Digital scrapbooking app LittleHootz wins Startup Weekend Kansas City

Lacey Ellis has been solving problems her entire professional career. Problem is, it’s always been for someone else. She helped build campaigns for clients like Commerce Bank, MetLife and Hostess as an art director and freelancer at ad agencies the past ten years. When a problem she faced as a mother wouldn’t leave her head,…

Lacey Ellis pitches her team’s digital scrapbooking app LittleHootz at Startup Weekend Kansas City.

Lacey Ellis has been solving problems her entire professional career. Problem is, it’s always been for someone else. She helped build campaigns for clients like Commerce Bank, MetLife and Hostess as an art director and freelancer at ad agencies the past ten years. When a problem she faced as a mother wouldn’t leave her head, she came up with digital scrapbooking app LittleHootz. The end result: first prize Sunday at Startup Weekend Kansas City, which aims to build viable companies over the course of 48 hours.

It began at our Big Kansas City event last month when Ellis, an attendee, found the opportunity to talk with Science co-founder Mike Macadaan and Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation vice president Lesa Mitchell. Unacquainted with the startup community and eager to see if her idea had traction, she shared it with the two of them, who both encouraged her to start moving on it. Mitchell’s advice: sign up for Startup Weekend Kansas City immediately. So Ellis did. And then she signed up for the pre-event boot camp on Thursday. There, she found two of her three team members.

“It was vital to our win,” Ellis said today.

LittleHootz—for a time, Quotography—was borne out of Ellis’ frustration trying to gather her favorite pictures, videos and memories each year. When released, the app promises to “let parents to do three things: capture, create and archive,” she said. The user will be able to jot or speak notes that are then archived with a time and location; design the entire look through what she called “Hallmark-quality” backgrounds, typefaces and more; and push the content out to others on LittleHootz to avoid getting “lost in all the noise” that exists on Facebook and Twitter, Ellis said. “You scrapbook the moments as you go.”

The value for parents caught the attention of the judges. Naithan Jones, co-founder of Kansas City area startup AgLocal, was on the panel of judges. “They are tackling a real problem that social media today is struggling with, and it combines that with a very viral group (moms) and a very strong emotional message (sentiment),” he said today in an email. “If they can key on user acquisition via mom’s groups, private groups in the app and then provide backward discoverability of pics and photos that existed prior to the install of the app, they will have a winner.”

Another judge, Kauffman Foundation entrepreneur-in-residence Diana Kander, said the idea “has all the ingredients of a viral application.”

The team (left)—Wade Burris (bottom left), Stephanie Lashley (far left), Ellis (far left, top) and Kim Flaherty (near left, top)—is on board for moving forward and they plan to go far beyond a simple app. Ellis currently freelances, and said she is ready to devote herself 100 percent to the project. Part of the product aims to include partnerships with companies such as photo sharing site Shutterfly so that users can turn a moment into a magent, keychain or framed photo. “It’s not just digital,” Ellis said. “It’s bringing your moments to life tangibly.” They also see a market beyond parents, to anyone with children in their lives, such as teachers and grandparents.

This was the seventh Startup Weekend event in Kansas City and organizer Joshua Eithun—who also designed the event’s T-shirt—walked away impressed by his third experience. “What really stood out to me this cycle was the quality of ideas,” he said. “The judges had a very tough decision this go-around as great idea after great idea was presented.” Of the final 11 teams, the other winners were AquaLife in second place and Vidspective in third place. Code Your Own and Vidspective tied for Crowd Favorite.

Learn more about other teams that competed in Startup Weekend Kansas City in our post: “Seventh Startup Weekend Kansas City yields 11 teams“.

 

Credit: Header photo courtesy event organizer Cory MacVie. Team photo courtesy Ellis.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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