You are out to dinner on a first date, ask the waiter to photograph the occasion and plan to surprise your future significant other on your one-year anniversary by sending them a text message containing the image.
There is now an app for that.
It’s called Anniversary, and was co-created by a Herricks High School alumnus and a summer camp friend from Queens who reconnected while studying at the University of Delaware.
The mobile application, scheduled to launch Friday on iTunes, enables users to set a specific date and time to send digital photos and videos to friends and loved ones and create a text message thread to reminisce about the event.
“What you have are these tiny little moments of nostalgia sent from you or your friends,” said Ken Wallach, 23, a New Hyde Park native. “It’s a great way to remember the real-time moments within our culture’s social media trends.”
Users who receive an Anniversary “present” – as Wallach and co-creator Ben Klein call it – would tap their phone screen to “unwrap” their media and enter a private chat session with other participants.
“Today’s social media landscape is all about instant gratification, but a Snapchat post disappears in three seconds and a post to Instagram gets lost in the shuffle of the rest of your feed,” said Klein, a Benjamin N. Cardozo High School alum. “What we’re trying to do is recreate a feeling of being part of a moment. By taking a picture and sending a moment away and coming back to it, you’re coming back to that moment in a way no other app can offer.”
The idea for Anniversary came about during their senior year at Delaware in 2012-13, when the two students – who both studied psychology – began spitballing ideas for social media applications they would use.
Klein said he suggested an idea for a music application allowing users to receive and filter web content about their favorite artists, but the duo settled on drafting Anniversary instead in coffee-shop brainstorming sessions.
After a few months of development, Wallach and Klein entered Anniversary into Delaware’s annual Hen Hatch business competition, presenting their plans for the application before a panel of judges and hundreds of classmates.
Of the more than 50 applicants into Hen Hatch, Wallch and Klein won, and the pair received startup funding and the necessary networking resources to begin crafting Anniversary.
“We saw a future for how this could pan out, but we had no experience in creating apps. I didn’t even have an iPhone at the time,” Wallach said. “We had to utilize our forward thinking and social foresight and learn the entire field from scratch.”
“It’s been both a blessing and a curse because we weren’t pigeon-holed into thinking a certain way,” he continued. “We had the entire tech and business field as an open door for us, so we had an interesting angle into learning coding and the initial legal things, marketing and structure. It’s been quite an interesting experience.”
Klein said he and Wallach have worked on Anniversary non-stop since graduation, and the process has become frustrating at times because the application has not yet made money.
They have since sought the advice of Matt Swanson, who co-founded FineStationery.com with his wife Maggie in 2000 and sold the customizable paper design company to 1-800-Flowers.com in 2011. Wallach said Swanson serves as Anniversary’s first board member.
“It’s definitely humbling, especially because we have friends we graduated with who are working at hedge funds and are making some money even at this age,” Klein said. “It’s a growing experience for both of us, but we’re really excited for the next stage to bring more people on and bring it to potential investors and turn it into a full-time business.”
