankly, we didn't create Remenis after doing tons of research. We built it because it was something we really wanted. Something we believed would help people keep their history/legacy, bring people together, and inspire them to joy, success, love, etc. We realize that our life and our characters are mainly built upon our memories. As we make decisions we don’t just think about the consequences. We look back in our life and remember that one-liner our dad used to say or the vow we made to love and cherish someone. When we are asked if we are happy, we don’t think about our feelings that very minute. We think back at that time in high school when our team won the championship, when we traveled to Rome with a special person, when we held our child in our arms for the first time.
Life and character is what Remenis was about. We wanted to help everyone and ourselves write, share and collect all our life stories.
Unfortunately, soon after we built the site and started getting users, our lives got a bit too hectic and the project went unattended. Nathan went to Asia for several months to do service work, Aswath got a new job at another software company, and my wife had twins. I'm sure we all have awesome stories to write about; if only Remenis was still around... :(
Here is some of the work I did. Unfortunately, since it was so long ago the site is now broken so it would take too long to fix it in order to take some screenshots, so you'll just have to do with the few design drafts I created and that I still have left. Most of these were tweaked in the end, but they'll give you an idea of what we did.
These are a couple pictures of the first landing page, home screen, and the first logo I created.
After realizing the logo was too busy and the look and feel wasn't quite what we wanted, we came up with a different logo and look.
Here are some screenshots of our site:
The top had a carousel and here are some more of the pictures featured on it.
Once you entered the site, you saw the following instructions:
Inside the site, you would see the following tool to help you think of stories. We had a list of these questions on a database that we could add to and the tool randomly pulled from it:
It was an excellent project. We had an excellent team. Man, those were some good ole days!
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