While most tech companies take the tangible and turn them digital, newly launched ShareMail is taking a different approach.
The service, which bears the tagline “No more lonely grandmas,” makes your social updates more accessible to offline friends and family. Co-founder Jeff Jackson started the company in response to his own struggles trying to keep his grandmother in the know on his life.
“I had to take pictures from my phone and print them out at work. The quality wasn’t great, and it required a lot of steps,” he said. “That made me think: ‘There’s got to be an easier way of doing this.'”
Jackson called on the help of a friend and former business partner to hone the idea and turn it into a service that could bridge the gap between modern and traditional forms of communication. And it wasn’t necessarily a smooth process.
“Originally, we wanted to make this a chatbot that connected through Facebook, but we quickly learned that doing so created an unnecessary layer of confusion — there’s a whole language behind using Facebook messenger," he said. "Not to mention, Facebook changes its UI all the time, so users didn’t really know how to interact with our chatbot. We wanted to make this as easy and simple as possible for everyone involved.”
From there, the service evolved into an app that connects to users’ Facebook accounts. The app pulls your recent Facebook photos and allows you to select or deselect which ones you’d like to send.
You include your message, give it another review and hit send. Photos are printed on glossy paper and the message is sent as a typed letter — just the way grandma would like it.
The service also has an automation feature that pulls photos on a weekly or monthly basis and includes a proposed message that gets sent to the user for approval.
“It can be either low touch and in the background or super high touch and personalized,” said Jackson. “A big part of our value proposition is that we update loved ones who would otherwise be left out.”
Though the service is still in its early stages, users are already giving testimonials on how the service has helped their grandparents stay in the loop.
“One of our users’ grandmothers has someone in her nursing home record her opening up her mail and shares it with her,” Jackson told us. “It’s like a little gift for them, and it feels good to be a part of something like this."
Image via Shutterstock.
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