Their app can make short movies of your trip in a jiffy. Now it has hit the classic hurdle

Photo credit: mihtiander / 123RF.

When Abhinav Mittal decided to resign his steady job as a cloud data manager to chase his startup dreams, he sent his resignation letter to two people: his CTO and his father.

“My father was going to be supporting me – morally and financially – for a few months, and I thought he should know,” Abhinav tells me.

His decision to quit his job was impulsive but sure-footed. “I barely took a day to think over it. But I had to do it,” he says.

Abhinav had felt a spark of inspiration in the ‘Look Back’ video feature Facebook launched in 2014. It commemorated Facebook’s ten-year anniversary and put together the most liked or commented posts from a person’s wall, a random selection of photographs, all set to instrumental music. With about 200 million downloads, the feature hooked him.

The startup idea began taking form a few weeks later.

“A few friends were talking about a journey we had a few months earlier, and I realized that I didn’t remember a lot,” he says. Abhinav wondered if there was a more interesting way to document a journey with more than just pictures put together in an album. “A few people saw the pictures, but it was soon forgotten. Most importantly, it could not capture the essence of the journey,” he says.

Abhinav had found his problem.

“Think of the app as a jar which you fill with memories of your trip,” Abhinav explains, why the name – Travel Jar.

Abhinav, primarily a product developer, used designing skills he picked up at his earlier stint with data company MeraData to design Travel Jar. Sachin Jain, co-founder of Travel Jar, handles the marketing.

Travel Jar works in a similar space as LiveTrekker– an app that makes live maps of your treks – and Trip Cast, which lets you share pictures and post updates about your travel with members of your group.

However, what Travel Jar also does is to allow you to make short movies of the trip by adding different features such as pictures, moods, videos, locations, and so on. The team is looking at the feedback they received from hitchhikers, backpackers, travel bloggers, and others to add more features such as notes, audio, and other customizations, which will make the app more interesting to a wider audience. At present, the Travel Jar app on beta has less than 1,000 users. It is likely to launch for public in the next few months.

What makes a good travel app?

Abhinav Mittal, co founder Travel Jar.

Standing ovations, but no investments