Bragshare gives users the ability to make permanent those things that matter.
We all like to brag. We don’t like to admit that we like to brag, but we like to brag in one way or another. Personally, I like to subtly drop my brags into conversations and say things like, “I’m just an associate editor at Beehive Startups. It’s not a big deal,” to which I usually hear, “That’s great, ma’am, but you didn’t answer my question so I’ll ask again: would you like to supersize your combo meal?”
Maybe I need to find a better audience for my brags beyond cashier Deborah at the McDonald’s drive-thru. Luckily for me, there’s Bragshare. “Bragshare is a social media site that makes social media more meaningful,” says company founder Chad Gundry. The platform makes social media more meaningful by allowing users to elevate the things and events that are important to them.
Up to this point, our lives’ biggest events have become lost in a newsfeed over time. But Bragshare’s dynamic timeline keeps the important things in important places. “Bragshare gives users the ability to make permanent those things that matter,” Gundry explains. Which is great news for those of us who have a tendency to share both the mundane and the extraordinary on social media. The extraordinary posts (I had a baby!) stick, and the mundane (Roman is having an okay day and bought a Coke Zero at the gas station, raise the roof) last only as long as we want them to.
Bragshare began back in 2010 when Gundry set out to create a tool that would showcase the lives of others. He knew it needed to be a social media platform where people could post freely, but he lacked the technical prowess to build it. So he partnered with Daniel Coburn who had been been working in the digital space since 1993. “Nobody had allowed somebody to take the concept of the bragline and take it and organize people’s existence in a meaningful way,” Coburn says, so together he and Gundry built something that did just that.
Each Bragshare user has a bragline that functions as a left to right timeline. “This is your place,” Gundry explains, “Out of all the posts that you make, these are the ones that stand out. These define me.” The typical timelines start with a user’s birth, but can extend back to a user’s ancestors. Bragshare works with familysearch.org to import family history onto braglines.
Bragshare gives users the ability to share posts to other social media sites, rank posts with a star system, and attract users from the Bragboard. The Bragboard is the public facing newsfeed where anyone can post. The Bragfeed contains only friends’ posts, and the Bragline is an individual user’s timeline. Bragshare actually imports posts from other social media sites to create a rich and populated timeline.
Bragshare has only been live for a few weeks, but has already received an excellent response from its users. Many have said Bragshare, with its organization and functionality, needed to happen. Bragshare hopes to help companies as well as individual users share their stories on their braglines. To this point the company has been bootstrapped, but Gundry and Coburn are now looking for investors to help their company grow.
“Thank you for calling social media what it is,” someone recently said to Gundry. The name Bragshare perfectly encapsulates what we all use social media for, and maybe makes us feel a little more comfortable promoting our greatest moments. As Gundry says, “When we put brag in front of share, it elevates the share.”
Published 4/19/2016
