Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many other social media networks, Internet users are sharing more and more each year (see Zuckerberg’s Law). Taken in its entirety, social media sharing creates a rich story for each of us. It comprises our most noteworthy moments in life. This history is incredibly valuable to people, but all too often it lies buried. It lies buried across multiple networks. It lies buried behind the news feed consumption mode that narrowly focuses on only the most recent 24 hours.

Three years ago Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong set out to solve this problem. Their mission was to empower people to easily collect their digital history, and to make it accessible, useful and meaningful. The manifestation of these efforts is Timehop. As is the case with many of the best mobile experiences, the product is beautiful in is simplicity. Each day you open the app and you are presented with your memories from that day in history. Today we are announcing Shasta’s most recent investment, leading the company’s $10 million Series B financing.

Timehop is one of the fast growing mobile apps in the market. More people open and read their Timehop each day than read the New York Times. Of those that have registered for the service, more than half return daily. In the iOS app store it is consistently a top 50 overall application and a top 10 app in the social networking category. In summary, it’s a rocket ship with off-the-charts repeat engagement.

But even with such phenomenal growth, it’s a company still in its relative infancy. We believe it has the potential to ultimately serve hundreds of millions of people, but they have a long way to go to get there. As such, how they got here was equally important to our investment thesis as their successes to date, since it’s these characteristics that will enable the team to achieve their lofty aspirations. Specifically, they’ve gotten here by:

• Keeping it simple. They’ve maintained focus on doing just one thing, but doing that one thing incredibly well.
• Continual experimentation. Less than 15% of what they have experimented with is in the product today. This approach has led to a number of counterintuitive learnings that are critical to its success.
• Focusing on repeat usage. As previously mentioned, more than 50% of their registered users open up Timehop daily. This is not by accident.
• Making it social. Our best memories typically include good friends and family members. Naturally there is a strong desire to relive these experiences with others. They’ve made it seamless for anyone to publicly share via social media or to privately share via text messaging.
• Growing from organic user acquisition. It would have been easy to cut corners and rely on paid customer acquisition to grow. Instead, they incessantly hammered away on the product and sharing features until they unlocked a more sustainable organic customer acquisition engine.

At Shasta, we don’t invest in ideas. We invest in the people that can successfully execute to make those ideas a reality. In Timehop, we found a team that we believe has the right mindset, playbook and DNA to achieve its big vision. We could not be more excited about joining them for this journey.