Growing Gratitude app aims to help users say “thank you” via video

As presents and parties pile up at this time of year, the list of thank-you notes that need writing grows and grows, sometimes to unmanageable lengths. It’s with times like this in mind that Kansas City entrepreneur Amy Marin Carlson created Growing Gratitude, a mobile application for sending video thank-you notes. A beta version of…

As parties and presents pile up at this time of year, the list of thank-you notes that need writing grows and grows, sometimes to unmanageable lengths. 

It’s with times like this in mind that Kansas Citian Amy Marin Carlson created Growing Gratitude, a mobile application for sending video thank-you notes. A beta version of the app, which is currently available for iOS only, debuted in the App Store earlier this month. 

Carlson came up with the idea for Growing Gratitude during her son’s second birthday party, as she contemplated ways to thank friends and family for their presents and presence. “Since 2-year-olds can’t write their own thank-yous, I suppose the parents should be doing it, but in my experience most weren’t,” Carlson said in an email interview. “I had every intention of writing them myself but didn’t. As with many things, life intervened.”

So, eventually, she created Growing Gratitude. The app enables users to select video from their phone, upload that video and send it in what Carlson calls “a lovely and elegant email” to one or multiple recipients. “Think of it,” she said, “as a digital envelope.”

Carlson has worked with a trio of Kansas City companies — PixelNation for app and website development, REACTOR Design Studio for branding and design and KetterRoe for administrative needs — on the project.  

Carlson’s current plan is for the app to generate revenue from advertising, and she expects to learn more about how to do that through data from beta users. 

“My end goal is to make the Growing Gratitude app ‘the way we do business,’ the tool used by all of us in our hectic, over-scheduled lives to help us stop and spend time paying tribute to what matters …” Carlson said. “I love that it just takes a minute, but it’s a minute of being present, being tuned in.”

For more on Growing Gratitude, see the video Carlson made for an earlier IndieGogo campaign for the app.

 

Credits: Video from youtube.com. Photo of Carlson from linkedin.com.

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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