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rrhoover
Congrats on the launch, Siqi and team. Beautiful app.
blader
Thanks Ryan! Appreciate the support.
deathspin
She's a beaut, nice work. I'm sure the NSA will greatly appreciate this also.
blader
If you disable syncing it's as secure as your device is ... which is to say probably not that secure. =(
mugenx86
Security against NSA/espionage really shouldn't be a concern considering nobody that paranoid would even use this app, let alone pay for it.
maebert
Nobody that paranoid should use an iPhone. Or any phone, actually...
sillysaurus2
Why is it free? I would've paid for this. Does advertising net you more profit in the long run?
blader
We're going to be a freemium product. Advertising would be a terrible business model given how sensitive the data we're going to have is.
sillysaurus2
Why did you spend 2 years of your life on this to give it away for free? It sounds like you don't want to benefit from this in any way, monetarily, which is interesting.

Much respect. I'm only curious...

EDIT: Whoops, I misunderstood the meaning of freemium.

blader
Freemium is how things like Dropbox and Evernote make money, and they seem to be doing okay. =)
pccampbell
Hey Blader - Freemium is typically used for a landgrab, but only when there's a very specific monetization plan in place to leverage the "leads" (free users). I'm a bit concerned that you're not first to market and going straight to free. Do you have monetization thought out?

Here's a good article to consider: http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/188339/Screw-Fre...

ajlburke
Looks cool - but coming from being in a similar automatic-diary iOS app space (Remembary), I'm really curious about your business model.

You have a team of 9 people and you've been working for 2 years - presumably costing well into the six (seven?) figures by now? Outside of Angry Birds and such, making serious money is pretty difficult in the App Store these days. Freemium for something as personal as a diary is tricky, since advertising is obviously a no-go - are you charging for the hosting? Is there a time limit?

I'm just a solo dev working on (and promoting) apps part-time, and you're VC-funded and have a whole team including someone who was "head of revenue for CityVille at Zynga," - so presumably you have something clever up your sleeves. I'm just curious.

I'm sure Momento and Day One make good money, but that much?

bliker
The tile is so vague, please:

     ShowHN: I've launched an app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
     ShowHN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
bmelton
It's a beautiful app, and I like just about everything about it.

Generally, when I look at apps like this, I immediately think of ways I could be doing it better (often, I'm wrong, but nevermind that) -- but with this, it seemed like everything I thought of was in the very next screenshot as I scrolled through.

It looks great (thought I would make the logo on the website much bigger -- probably twice as large). The site is fantastic -- and I especially love being able to flick through the iphone on the page.

I'm an Android user, so I can't check the app proper, but I'd expect good things from it from what I see. Congratulations on shipping.

blader
Thank you so much, that's such a nice compliment to our team. We're working on Android as soon as we can, but we're a very small team of 9 people.
cesarbs
Any plans to release for Windows Phone?
blader
None at the moment, the numbers just don't make sense for our very small team right now. =(
lbearl
Any place we can get notified when this drops for Android?
mugenx86
This is great! I could definitely see myself using this if my life was more interesting than home -> work -> home (mon-fri).

And if weather permits, home -> beach -> home (weekends).

blader
Ha! That's basically what mine looks like too most of the time, but I've found that it makes me want to make my life more interesting.
colinbartlett
I work from home (home -> home -> bar -> home).
ringmaster
I work from home and brew my own beer. (home -> home -> home -> home)
darkstar999
That's what I think when I see these "one second of every day of my life for the last year" videos. Mine would put you to sleep. I need some hobbies...
liuhenry
Is there a backup or data download function?
blader
We do sync the data to our servers, which you can switch off. We've engineered it so that if you just want to keep the data on your phone, the app will still work fine, and you can rely on your iTunes/iCloud backups.
colinbartlett
Any plans for a kind of "export"? I like this idea a lot, as someone with a terrible memory but that doesn't use social media like Foursquare. I would only worry about a way to have my data permanently. Outside of the app which could be pulled from the AppStore at any time.
blader
This is literally our #2 most requested feature. We so want to build this.

