Hi! I’m Jonathan, the founder of ShareLocket.
This company was born from a couple of years crammed with the highest and lowest points of my life. Whether the event was happy or sad, I kept finding I wanted to share it with friends and family — many of whom aren’t especially tech-savvy — in a beautiful, easy, meaningful way… and with everyone’s privacy protected. Yet every option seemed to come with some compromise: a required app download, an account tied to one social media platform or another, a limit to only video, or photos, or text, lock-in to a single company, and on and on. I’ve spent my adult life building things on the Web; I felt I could do better and help other people in the process.
It seemed like it should be simple: a nice slideshow my parents could watch with photos and videos from the epic 6-day race I ran across the Rocky Mountains. Hours later, after a lot of frustration on all sides, I told them I’d bring my laptop over the next time I visited and show them then. A few years on, I still don’t have a visual keepsake of that experience — the photos are jumbled in with the rest in my computer’s photo album. Worse, I can’t always remember where each one was taken or what was happening.
Over the next three years, I lost both of my parents. I was faced with what, sadly, people are confronting every day: How do I share what made them so special? How do I let everyone know? How can I preserve the memories that matter most? All of these decisions came at the time when I was least capable of deciding anything. With my technical skills, I was able to build memorial websites and send out emails; but once again, they were difficult, time-consuming, solo efforts, and something most people couldn’t do.
From those experiences comes ShareLocket. I wanted a keepsake beautiful enough to honor my parents; flexible enough to share the story of my race in photos, videos, and writing; and simple enough that anyone could do it. This is the product I’ve wished I had over and over again — for a friend’s kid graduating high school, for preserving the stories of an older generation, even for my dog’s 12th birthday! In building something that my friends, family, and I wanted for ourselves, I hope I’ve made something the rest of you will love too.
Jonathan