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“The communication is the message” is a common phrase, but entrepreneur Alexis Traina believes that messages, themselves – text messages to be exact – deserve attention.
Trena is the CEO and co-founder of HiNOTE, a company that helps people create messages, creating personalized backgrounds for anything from a tipped wine glass to a branded letterbook. Her idea, in her interview with TechCrunch, is that she does not get up every day and wear green, blue and gray clothes – so why do we stick to these colors in our text messages?
“People are looking for new ways to connect, new ways to present themselves,” says Traina, who built the company with co-founder and husband Trevor. “Even on a professional level, it’s about being able to communicate in Poland and representation.”
In the year Since its launch in 2022, 1 million HiNOTES have been shared by users with more than 2,000 types of notes that can be personalized on the app. The company is also working on brand-creator collaborations — think digital messaging tailored to your favorite influencer’s aesthetic — and has made 20 deals.
Image Credits: HiNOTE
The majority of users are women, Traina said, between the ages of 25 and 65. She lists the most common features among early adopters: they send 15 greeting cards a year, have a Canva subscription and send paperless mail. Directly invites with a collection of holiday cards.
Self-expression in the form of text messages is a definite bet on people who want more from their digital communication styles. But it is also not very new. Emojis were created in the late 1990s and remain a huge part of our vocabulary today. They continue to be a fun way to share messages, even in some messaging apps like GroupMe, which are easily beat on online services. And, as an Indian American, I can definitely tell you how common it is to end up with what seems like a million photos covered in text on every holiday or life occasion.
Image Credits: HiNOTE
As humans, we’ve been shying away from bubble-based writing for decades. Heck, there’s a $40 billion elephant in the room: Canva.
According to Traina, Canva has become a valuable tool in the enterprise space by bringing simple tools to business communications.
“What I saw about it was that it was still on the desktop, and it used to be 9 to 16 taps to get your product to work,” she said. “So I understand for us, the magic will be mobile-first, easy to create and everyday delivery.”
Certainly, HiNOTE requires fewer purchases than an app like Canva — literally, because it’s now free. It only takes a few minutes to create an account and start using Personal Notes. Once you draw a note in the app, you can share it via text with one click.
Clearly, personalized messaging is popular with some, so the question for HiNOTE revolves around how to seamlessly become part of a user’s daily behavior. Part of that involves knowing what’s useful to describe with an image overlaid with text, and what’s useful to send as an instant message with descriptive text.
Traina lists several use cases for HiNOTE, noting that the most popular category of notes is the “daily note,” which features pictures asking someone to give you a quick call, birthday messages with personal tags, and more.
Trena only uses one HiNote in our conversation, she is eagerly awaiting our call. Other than that, we’re stuck with texts. Apparently, as much as we enjoy a good meme, it’s not the only way we express ourselves. Sometimes text works. HiNOTE is in the process of finding that early product-market fit, but it’s echoing confusion among high-profile investors.
HiNOTE has raised $1.9 million to date in previously undisclosed capital from disruptive angel investors including Marissa Mayer, Dick Costolo, Marc Benioff, Yuri Milner, Peter Thiel and Sarah Kunst.
“She likes the idea of trying something mundane[like texting]and adding richness and expressiveness to it,” Mayer, a former Yahoo CEO and co-founder of Sunshine, told TechCrunch in an email. She compared HiNOTE to other angel investments, including Uber, Square, Minted and Figma. All of them “solve a wide range of consumer problems in an elegant and simple way with an ecological approach.
The pre-seed round is helping the team avoid the need for immediate monetization, unlike its early-stage peers.
“Like many early stage consumer companies, we’re focused on providing our users with an amazing and compelling product — and there are many future-proof revenue models for consumer platforms,” Trena says.
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