How Hugh Eggar turns family memories into books at Memolio
Hugh Eggar is the founder of Memolio, which turns family memories into personalised, watercolour-painted hardcover books. Eggar explains how a free first portrait helps customers decide, why families can edit each page, and why marketing should start before the product feels finished.
When customers are buying something personal they have not seen before, a chance to preview and shape it can matter more than sales copy. Eggar also makes the case for starting marketing early and refining the product with customer input rather than trying to perfect everything upfront.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
Memolio started with a simple wish: the stories older people tell at the kitchen table usually disappear with them. I grew up with grandparents living on the other side of the world and although I have many fond memories with my South African grandparents, I realised as I got older that I didn’t really know them as people – nothing about their own childhoods or adult lives apart from what my mother told me. Until recently, a properly illustrated book about one real person meant hiring an illustrator for weeks. AI image tools changed that, so I built a way for any family to make one.
What sets us apart is that the book is about a real person and looks like them. You answer questions in about half an hour, typed or spoken, and every page is painted from your own photos. Since AI is often liable to make mistakes, I spent a lot of time trying to make it possible in a user-friendly manner to edit and change the book as the user sees fit. We are open about using AI, and the stories come from your answers, not from a template.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Our first orders came after we launched on Product Hunt in September 2026 and opened sales in Austria, Germany, the UK and the US. Most of our customers tend to be the adult children of the older generation, creating something that can connect their elderly parents to their grandchildren. Today new customers mainly find us through search, through gift guides and wedding and family sites that feature the book, and through small, tightly watched social ads. The biggest lever has been letting people start for free: you can begin the book and see your first painted portrait before you pay anything.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision: letting families start for free and pay only once they have seen the first painted portrait. People are buying something they have never seen, about someone they love, so seeing it first matters more than any sales copy. The mistake: expecting AI to get things right 100% of the time. I spent a lot of time in the beginning trying to ‘front-load’ against mistakes – building up a large and complex series of prompts to create a ‘perfect’ book in one go. Eventually this became very unwieldy, with large prompts and a lot of contradictions between instructions, leading to confused stories and visual prompts. Eventually I pruned back the instructions and decided to instead allow my customers more freedom to build the book as they like it – they receive a first draft and then can edit and change anything within the book to suit their own tastes and memories.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Two years ago AI images could not keep one face recognisable across a whole book. Now they can, and that made this product possible. At the same time people have become more careful about AI and about their photos. So we adapted in two ways. We say clearly that AI paints the pictures, and we put the family in charge: every page is checked and can be repainted before anything is printed.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
The tools we now have at our disposal are incredible. You can learn almost anything and if you can’t learn it, you have access to an LLM that can in all likelihood do a lot of it for you – there has never been a better time to build. However you should’t let this tempt you into ‘over-building’. The biggest shock I faced was going from building, which I feel I’ve got quite good at, to marketing, which is a completely different skillset and attitude. I would say that you should try to get started on this aspect as quickly as possible – build your website, improve your search engine optimisation, play around with your social media accounts to see what works – at this point before you are finished building, you are unlikely to have many followers, so have fun with it, experiment and don’t let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good.
Thank you to Hugh Eggar and the team at Memolio for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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