If we do get pulled from the App Store, it will still be on your phone, so as long as you don't delete it you'll be fine.

ghaff
I don't consider being on my phone to really be an archive. People change phones, etc. Looks awesome but I wouldn't seriously use it if I couldn't export the data--in whatever degraded form--to a standard format. Frankly some sort of PDF export would be fine.
maebert
Engineer @heyday here. We've already got an export-to-json prototype, but it's not quite ready for the public yet. And of course we want to export into a beautiful format for the average user as well.
tim333
Export to html would be nice so it could look pretty in my laptop browser.
tunesmith
I basically can't use any journal app either unless I can export and own the data - as in, remix it into a different format if I choose. I've used two journal apps so far and have lost journaling data both times (both apps still exist). If there's a journaling app that lets me export to text/metadata every week to store in some repo, but where I still prefer to use that app for input and display purposes... that's a great journaling app.
state
The only thing that would attract me to a "personal archive" product is being able to completely and totally own it. I want to have ownership not just over my data, but also of its presentation. If you decide you want to redesign the app and I hate it, then all of my previous time and energy is wasted.

This product immediately asserts, 'use me forever', but everything about the project says 'we raised money, and who knows how this will play out.' It always frustrates me that companies are willing to gloss over that obvious conflict when entering in to such a potentially long commitment with their users.

I don't mean to be overtly negative, but instead just want to point out something you may have overlooked. I would expect that you want to attract users who don't take these choices lightly, right?

blader
I feel the same way. That's why we spent time building it so that all of your data lives fully on your device (it's synced to our servers for backup purposes, which you can switch off). So even if we run out of money, you can still use Heyday forever.

But less factually, I'm in love with this product and I intend to work on it for the rest of my life. Even for free.

state
I certainly appreciate the boldness of your personal commitment. You should add that to the site somehow.
neon_electro
This comment converted me to download the app. I'd strongly suggest making this more clear in your product's description! :)
nicktal
I feel the same way about Keepsake and I taught myself to code 9 months ago to build it and will work on it forever. It's roughly in the same market as HeyDay, but with a different perspective around grouping content semantically and quickly sorting it to publish on your iPhone: http://www.getkeepsake.com/
kmfrk
Pixter (http://pixter.in/), if you mainly deal with images.

I, too, would like an app like the one you're talking about. Maybe something that plugs into Dropbox.

nlh
Congrats! I'm on a plane now so haven't been able to download but it looks like it addresses the major complaint I have about journaling apps (i.e. Day One, which I use and, for the most part, love) -- which is that if you forget/are too busy/get behind, the queue just gets bigger and bigger and more overwhelming.

I go through phases with Day One where I write every day, but sometimes I'm just too busy and instead take pics. But then you have to manually add, tag, geo-locate, and it still gets overwhelming.

If this addresses that, you've got a convert on your hands! (and probably many more...)

Congrats!

blader
This is exactly why we built Heyday! Please try it, I think you'll love it. =)
nlh
Downloaded. Looks great so far!

One question: is it possible to add an entry without either changing locations or adding a picture? I can't seem to just add a "normal" note...?

kmf
+1 here. I forget to log with Day One pretty often (even with their Mac notifications, which give you a text field to begin writing on), but I'm also not convinced that I was as much information as something like Slogger[1] gives me. Especially with things like the new M7 sensor in the 5S, there's huge potential for passive journaling where a great deal of information can be gathered locally without ever typing a word.

[1]: https://github.com/ttscoff/slogger

[dead] nlh
Congrats! I'm on a plane now so haven't been able to download but it looks like it addresses the major complaint I have about journaling apps (i.e. Day One, which I use and, for the most part, love) -- which is that if you forget/are too busy/get behind, the queue just gets bigger and bigger and more overwhelming.

I go through phases with Day One where I write every day, but sometimes I'm just too busy and instead take pics. But then you have to manually add, tag, geo-locate, and it still gets overwhelming.

If this addresses that, you've got a convert on your hands! (and probably many more...)

Congrats!

ALee
I've used it and the first time I immediately saw benefit. Key awesome features include: intuitive design, really easy to share, and it's definitely something that could compete against a lot of photo apps out there that don't make it NATURAL to share and curate your photos.

Android soon?

blader
Thank you so much for the kind words. We're working on way better automatic photo beautifiers (scene/face detection + automatic cropping).
swalkergibson
Congratulations on the launch! The app looks beautiful and the fact that it automatically does all of this for you is pretty cool. Anyway, I was wondering, are you guys funded at all? You seem to have a pretty big team. Just curious!
blader
Thank you! We did raise a seed round from some investors. It was $2M and from a bunch of people: https://angel.co/hey
swalkergibson
Right on! Looks like a good group behind you. Any plans for an Android version?
blader
Yes! As soon as we make the product great on iPhone.
bruceb
If you are ok with answering how long in to building it did you look to raise money and how long did it take you? Did you have a demo for them to see? It seems 1 year before launching?
languagehacker
Here's an interesting example of where time to market really matters. I've had Memoir since upgrading to iOS7, and I'm pretty happy with it. So it feels like you're late to the party by several months. Bit of a bummer since it sounds like you put a lot of effort in.

