Party planning platform Punchbowl’s owner is acquiring Timehop

The online party planning platform Punchbowl is rebranding to create a parent organization called Sincere Corporation. Additionally, it is also acquiring the personal memory capsule app Timehop — and yes, it still exists.

Sincere said that Timehop as a product will continue to work on the memory space. As a part of this deal, some employees working mainly at Timehop are moving to Sincere, including former Timehop CEO Matt Raoul.

Timehop history

Timehop was a really popular app in the last decade that showed users photo memories from different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Photos and Dropbox. The app’s appeal was showing “today in your history” kind of posts to remind you of what happened on this day a few years ago.

The app attracted more than $14 million in funding from investors like Spark Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, and Randi Zuckerberg. Heck, Facebook even made a Timehop cline called On This Day in 2015, which garnered 60 million daily visitors in a year. Plus, Google introduced the “Rediscover This Day” feature for its Photos service.

In the latter part of the decade, the app’s relevance waned. In 2017, CEO and founder Jon Wegener left the company to work for Snap. In 2018, the app suffered a major data breach affecting 21 million people.

In a call with TechCrunch, Punchbowl founder and CEO Matt Douglas said that “millions” of people still open Timehop every day.

According to data from analytics company Data.ai, Timehop downloads across Google Play Store and Apple App Store peaked in 2014 with 13.5 million downloads. However, last year, the app was downloaded only 140,000 times. The firm said that the US led to a global share of downloads with 63% followed by the UK with 22%.

Another analytics firm Sensor Tower suggested that Timehop has been downloaded only 720,000 times since 2020. While Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst, didn’t specify exact figures, he said monthly active users in May 2023 have fallen by 80% as compared to May 2016.

Sincere roadmap

With the addition of Timehop in its roster combined with the VidHug (now Memento) acquisition in 2021, Punchbowl wanted to create a brand to encapsulate its work around creating memories. Hence its rebranding to Sincere.

As compared to Timehop, Punchbowl (active since 2013) and Memento (active since 2021) have had fewer lifetime downloads — 4 million and 67,000 respectively, according to data.ai. However, the figures don’t include any web usage of these platforms.

Douglas said that Sincere is a subscription company, so it is thinking about ways to introduce subscriptions to Timehop in a way that makes sense for users. He indicated that the paid plan might include perks like removing ads.

In addition to this, Sincere is opening a foundation to donate to different causes. Plus, the company is also investing around half a million dollars into BookClubs, which helps people create and manage a book club.