Dealer.com alumni invest in photo sharing app

The first ripple of the billion-dollar buyout of Dealer.com has reached a Burlington software start-up, bringing dollars and talent to Notabli, a new kid-centric app that gives parents a way to document and share their children's lives without boring their Facebook friends.

Two former Dealer.com executives, Mike DeCecco and Tom O'Leary, left the company following the buy-out, and later joined Notabli, founded by two 34-year-old software designers, Jackson Latka and Jory Raphael.

DeCecco, who ran business development for Dealer.com, and O'Leary who was the chief customer officer, brought not only their experience and knowledge to Notabli, but also helped raise $1 million for the company, in addition to the funds Latka and Raphael had already raised.

Dealer.com Chief Operating Officer Mike Lane said it was "bittersweet" to see DeCecco and O'Leary leave his company to forge their own business.

"On the downside it's terrible to lose someone," Lane said. "Mike worked for me directly. At the same time, I'm really proud of him for taking the opportunity to do something for himself. They want to live the dream and build their own thing, just like we did."

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Neither O'Leary nor DeCecco would say how much they personally invested in Notabli, nor how many investors made up the total amount raised, but both are well aware of the speculation surrounding the gigantic acquisition of Dealer.com and what it might mean for Burlington's tech start-ups. O'Leary said it was fair to say there are other people at Dealer.com who are investing in Notabli.

"Sure, there are some millionaires, but there's also just people who have learned from their experience at Dealer.com, and are interested in investing in their next thing," O'Leary said. "That's a pretty exciting thing I think for Burlington. I've found Burlington to be an incredible start-up community."

O'Leary spent five years in Silicon Valley, working at both eBay and Tesla, among others, and says in many ways he has found Burlington a much better place to work.

"I used to tell people that at Dealer.com," O'Leary said. "Don't sell yourself short. This company is funner. The people are every bit as smart, and the work environment is way better. People think, 'Oh, to work at eBay must be glorious,' and Dealer.com was a better place to work."

Notable moments

Latka and Raphael launched Notabli for the iPhone in January 2013 with a little help from Apple executives who noticed the app among the hundreds of thousands vying for attention in Apple's App Store.

"They basically wrote Jory and I and said, 'Hey look, you have 24 hours to get us artwork for your feature and we don't know if we're going to feature you yet. Hurry and get everything to us and we'll let you know,'" Latka said.

As it turned out, Notabli was featured in a banner at the top of the App Store Lifestyles page for a week or so.

"It was a good boost at the time to kick us off," Latka said.

Notabli, which is free at this point, has 20,000 users around the world, with the latest spike of customers coming from the United Kingdom.

"We actually had more downloads in England last week than the United States," O'Leary said.

All four Notabli principals have children. Raphael has a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son. Latka has two boys, 4 and 1. O'Leary, who is 45, the old man of the group, has four children, 14, 12, 11 and 8; and DeCecco, who is 39, has a 2-year-old son.

Latka and Raphael, both freelance designers, have known each other for years. Notabli grew out of a conversation they were having about another product that was about capturing the notable moments in your life.

"Then we realized as parents really the most important things happening in our lives are about our kids," Raphael said. "Those are the things we want to capture, keep and share."

Well, isn't that what Facebook is for?

"Most of the content on Facebook is ephemeral, right?" Raphael said. "So it's a little status update, what I'm doing today. A photo of my lunch or whatever. Intermingling are important photos of your kids growing up. So there's a disconnect there."

What about Instagram, or Tumblr?

Raphael and Latka realized from their own experience that friends and family, especially grandparents, could soon find their heads spinning from all the social media options that are out there.

"One thing we saw happening was grandparents, family and friends were having to join every new social network that was cropping up," Latka said. "Parents were saying, 'OK, now I'm using Instagram to share photos.' 'OK how do I join this Instagram thing? I just kind of caught on to Facebook, now you want to join Instagram because that's where your kid's photos are?'"

