Legacy Republic’s new mobile app gamifies your video and photo albums

Legacy Republic has started a movement to convert our photo and video albums into online storage. And now it’s hoping to kickstart that effort with a new app that incentivizes people to convert more albums and recruit more customers.

Michael Chang, the chief  executive of Santa Clara, Calif.-based YesVideo (the owner of Legacy Republic), said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat that the company’s new iOS app takes lessons from car service Uber and “gamification,” or the use of game-like mechanics to incentivize people.

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YesVideo takes your old video tapes and other formats for home movies or photos and turns them into digital records, both as online movies or DVD-based storage. Back in October, it created its Legacy Republic as a “social selling division” and invested $6 million into it. Legacy Republic has recruited hundreds of paid evangelists to proselytize the benefits of storing your memories online. To encourage those recruiters to do more, the company’s new mobile app is aimed at this fleet of “Legacy Makers.”

“We’ve had a great turnout at getting pockets of people involved,” Chang said. “We make sales into a competitive game where you can compete against others to get the top score and level up in the organization.”

These Legacy Makers are the modern-day equivalent of Tupperware party hosts, and their job as paid missionaries is to get people to send in their home videos and photos for digitization. Inspired by Uber, the app enables Legacy Makers to track sales, manage shows, view team reports and do other things to boost sales. The app also gamifies the sales process to motivate Legacy Makers to level up to manager and executive director status, a promotion achieved by demonstrating performance progress tracked each month. Chang said that the Legacy Makers are like “micro-entrepreneurs,” making a part-time or full-time living by educating friends and family about how to save their data via Legacy Republic and YesVideo.

The service is part of a trend popularized by the likes of Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. It has expanded to expanded to 35 states and increased its trained Legacy Maker headcount to more than 350. Each Legacy Maker can build an organization and get a commission from sales reps under them.

Legacy Republic’s Legacy Maker app makes the social sales process more rewarding and manageable. It gives transparency into number of sales and it shows details regarding upcoming and previous Legacy Shows, status of orders, and sales predictions for the coming weeks. Legacy Makers can use it to manage shows, view team reports, and see earnings.

“We wanted to modernize the social sales experience for our incredible team of Legacy Makers, and integrating the mobile factor was key,” said Chang. “This new app will help foster a sense of community by motivating and inspiring Legacy Makers to run their business and meet their goals.”

YesVideo takes your old home movies on 8 millimeter camcorder cassettes and other old formats. It converts them to DVDs or online videos, allowing you to more easily access the old memories. More than 8 million people have converted their videos using YesVideo, but the company believes there are tens of millions more people in the U.S. who could benefit from the service.

The YesVideo business has gotten traction in a lot of retailers such as CVS and Walmart. But the company wants to convert more videos at a faster rate, and Legacy Republic is the answer. The division is hiring evangelists to throw the modern equivalent of Tupperware parties to convince people to save their memories and show them how to send their old tapes off to the company.

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YesVideo charges an upfront fee of $25 per videotape, or $9 to $70 for a film reel transfer. You get unlimited storage and no annual fees thanks to YesVideo’s partnership with Amazon. YesVideo operates a home media transfer and digitization service. But more than that, it has positioned itself as trustworthy enough to store and protect your most precious memories. And you can gain easier access to them via an app, a DVD, or a website.