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Share your memories
Leslie Dinaberg, December 2003, South Coast Beacon
With the spirits of Mr. Rogers, Bob Hope and Aunt Sevelta on its development team, its no wonder that Goleta-based Memorypost.com is on a roll. Launched in January 2003, the Internet service to celebrate life events has already been featured on national television and has users from all over the world.
The project started three years ago when his Great Aunt Sevelta passed away, said Tosh Bulger, who runs the site along with wife Monica and web designer Safa Scott. Sevelta's funeral excluded a lot of the family, so he "decided to make a website where people could go and leave stories."
The site caught on with family members, with about 30 people posting stories about Sevelta. Inspiration struck when one of Tosh's cousins told him "This isn't just for our family; everybody could use it."
The Bulgers had already collaborated on a consulting company, Santa Barbara Techworks, when inspiration struck for Memorypost.com. "We heard that the only thing making money on the Internet was porn," Monica said. "We wanted to do something positive and profitable." They self-funded the enterprise with an inheritance from Sevelta, working other jobs and going to grad school at UCSB at the same time. "Most of the work actually took place between 6 and 2 a.m.," Tosh said.
The site is designed primarily for broadband users. "We built it for the future, " he said. Although with digital camera sales eclipsing that of analog film-based cameras in market share and dollar value, according to Business Week, the future is gaining ground pretty quickly.
"What we are is an online scrapbook … we started with memorials, but now its really a family website," Monica said.
The interface is simple, offering a collaborative site to share photos, stories, create personal home pages, a guest book and more. The first Memorypost.com guest invites his family and friends to view the site, add photos and stories and so on, all for free. It's also free to the original user for the first 90 days, with optional upgrades that include adding additional images (the first 25 are free) and special projects like adding audio and video.
The Bulgers have become experts in guerrilla marketing. For example, when Mr. Rogers died, they created a Memorypost for him and paid for the site to come up first on search engines. They had people from all over the world visit the site to pay tribute.
"It seems to be almost cathartic," said Tosh. "A lot of times in the memorial they write directly to the person," said Monica. They did a similar memorial site for Bob Hope, again garnering worldwide attention from both individuals and the media.
This is more than just a commercial enterprise for the Bulgers. "Our goal is to connect people," said Monica. In addition to the memorials, popular subjects for sites are family reunions, destination weddings and, of course, new babies. "We'll have fathers rush to post pictures, literally minutes after their baby is born," smiled Monica. "It's so cute. They're so proud."
Surely Aunt Sevelta is looking on with pride somewhere as well.
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