Tweekaboo

Eugene Murphy, an engineer and proud dad of four opens up to GeekyCorner and talks about Tweekaboo, a great new family app that helps you organize and privately share photos and videos of your children's lives. Because we all want to hold on to our memories and because "it only takes a moment to make a moment!"
Big thank you to Eugene for the interview and for sharing this great new mobile app with us. 

Eugene tweets as @murphy_e and blogs at http://4kaasu.com  

From Civil & Environmental Engineering to founder and CEO of Tweekaboo- what led you to get involved in app development? 

It’s definitely not an obvious route, but after graduating I spent 5 years in Investment Banking Technology inLondonandNew Yorkas a Business Analyst and Project Manager. So, moving into the role of a Tech Founder was an easy one for me. The reason I took the plunge to set up Tweekaboo was becoming a dad and having an urgent need to hold onto the memories of all the cool things my kids say and do every day.

There are a lot of apps that offer parents tools to privately share photos of their kids. What differs Tweekaboo from the others?

Tweekaboo is all about family. Unlike other apps, when you set up a profile on Tweekaboo, you set up a family profile as opposed to a single user profile. This allows both parents to co-own their Tweekaboo memories and it’s a unique way to document and share family moments in an intimate and convenient way. Secondly, we’re very excited to be launching a disruptive print product in the near future and this will make Tweekaboo truly unique by merging mobile journaling, private sharing and cloud-to-print into one seamless offering for busy parents. 

What was your Aha! moment with Tweekaboo?

I literally woke up one night, went downstairs and wrote 3 pages that formed the core of what is the Tweekaboo vision: to simply record the story of our kids’ lives by organizing the moments we share every day on our mobile phones into a life-story. 

Currently, Tweekaboo is available for iOS and web, do you plan to offer the app on other mobile platforms in the future?

Yes – we will be rolling it out on Android next and then Windows Phone.

What is Tweekaboo's  coolest feature in your opinion? 

We call it “Remember when”: a very simple feature where we email you random moments from the past. It’s a wonderful nostalgia hit and keeps us focused on how quickly our kids are growing up.

From a bootstrapped company to US$800,000 in seed funding from Irish and international investors-how do you plan to use this new round of funding? 

Developing and launching our print service and scaling the user base. Expanding into theUSandAsiaand building out the service on multiple platforms.

Every Founder makes mistakes. Can you share a few of yours and if you were to start again, what might you do differently?

I’d probably do everything differently! But the reality is, most founders and our teams are doing everything for the first time. There’s no Mulligan in startups – you have to keep moving forward. The problems we are solving are generally new. The key is to remain data driven and constantly focus on the 80:20 – as Mark Zuckerberg so rightly said – done is better than perfect. Perfect code sitting in your dev environment is of zero value. Pushed, unpolished code that engages users and gets you feedback is a million times more valuable. 

Do you have any favorite business or related books that you can recommend to other entrepreneurs?

Steve Blank’s “4 steps to the epiphany” and “The business model canvas”. Buy no other books. Stop everything you are doing and read them asap!

What is the best advice you have ever been given?

I know I mentioned him earlier, but I’m inspired by the simplicity of one of Mark Zuckerberg’s and Facebook's core values: “Focus on impact”. It’s easy and comfortable to focus on the minor tweaks that polish out your product, but in the early days, it has to be about ruthless prioritization of features that will actually drive growth and constantly pushing outside of your comfort zone. 

What are you most excited about at the moment?

We have some very cool features in the pipeline around the print service. We’ll be rolling these out in October and November so watch this space.

But honestly, the coolest thing about doing what we do is the random feedback and stories we receive from our users about how they love Tweekaboo and the positive impact it is having in their lives. Tweekaboo is – in my humble opinion! – one of the coolest things any parent can do for their kids. The moments that get shared on Tweekaboo are, at the end of the day, the moments that make us who we are – that make us family. Only yesterday we helped a great grandaunt log in and view the first pictures of her great grandniece on Tweekaboo and we think that’s pretty cool!