MemoryShare

After 8 years in business we decided to rename our company. Our old name "Midwest Streams" presented many challenges in our business. Most people thought we were a fishing company located in the Midwest.

We put a lot of effort into this name change. Overall the process took us about two years to finally decide on a name that we liked. We came up with MemoryShare, because it's what we do. We share the memories of a person's life.

After 5 months of development we just launched our IOS mobile app. This is a huge milestone for Midwest Streams. We previously had the burden of requiring our customers to purchase cameras and expensive live streaming equipment.

With the recent advances in mobile technology, iPhone cameras are just as good as the video cameras we were previously sending out. This means that we can stream the funeral directly from our customers mobile device, without losing quality.

Our app provides us some huge competitive advantages as well. Our app is the only live streaming app in our space that allows users to record the funeral while live streaming. This is huge for us! Occasionally streams fail, and this is devastating! The worst day of a family's life is made worse by the failing technology of a funeral. Our app gives us the power to have a backup recording of the service even if the stream fails.

Very proud of our team for being able to deliver on this hard business requirement.

With the virus going around, we are seeing a large influx of customers. Funeral Webcasting is now needed more than ever. Many homes are now turning to funeral webcasting to allow people to remotely view the services.

Forbes is running a campaign of stories of how Corona Virus is affecting businesses both positively and negatively. They ended up choosing our company to feature on their YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jIYjvZRF0g

Hitting 5k a month in revenue took a lot longer than I was hoping. The funeral industry hates change. Almost no one in the industry wants to try out new tech. It was very challenging but we did eventually get to $5,000 a month. We plan on continuing to grow this number each year.

After a lot of pavement pounding we were at the point of making over $1,000 a month. This was hard, but I was able to quit my job and go full time running this SaaS. I finally had the time to really dedicate to the project and release a bunch of features that really separated us from the competition.

Now that the bugs were worked out we finally felt confident to hit the road again with selling. Kyle and I travelled all throughout the Midwest and talked to hundreds of funeral directors.

8 of them signed up, and for the first time I felt like we had a real business.

Anyone who has launched a piece of software can tell you about the grueling process of finding bugs. Everything to work fine in development, but in the real world our software was failing. We spent over 3 months fixing these bugs, and finally got our errors to a manageable level where users were not being affected.

After many conversations we finally landed our first customer. The only problem was that our product was nowhere near ready for use. It was simply a Vimeo page on a webpage. The funeral director could have easily just used Vimeo.

We hit the ground running and grinded for two weeks to get to our first actual MVP. These two weeks were a grueling 2 weeks, I hardly slept and wrote code 24/7. We focused on features that were specific to the funeral industry. Some of these features required writing our own video rendering engine, this was some of the most challenging programming I have ever done.

Everything was completely worth it to get some money coming in the door.

Now that we had something to show, Kyle and I were ready to sell. We hit the road and walked into several funeral homes around our area. This was something that has always scared me, but honestly cold selling wasn't so bad. Most funeral directors were fairly nice, and at least willing to hear what we had to sell.