I guess I’m interested to see what it looks like because I feel like I’ve had a really positive experience. It just feels like people want women to succeed in Utah.
How often do you ask yourself the following questions:
Am I posting too many photos of my children?
Do I really want the entire world to see this picture of my kid in a diaper?
But if I make my account private will I ever become rich and famous?
Weekly? Daily? Hourly? Yeah, me too. My photos have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making it into a scrapbook, but I want to document the lives of my children. I just don’t want to document the lives of my children in a way that clogs my followers’ feeds or attracts Internet creeps. What if I told you there was a clog-free, creep-free solution to photo sharing? Would you slap my face and tell me to shut the front door? I know, I wouldn’t believe me either if I hadn’t just finished my interview with Laura Stevens, founder of Goze.
A few years ago Laura took a trip to Yellowstone with a guy she had just started dating and his family. It was a great trip and she took lots of photos even though she knew she would never do anything with those photos. There just wasn’t a space where she felt comfortable sharing them. And that kind of bummed her out because she really liked these photos. So while riding on the back of a snowmobile she began brainstorming solutions and essentially designed the Goze app in her head during that single snowmobile ride.
She sat on that snowmobile premonition for a while before she put together a business plan, researched markets, and finally decided Goze was something she wanted to make happen. So she contacted programmers and, using her own money, got Goze going.
Now Goze is available in the App Store and Stevens and her team started seriously marketing their product just last month. It’s a word-of-mouth grassroots marketing campaign which will likely succeed based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback so far. “Most people say there’s nothing like this out here,” Stevens reports.
There are a few things that sets Goze apart. Goze allows you to collaborate with other people, any other people you’d like, for any event. Goze also lets you set your privacy settings so you can share your photo and video stories with just yourself, your contributors, your social media friends, or the world. Additionally, Goze offers the ability to curate content with unlimited text. With these flexible options, the possibilities for Goze are endless. Make the app your journal. Have your wedding guests collaborate in one big album and write advice. Create a private timeline for each child and post photos to those timelines. So I’m joining most people in declaring, truly, there is nothing like this out there.
The next step in the Goze journey will be seed funding, a step Stevens will take once the app’s user base becomes a bit more robust. Stevens expresses her appreciation for the friendly, welcoming startup community in Salt Lake City. “People are so willing to help out,” she says. “It will be interesting when I go to get funding to see how that evolves.” Stevens is also interested to see how receptive investors will be to a company run be a woman. We’ve all heard that the industry is slanted toward men, and Stevens wonders how true this rings in our desert. “I guess I’m interested to see what it looks like because I feel like I’ve had a really positive experience. It just feels like people want women to succeed in Utah.”
I can’t speak for Utah as a whole, but I personally want Stevens to succeed not just because she’s a woman, but because she seems to have the photo-sharing solution for millennial moms the world over.
You can find Goze in the App Store. Goze is also currently looking for a technical cofounder and Laura wants to know if you’re interested.
Published 2/16/2016
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