Jumyo CEO Joe Egan is working to bring order to the chaos of social media communications.
His app looks to replace the scattered, one-off communications that dominate social networking sites with connected, meaningful moments that become our social stories.
I asked Egan for a look behind the scenes of his Seattle-based startup. Here’s what he had to share:
Tech Cocktail: What is the inspiration behind Jumyo?
Egan: “The inspiration is to enable people to tell their life story – creating a way for people to have meaning to what they are doing on their mobile devices rather than the one-off moments that are predominate in the social world.”
Tech Cocktail: What do you enjoy most about your work?
Egan: ” I love all aspects about what we are doing. I literally can see people laughing, crying… going to Jumyo to find current events and seeing pictures of their friends. As long as I am working on Jumyo, I am enjoying myself. ”
Tech Cocktail: Who is Jumyo’s greatest competitor, and how do you differentiate yourself?
Egan: “Piictu is probably our closest competitor with the ability to connect sets of pictures with other people. We differentiate ourselves through the content itself. Our users are creating bodies of content through images and interlaced text. This creates a unique opportunity to build moments and events with the people around you rather than one-off random images.”
Tech Cocktail: What is the biggest advantage of starting up in Seattle?
Egan: “Seattle is the startup capital of the world. I love this place for the culture, nature, and the people around us. The pool of talent here is incredible, and I would not want to be anywhere else.
That is also the challenge – being in a place with so many startups and tech companies makes it more challenging to find talent, but it’s nothing creativity can’t solve. ”
Tech Cocktail: Describe a challenging moment for Jumyo. How did you deal with it, and what did you learn from it?
Egan: “We originally started down the road of a native IOS app, which I still believe is our direction long- term. The challenge we faced early on was being able to iterate quickly based on user feedback. Because if this, we decided to focus our technology efforts using HTML5. This has allowed us to develop and iterate faster.
What did I learn? – to be flexible and give “lesser” technologies a break :)”
Tech Cocktail: What’s one quirky fact about you, your team, or your office culture?
Egan: “We are just regular people doing big things.. we love what we do, good beer, snowboarding, and photography. We have weekly meetings at the Brave Horse Tavern or Pine Box. Oh – and this is our second startup together. ”
Jumyo was a featured startup at our Tech Cocktail Seattle Mixer & Startup Showcase
