Chapter 1 A small celebration
Seven years ago, my daughter was born.
Like many new parents, I started taking a few photos and short videos every day.
As her one-month celebration approached, I wanted to make a short video to share with our family.
Especially for my parents.
That's when I discovered an app called 1 Second Everyday.
I loved it immediately.
Every month, I turned our family photos and videos into a short recap. It became a small tradition that stayed with us for the next seven years.
I even recommended it to many friends who had just become parents.
Looking back now, those videos became much more than monthly recaps.
They quietly became part of my family's history.
There's one short clip I'll probably keep for the rest of my life.
It was my grandmother holding my daughter for the very first time.
At the time, it felt like just another ordinary family moment.
After my grandmother passed away, that short clip became priceless.
You never know which ordinary moment will become priceless.
Chapter 2 Six years of ordinary moments
With 1SE, taking a few photos and short videos every day became part of our family's routine.
Birthdays.
Family trips.
Ordinary weekends.
Watching my daughter grow up, and later, my son as well.
Over time, I built a collection of memories that meant more to me than I had ever expected.
You may notice that some faces are covered. There is a reason for that.
A few years later, AI became incredibly good at recognizing faces.
For the first time, I started thinking differently about where my family's photos and videos were stored.
I wasn't afraid of technology. I was and still am a programmer.
I simply realized that these memories were too important for me to treat casually.
When I discovered that my media could be synchronized to cloud services, I turned that feature off.
I kept paying for the subscription because I still loved creating those monthly recap videos.
But one question stayed in my mind.
What if I could enjoy the same experience...
while keeping every photo and every memory on my own device?
Chapter 3 A different idea
I started looking for an app that worked the way I wanted.
Something that could turn my monthly photos and videos into a recap video.
Without uploading anything.
Without creating an account.
Without storing my family's memories on someone else's servers.
I couldn't find one.
So I decided to build it myself.
The first line of code was written in February 2025.
At first, progress was slow.
AI coding tools were still in their early days, and I built the app one class at a time.
Eventually, I paused the project.
A few months later, AI-assisted development improved dramatically.
I came back with a completely different workflow, and suddenly everything moved much faster.
After more than a year of evenings, weekends, and countless iterations...
Minute It was finally ready.
Chapter 4 Why is Minute It built this way?
When I started building Minute It, I wasn't trying to create the perfect app for everyone.
I was building the app I wanted for my own family.
That decision influenced almost every design choice.
Everything stays on your device
I don't believe cloud services are bad.
In fact, I still use some of them every day.
But I wanted another option.
I wanted an app that could create monthly recap videos without uploading my family's photos and videos anywhere.
That's why every recap video is generated directly on your device.
No account.
No server processing your memories.
No photo uploads just to create a video.
Privacy by design
Minute It only asks for the permissions it genuinely needs.
Access to your photo library is essential because that's where your memories already are.
The only network access is for crash reporting, so I can fix problems when something goes wrong.
That's it.
Privacy isn't a feature that was added later.
It was part of the design from the very beginning.
Chapter 5 Maybe I'm not the only one
When I first started building Minute It, I wasn't thinking about launching a business.
I was simply trying to solve a problem for my own family.
As the app slowly took shape, I began to wonder:
What if I'm not the only one?
Maybe somewhere in the world, there's another parent who takes a few photos every day.
Someone who also enjoys creating monthly recap videos.
Someone who simply wants those memories to stay on their own device.
Maybe Minute It can help them, too.
If that happens, then every late night, every weekend, and every line of code will have been worth it.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story.
I hope Minute It becomes a small part of yours.
— Terry Wang