Our Story

After moving in with my wife and having those tiresome spring cleanings, I realized that when I used to spring clean my parents’ house, I would always find a box of old photos and memories. I would spend hours going through them, using my childhood toys and remembering the people and places in those photos, and feeling nostalgic for the past. But in my new home, I didn’t have the same memories I had at my parents’ house and wanted them with me wherever I went.

Not having a box of memories, but having lots of them in my mind, made me think about all of the other people that have the same feeling as I did back then, and I wanted to do something about it. I want to reinvent the memory box and make it so incredible that people around the world, no matter where they are, can keep their memories with them, anywhere, anytime, and I still haven’t talked about the most important thing.

Happiness doesn’t exist if you don’t have anyone to share it with, and so I knew from the beginning I had to make this new kind of memory box, shareable with your loved ones. Both my family and I want to keep the physical memories at home, but since you can’t copy and paste them into your own box, Nostalgia let’s you keep a digital version of your memories and share them with siblings and anyone you want to, keeping the memory alive even if it never leaves your parent’s home.

Whenever I hang out with friends, siblings, cousins, my parents, grandparents and most of my family, the topic we mostly talk about are the old days. It’s always there, the nostalgia, and so this new memory box needed shared collections because every single one of your friends and family, has a different story, take or photos, so it was paramount that sharing was part of this first version, even if it costed me months of work. I knew that if I didn’t include it, the happiness people would feel when adding memories to the app, wouldn’t last as long. I don’t mean for ‘Nostalgia’ users to feel addicted to the app, but instead, I wanted my users to have a long lasting effect in their happiness when they re live the god old days, and shared experiences make that feeling last even longer.

Getting the shared experiences right required a lot of thinking, because I didn’t want ‘Nostalgia’ to be another social network, because nostalgia is not about algorithms, ads, engagement, metrics and making fake memories to boost clicks. Instead, I wanted memories to be shared in a way where they can be real, private, secure and true.

In the end, I think we got it right. This is our way to say thank you to the world, by giving you something that matters and was truly built from the heart.

- Juan Williman (Founder of Nostalgia)