Biograph saves you time and experience. It’s more than a motto. It embodies the soul of our organization. Our product saves time by enabling people to write with their voice rather than being shackled to a desk. It saves time when you’re trying to remember something useful for your next endeavor, whether that’s applying to a job, making a meaningful birthday card, or preparing a speech. People can save time (or be more efficient) by literally saving (or recording) time. Biograph transforms everyday conversation into powerful writing. By thoughtfully recording, we save time: history, legacy, memory, and experience. Investing just a pinch of time to record meaningful moments frees Biograph authors to experience life with undivided attention.
Our mission to help everybody save time and experience has guided our design of the Biograph app—an easy tool for recording and sharing lives on a collaborative platform that revolutionizes storytelling. How can you “save experience”? And what is “experience” anyway?
Experience includes all the rich complexities encountered while navigating life. Biograph helps you record, save, and organize your experience to access later—whether in three days to remember the dish at that tasty restaurant, three months to reminisce, three years to write the next great American novel, or three centuries to raise posterity upon your giant shoulders.
Biograph is obsessed with continuous improvement of your experience. We build the app to be seamless, even invisible—nothing but essential. It never distracts you with bells and whistles or pesters you with pop-up notifications and ads. Instead, it’s like a trusty hammer: the wood of the handle worn down where you’ve gripped it, so it fits, perfectly, in your hand. Biograph presents the consummate creative experience—freeing you from the screen and fumbling fingers, saving you time to experience everything that gives your life meaning.
BRING YOUR EXPERIENCE TO LIFE
Experience isn’t something that just happens to us. It invites our active participation. And experience represents something different for every person. As author Shoshana Zuboff observes, “Experience is not what is given to me but rather what I make of it. The same experience that I deride may invite your enthusiasm.”[1]
Because experience is so personal—so dependent on your initiative, energy, and personality—it’s also vulnerable and elusive. As soon as someone else tries to describe something that you experienced, the experience shrivels up. Only you can tell your story. Biograph puts you, the author of your own life, in control of your narrative. Yet at the same time, the app is collaborative and promotes shared experiences.
Let’s say you’re on a cross-country adventure, traveling the same open road your great-grandmother took to migrate West a century earlier. Snap an image and record a quick story—what inspired this journey, what you had for breakfast, what towns you’re coming from and where you’re heading now, who you’ve met, how you feel, what’s on the radio—maybe concluding the record with a question: I wonder what the previous generations felt while traveling this same road and how their experiences compare with mine.
Now share your experience with friends and family—in the form of 60-second audiovisual records or virtual books, gathering many such records from your trip—and invite them to contribute their own experience. Whether they’re in the car with you or back home living your adventure vicariously, shared experiences inspire unique perspectives from every person.
Storytelling on Biograph makes your experience more vivid and lasting. No longer a passive bystander using Old Social Media, no more an infinitely scrolling consumer of others’ content, on Biograph you can see life more clearly, feel it more deeply, while actively witnessing it. You’ll discover patterns in the fabric of your days, notice what was hiding in plain sight. You’ll smell the roses, know yourself, and finally hear people well enough to really listen.
EXPERIENCE A NEW SOCIAL MEDIA
Biograph is a sanctuary for experience. As Zuboff writes, the creation of meaning from experience is “the foundation of personal freedom.”[2] Rather than exploit your data for “personalization” or create tools that surrender you to advertisers, Biograph empowers you to save time and experience the finer things in life.
With Biograph, you’ll find freedom from FOMO (fear of missing out) as well as freedom from what Michael Gervais, PhD calls FOPO (fear of other people’s opinions). It’s obvious by now: Old Social Media sucks the life out of experience. During a great meal, “the phone eats first” and all you think about is whether your Instagram post is getting enough likes. When a high school acquaintance runs a marathon or gets a boss job, you think, “Why not me?” Instead of focusing on yourself, you’re letting others get your kicks for you.
Biograph helps you focus on your experience, rather than superficial validation or fake comparisons. Our goal is to help you tell your story, rather than worry about what someone else will think of it.
As you tell stories with the Biograph app, you don’t have to worry about writing conventions, staying organized, or the inner workings of voice technology. The app is intuitive and easy to use. It’s playful, therapeutic, refreshing, restorative, and recreational. Literally, with Biograph, you can re-create yourself every day as your experience leads the way.
