If you're reading this we know you have a lot of opportunities. But the question is, how badly do you want your work to have an immediate impact on the world? As you may have guessed we're looking for you, our first-hire, to join Storytree, our awesome and growing startup. Facebook is for your friends, LinkedIn for your work life, Storytree is for your family. Storytree uses your mobile phone to create a private and easy way to share photos and videos with your family… making it so easy grandma can do it.

Storytree was launched out of the Stanford d.school and incubated at 500 Startups. Our iPhone app has been featured twice by Apple, we were covered by the New York Times, and we were Interactive Award finalists at SXSW this year. We are a funded startup and over the past few months we've been building momentum. It's an exciting time to be at Storytree! 

Work with us and dive right into the stuff that makes or breaks companies… Accounting. No just joking. But in all seriousness, what you do at Storytree will have a huge impact on our users and our future as a company. No more writing code that never sees the light of day. No more stupid bosses that micromanage and smell funny. No more "thank god its friday". At Storytree, everyday is Friday. Join us and you'll learn a ton and gain the kind of experience that will one day help you start your own company. It'll be like the Matrix where they plug you in and you learn Kung-Fu, Taekwondo, and how to fly a helicopter under 10 seconds. That's what we do everyday.

Requirements

• Extraordinary software engineering talent.
• Needs to be a self-starter with attention to detail.
• An iterative approach to building software.
• Expert ability to "getting shit done" on a small team.

Ideally

• High proficiency in Python.
• Experience using Git for source control. 
• Interested in startups, entrepreneurship, and making a mark on the world.

Your Responsibilities

• Collaborate around the creation of new and existing features.
• Craft backend services and APIs.
• Build scalable infrastructure to support a fast growing product.

What you'll get

• Freedom, Independence, and free lunch everyday.
• Room and the resources to grow as an individual.
• A cool work environment @DogPatch Labs where companies like Instagram TurntableFM were incubated.
• A competitive salary and equity in Storytree. If we do well, you’ll have a huge upside.

About us

We are two fine lads with backgrounds from the Stanford d.school, IDEO, MIT, and Google, and we are passionate about keeping our families connected and close together using technology. Like most of us, we live in one place while the rest of our families live across the country [Matt is from Hawaii, Alex is from Portugal, yet we live in California]. There has got to be a better way to stay connected that spans generations other than talking on the phone or sending emails. There has to be a better way to share the stories of our lives with the people who we care most about.

For more information contact Matt at hello@storytree.me

We are pleased to announce that a new and improved Storytree is live in the app store. Please download the latest version to try it out. We've listened to all of the feedback we have gotten from you, our wonderful users, and made many changes. We would love to get your feedback on this latest version as we continute to improve Storytree. Please send us an email at hello at storytree.me.

What's New in Version 2.8

• Ability to edit picture captions!
• Re-design of the sharing screen so it's more intuitive.
• Nice header bar!
• New onboarding screens to help new users get started.
• Picture placeholders.
• Button to expand a picture to a full screen.
• ... and more coming soon.

- Matt

Storytree is looking for a human factors designer to join our small team this summer in Palo Alto. 

 Storytree makes it easy for new parents to share photos and videos of their child with family while automatically creating a baby book. Storytree was launched out of Design Garage at the Stanford d.school and incubated at 500 Startups. Our iPhone app was featured twice by Apple, were covered by the New York Times and USA Today, and we were Interactive Award finalists at SXSW in Austin, TX this year. 

We are a small team with backgrounds in design from the Stanford d.school + IDEO and development from MIT + Google.

Storytree is located in Palo Alto, CA.

Job Description: 

We are looking for a summer human factors designer who can take the lead with helping us understand how our users want to use Storytree and how we can improve our product to better fit their needs. This will mean a lot of user testing with new parents and quickly iterating on our product… right now we are doing daily product iterations and over 20,000 people have downloaded our app. If you work at a large company you will be doing annual product iterations.

We are looking for someone who is excited about:

 Understanding our users:

• Finding, setting up, and doing user interviews with new parents every week.
• Combining user testing with mobile & web analytics to make design decisions.
• Mocking up and implementing new features on mobile & web.

User acquisition and distribution:

• Come up with creative ways to acquire users [from ad campaigns to contests to PR stunts].
• Help us implement a few cool user acquisition ideas that we have [happy to tell you more in person].
• Understand how products spread through word of mouth in the new parent space.

Building a community using social media and the web:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Storytree Blog

Qualities we are looking for:

• Excited about talking to new parents
• Independent 
• Lots of energy 
• Has a knack for understanding people
• Genuinely cares about the problem we are solving for new parents and their families
• Creative thinker and not afraid to take chances and fail
• Interested in startups and entrepreneurship

Compensation: Yes, but TBD based off of candidate qualifications.

For more information contact Matt at hello@storytree.me

We attended the MamaBear conference this past Friday at Microsoft. Lots of great speakers from the parenting space ranging from mommy bloggers to tech startup founders (including yours truly!).

Here are a few of the highlights:

Speaker LeVar Burton, Actor from Star Trek and Reading Rainbow - Captivating speaker

Dave McClure with giant green Hulk hands - Just as captivating. 

