Ever wanted to quit your job and start something new? Do you remember how scary that thought was?
Edreece Arghandiwal who recently launched the app Jurni, did just that. His new app is a video journal, that allows you to post your thoughts in video only.
“Key thing is that we’re not a social media platform,” says Arghandiwal, “We’re a journaling platform.”
Hearing Arghandiwal’s story paints a picture of what it is like to launch a new technology in today’s saturated market. You have to come up with your idea and then believe in it like you have never believed in anything before. Watch a video about Jurni below:
“I felt this huge gap in the things that I was doing mainly because I figured that I wanted to impact people versus just growing a business and making money,” Arghandiwal tells connectwithlife.com. “I started Jurni basically off the premise that I’m an avid consumer & producer of content on social media and one of the main things that I noticed is that a lot of what we consume & produce are you know inauthentic, it’s surface level. It just a reflection of who we want to be not necessarily who we actually are as people.”
The idea that social media allows you to present to perfect sliver of your life is not new. Arghandiwal’s answer to this is to capture more of what is behind the picture, hence the video and hence the journaling feel of the posts on the app. “You look at people and you’re like great it’s all reflections of places, what you eat,” he says. “But what are the emotions behind it, what is the narration behind it and what is the story behind it?”
The one thing users need to be ok with, is making their private life public. When would this be a good idea? According to Arghandiwal, it’s ok when you are in search of a network of support.
“I wanted to be able to take, say a pregnant mother going through pregnancy that’s feeling anxious about what she’s going through and then taking her and being able to visually connect it to other mothers going through the same thing,” he says. “The other day we had a girl come in and talk about her dog dying and she was like crying on Jurni and then two other people came on Jurni and gave her support and said look I’m going through it and one of them was crying too, then there’s this like visual emotional thing.”
Though it’s nice to assume that social platforms will be used as a support network, it seems somewhat impossible to control what people post. Jurni will attempt to police against any negative comments by making it difficult to post anything negative and policing its site heavily.
“What you will see on Jurni so far is that people will leave positive sentiment. They’ll come in and leave video support positively; you won’t see any if none on negative comments,” says Arghandiwal. “We hope that being video comments will prevent that, we have this very elaborate report mechanism. If you report it, it’s immediately taken off Jurni. We’ll either release it back or we won’t.”
And in case you are thinking of taking the leap into entrepreneurship, we asked Arghandiwal for his top three tips for starting your own company:
- Don’t look at obstacles as very crazy things, look at them as opportunities.
- Make sure you have the ability to gather a good team. You can’t do things on your own. Everything that we are at this point is a reflection of other people.
- Have confidence in yourself. Train yourself to have passion and believe in yourself or just have it naturally and go for it.
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