Conversely, when Memoir came out, they couldn't handle their anticipated scale, but they got their foot in the door. Seems to be a good case for "just shipping it".

blader
That's cool. I use Memoir too, and it's a great app. I think you'll find that Heyday does things a little differently and is good for other use cases, like traveling or keeping a journal.
tim333
I see Memoir has a fairly rubbish review score on itunes (3.5/5) whereas Heyday looks good (4.5)
giarc
There was an article on HN today talking about Dropbox and how at the time when Dropbox was launched there were hundreds of similar solutions. The gist of it was that the "first to market" concept wasn't a roadblock but simply a hurdle that can and has been overcome.
IvyMike
This is sort of off-topic, but I think it's still HN relevant and might be helpful.

The WOT (web-of-trust) plugin rates your site as untrustworthy. But the rating shows some crazy IP-based russian spam site from a year ago. I'm new to WOT so I don't understand--is this rating due to too-broad-a-wildcard in the system, or due to previous use of the site owner, or something else? (I'm hoping someone more familiar with WOT jumps in and explains what's going on here.)

In any case I rated it trustworthy on WOT so hopefully that percolates through the system eventually.

maebert
Engineer @heyday here. Thanks for letting us know :)

I think the evaluation is based on the previous owner / user of that IP address (it's hosted on S3, and IP addresses are kind of like relatives on your family's christmas get-together.) I submitted the site for re-evaluation though.

blader
It may be relevant to note here that Manuel joined our team through a Hacker News Who's Hiring thread. =)
blakesmith
I got the biggest smile on my face when I saw pictures I had already taken get pulled into your app right after launching for the first time. It was so easy to add a note to pictures I had already taken. Immediate engagement win.

By the way, your sign-up introduction flow is awesome. I love how all the permissions I granted (location, photos) had context as to why I gave them. That's a huge deal, since most apps just ask for what they need on immediate startup and I always get really annoyed. More apps should emulate this design!

Awesome work!

blader
Thank you! We did it the naive way at first. We iterated to the current the sign up flow to maximize the opt in rate, so not quite brilliant design, just lots of iterating! =)
askedrelic
Digging this. Great organization, photo layouts, filters: great presentation overall.
mrdub
Excellent work, super polished app!
dmazin
I am floored by you weaving feature explanations with permission grants. That is art.
methehack
Totally agree. Super-elegant. Often the permission grant seems like you're doing the app a favor. In this case it seemed like the app was doing you a favor.
dmazin
Sort of... though just to nit-pick a bit, an application should never feel like it's doing you a favor (Heyday doesn't). It should feel like it completely defers to you. But we agree.
rfnslyr
Commenting in thread for when OP becomes a millionaire. Calling it right now.
xpop2027
Would be sweet to see the stats of the launch!
johncoogan
Amazing work, incredible on-boarding experience. Opening the app for the first time and having the past few days already perfectly chronicled for me felt truly magical. Maybe I just got lucky, but I felt like the combination of my photos, geolocation data, and time data was perfect. Thanks for showing!
blader
Thanks for trying it out and the feedback! When the stars align Heyday can be really magic.
HaloZero
One thing that I've always liked about OhLife is that they send me an email everyday to keep track of my journal entries, anyway of integrating that in? I keep a zero inbox so this works out for me really well.
blader
Yes! You should be getting a notification every so often to surface a nice memory or remind you to write. This is kind of annoying right now, but we're making it better!
richardlblair
I love the idea. I have a terrible memory, and when people ask me "remember when were at ____ on ____?". My answer, every time, is no.

If only I had an iPhone...

jmathai
Wow. I rarely download this stuff. But the fact that it claims to be automatic piqued my interest.

After downloading it I can say that my first impression is shocked. Shocked that I really liked it.

I think what I love about it is that it's not social. It lets me relive my recent past. It includes some photos of my kids that I wouldn't put on Facebook, for example. That leads to a much more intimate experience of my past.

blader
Thanks so much for the feedback! I'd love to learn about what we can do better for you!