Snap. App. Composite., Startup Yo! Moments creates memories through your phone

Remember walking the halls of your college or university and seeing rows and rows of photo composites capturing the faces of fraternities/sororities, faculty, board members or other groups? One early-stage startup found a way to make digital composites through your phone. Introducing Yo! Moments, these founders developed an app that allows you to create an interactive composite photo for groups and events all through your mobile device. Their product also gives the user the ability to print out the composite photo at a cheap price.
 

The Yo! Moments co-founder Shawn Partridge is a graduate of ASU and first launched his idea at Startup Weekend San Diego, and won. Yo! Moments is now a Phoenix Flight Venture at the Chandler-based incubator Desarrollo. I caught up with Partridge to find out more about his company.
How did you get started with Yo! Moments?
I went to Startup San Diego with an old idea that I wanted to put a modern facelift on and make it fresh. I remembered seeing photo composites made all the time when I was at ASU, usually by fraternities and sororities as a keepsake. I came up with the idea of putting a modern twist on [composites] and giving them a makeover, as well as making them interactive for users. We started developing Yo! Moments in San Diego.
How did you get back to Arizona?
My partner there had seen an article in AZTB about Desarrollo and we moved out here.
How is Yo! Moments interactive?
[The composite] is not just something that someone hangs on the wall – they can share it on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. [Users] can find the people in the pictures and click through to their social media outlets. This is a huge networking opportunity and a great way to connect with people.
When you open the app, you can see all the significant moments in your life such as weddings you attend, conferences, or trips you take…these are all major events and should be captured; it can also act as a keepsake and help you network and interact with those people.

Do you believe this is an expanding market?
We believe it will go past the fraternity and sorority world. We’re seeing a lot of traction in startup conferences and tech conferences because people want to commemorate those moments. We will be making some for Desarrollo and we made one for a couple incubators when we were out in San Diego. We made one for our Startup Weekend team that won. (seen above)
Have you started raising money?
Right now, we’re really trying to attract seed money from investors and bring on full-time developers. For users, it’s totally free to make these but we will make money off the people who want print copies, which is a huge market. When people order these from traditional photo composite makers, it can take up to three months to get them and it could cost thousands of dollars! With the technology available today, why continue to do this?
Tell me about the logo.
YO is the girl with the bow in her hair, Mo is the guy with the mustache and it’s part of building our brand.

What’s next?
Currently, we are in a beta testing phase and have a fraternity at ASU that we are using as our testers, in addition to groups we are already taking photos for. We will be doing that for the next few months to test our software and make some improvements. We’d like to attract investors and really build our brand to get our name out there. I see so many outlets for this from theme parties to softball leagues to boys and girls clubs. There are a lot of people who make these and need them and if you do, we can do it for you and make it a heck of a lot cheaper.
Learn more about Yo! Moments here.
Read about more startups at Desarrollo here.