Dutchman living in Romania launches private social network for parents with children

Dutchman Roemie Hillenaar, an expat who has been living in Romania for three and a half years, has created a social network dedicated to parents with children that aims to solve the privacy issue of sharing photos online. He already launched the beta version of the app, which is called Year, on the popular tech platform Product Hunt, on Monday, July 13. The social network allows users to set up profiles and share photos of their children only with selected family members and friends, called followers. This is also possible on Facebook and other social networks, but the big difference is that the followers can only view the photos and “love” them (similar to Facebook like), but can’t share or redistribute them. Roemie, who’s 31 and a father to be, has created Year based on his specific needs as part of a “multinational” family. “In our case, being a Romanian-Dutch couple, we have our friends and family split over 2 countries by default. These are people that I would really like to involve in the development of our daughter,” he told Romania-Insider.com. “However, I don't want my daughter’s pictures all over the internet and I definitely don't want to share them with the world. So for me sharing them on Facebook is not really an option. Also, I really believe that the majority of the people that I have on Facebook are not waiting those pictures either,” he explained. The third thing he had in mind was usability. He needed a tool to update his friends and family about events in his child’s life without going through the hassle of posting on various networks and apps they may use. The followers don’t even have to use the app, as they can get email updates of what the user posts. Roemie hasn’t invested any money in the new app but spent some two and a half months working on it, using his own coding skills. “I am a Product Manager that codes (opposed to a programmer that can manage Products),” he says of himself. Before creating Year, he and his Romanian fiancée ran a small web development agency in Bucharest that worked mostly for clients in the Netherlands and the US. Now, Roemie is investing his effort into this new project, hoping that he will be able to draw 50,000 to 100,000 users by the end of the year. “This app thrives on virility in closed groups. Users create profiles for their children, add their partners, grandparents get added, uncles gets added who also have kids of their own, and so on,” he said. He plans to monetize the social network using a photo printing service. The app has a paid feature that allows users to have the added photos printed and shipped to his home every month. “I love having printed pictures but I realized that the last 5 years I just never actually printed a picture anymore. It's too much hassle to select the ones you like, go to a printing store or install some software to upload it online,” Roemie justified his idea to add this option. Users can also send the photo albums to their loved ones. “If the grandparents live far away and they don't even have email, you can add them to the list to receive the pictures via post.” Currently, the photo printing is the main way of monetizing. “I don't want to add advertisement and I don't believe in a premium service where you would have to pay for more storage. For the future there are some other obvious ways of monetizing such as selling photo albums (for grandparents, family members), and allowing friends & family that are far away to buy a presents for the child’s birthday,” Roemie told