Some fun facts we learned:

Mobile Moms:

• 52% of Moms use their smartphones within 5 minutes of waking up. 
• 78% of Moms say they do something with their smartphones in the last 10-15 min before they go to bed. 

Moms are online:

• 9 of 10 Moms are online daily.

Huge Market:

• Moms have a $2.4 Trillion buying power in the US.
• There are over 36.1M Moms in the US.

(download)

Click here to download:

mamabear-family-tech-conferance-GrfFaiojqBvmlHzhyDsl.zip (2.22 MB)

We just got back to San Francisco today from South by Southwest in Austin, TX. We had an amazing experience and it wasan honor to be nominated as a finalist for the 2012 Interactive Awards.

When we landed at 9AM today in SFO we stumbled into a news stand to buy water. We hadn't slept the night before because we were trying to save money by sleeping in the airport for our 5:30AM out of Austin. In our state of delerium we picked up a paper and noticed that Storytree was on the inside cover of the business section of USA Today. Now that is pretty awesome. It's the sort of thing that gives you a jolt of adrenalie and wakes you up in the early morning.

We had done this interview with Jefferson Graham from USA Today a few months ago but had figured that it had been shelved because we hadn't heard from him in a while. Turns out the story ran. Thanks Jeff! Thanks friends! We are so lucky. 

- Matt

We are excited to announce that Storytree will be featured by TBS this coming Saturday February 4th @ 11AM on the show Trends with Benefits. This week show is on archiving your life… its going to be pretty great so please tune in! Thanks TBS.

Cheers,

Matt

I've now spent the past few weeks looking for a graphic designer to help the Storytree team as we design our new product offerings. Compared to finding developers in Silicon Valley I expected it to be a walk in the park... turns out its actually harder.

I was hoping that because we are deeply plugged into the design community here (d.school, IDEO) it would be easy to find the right person. I learned that it's easy to find a designer. However, it's almost impossible to find someone who is both talented and fits with the design language we are looking for.

I started off by hitting up the different design job sites like Dribbble, Forrst, and Zerply. Zerply was the most helpful but I found that the really good designers are always packed to the brim with work, and you've got to be really luck to find them during a dry spell. Next I tried the design studios. We talked to a few places and Cuban Council was at the top our our list. Super talented designers, high quality work, astronomical prices (they designed the Facbook logo after all :) If we had the money I would have loved to work with Cuban Council, but alas we have a limited budget and it would be nice to be able to bring on a designer who really like full time... much less likely to hire a designer from a studio.

Finally at the end of the day it came down to word of mouth. I am discovering that this is often the case. Who you know is so much more valuable than I had originally thought... and networking is really important. I can finally appreciate all of the time business school students spend "networking" with each other and getting drinks. When I was at Stanford I should have spent more time hanging out + meeting people and less time working:)

So as of the end of last week I finally was introduced to two very talented designers who are now helping us design our products. Im really grateful that we found the designers that we did and now its back to wireframes and user testing!

-Matt

Since Storytree was featured again by Apple in the App store (thank you Apple) we have been getting a lot of attention from all different spectrums of users. Today we noticed an article describing how Storytree is the perfect tool to get people to start writing. Its great to see how people are using the app.

When we first started Storytree we sought out to design a better way to capture our family stories... you know the great stories that grandpa sometimes tells after a few glasses of wine at the dinner table. Those stories are invaluable and we will all miss them when they are no longer told. One day i'd like my kids to know what their great-grandfather was like. Thats the problem we started off solving.

What we ended up building was a platform that had the potential to transform the digital storytelling space... something that I do believe is sorely needed. As a result of developing a broad product we got the attention of some of the biggest players in different industries who wanted us to transform digital storytelling in their space. We got the attention of the big record labels, museums, politicians (now that social media can make or break and election), and of course... Oprah. It was an honor to have received the attention of so many important people and it definitely gave us a whole new perspective on where Storytree could go... there is so much potential.

But the downside of building a broad product was that it did not do one thing very very well, which I believe is the ticket to success for an early stage company like ourselves. We started with very broad design constraints and did not clearly define who our user was. At the Stanford d.school, one of the first things that we are taught is to define our user... we study them and understand how to design for them. We create design constraints which direct the design process and ultimately end up with a product that fits our user exceptionally well. By starting with a narrow and targeted product you have a solid base to stand on from which you can eventually branch out to the record labels and museums of the world. Our problem was that we did not know who we were designing for... now we have that figured out.

Lucky for us Storytree was featured by Apple twice and makes a good story for all of the news editors out there. Over the past few months we've managed to attract a very solid user base and have been able to identify who the big users groups of Storytree are. We've singled out one of the largest user groups in Storytree (its very exciting) and are now designing and building a new iPhone + iPad app specifically for those users. We're sticking to our mission of capturing and sharing family stories, but now we have design constraints which will help us build a better product. Its an exciting time at Storytree. As always there is a ton of potential. More exciting news to come in the near future!

Aloha,

Matt

CEO, Storytree 

This is the second time Apple has featured Storytree as New and Noteworthy. Thank you Apple!