One-stop shopping

Raphael pulls out his iPhone and brings up a photo of 6-year-old Phoebe with a wide grin, missing one tooth.

"That's my daughter, she just lost her first tooth last night," Raphael said. "We gave her a dollar that was origami-folded like a heart and a coin from Malta. The tooth fairy gets all over the world."

Raphael brings up a gallery of kids, including his own and others, in Notabli.

"My parents, her grandparents, keep up with her on Notabli," he says of Phoebe. "There are other grandkids. I see my nieces and nephews and friends, keeping up with their kids."

"Imagine this from a grandparent's perspective," Latka adds. "These are all the kids that you care about, all in one place."

And all in one secure place. Only those who are invited in can view the content in Notabli, unlike images on Facebook and elsewhere that find their way into the maelstrom of the Internet.

Tom O'Leary realized early on in his conversations with Raphael and Latka that they were addressing a problem that was garnering increasing awareness among parents.

"Parents are starting to wake up about this posting stuff all over the Internet for their kids," Latka said. "This is the first generation of parents who are doing this and what is that going to mean for their kids, five, six or 10 years from now? They really don't know, but they're creating this digital footprint for their kids online."

"But at the same time, parents want to share more with the people who care most about their kids," O'Leary said. "Your Facebook friends probably don't want to see a post about your kids once a week, but your mother would like to see a post every single day of the week, maybe two or three times, right?"

Notabli aims to solve both problems.

Content uploaded to Notabli is stored on Amazon S3 servers, the web services portion of the Internet juggernaut. Latka said that approach to securing content is as technologically advanced as any company, barring Facebook and Google, which own their own servers.

"As soon as you upload content to Notabli it is stored in multiple locations, backed up redundantly and delivered to edge locations," Latka said. "If you have family in Hawaii watching video, we want that high def video to be served up very quickly. That means it can't be coming from a server in Burlington, Vermont. It needs to be already delivered around the world, so it's in the closest location possible."

DeCecco compares what Notabli does to taking his son, Dominick, to a party of family and friends as opposed to the Champlain Valley Fair. He's more apt to let Dominick run around and talk to whomever he wants at the family party than the fair.

"Notabli is a great place to share these moments once you've created a network of people you know care about what you want to say," DeCecco said. "For example, if Dominick does something really funny on Church Street, I think twice about putting it on Facebook. 'Oh, here's Mike with another video of his kid.' Scroll right past it. But in the environment of Notabli I get this great feedback from people in the same boat as me."

Old shoebox

There are five types of content you can input into Notabli, each represented by an icon. You can post photos and videos, audio recordings, quotes from your kids, and notes about your kids.

"My son yesterday asked for a snack," Jackson Latka said. "He asked for hot chocolate and steak. Yeah, OK, you want to remember those little blips. You hit quote and type that in, or speak into a microphone and record it."

If Latka finds his 4-year-old son's snack request funny enough to share with the world, he can do that through Notabli, which includes connections to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

"We aren't living in a bubble, we understand these other networks exist," Latka said. "On the flip side, if it's something you don't even want to share with your private Notabli family and friends, and it's just for you and your wife or husband or partner, you can lock it."

Notabli, which is free, faces the same dilemma every app faces: How to make money. The partners have a plan, and it's not to start charging for the app, but instead to charge for new premium features they will develop.

"When you build a product and you add features it becomes a natural moment for saying, 'This is a premium feature, it's going to cost you X amount,' as opposed to saying, 'This thing you've been using for the past year and you love it, now it's going to cost you money,'" O'Leary said.

O'Leary figures, somewhat facetiously, that the potential market for Notabli is about 1.7 billion people, since one-quarter of the world's population of 7 billion is 15 years old or younger.

"That's a pretty good market," he says.

Raphael anticipates the market for Notabli is "self-replicating," as his kids use it for their kids.

"Your relationship with your parents, that's what's captured here," Latka said. "This is like the old shoebox your parents hand you full of photos, except when you look back at that 30 years from now, it's all captured and organized."

Contact Dan D'Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanDambrosioVT.