Story Something, one of the promising startups from this year’s TechCrunch50 conference, announced their open beta this evening.

With Story Something, parents create personalized bedtime stories for their children by first selecting a story type from among a range of categories (age, topic type, gender) and then entering names for the characters so that children can enjoy the story as if it were their own. The idea is that kids will enjoy the stories so much that parents will be willing to pay a nominal monthly-subscription fee to continue with the service. Story Something has commissioned 50+ unique stories from over 20 authors. Each story comes complete with its own artwork.

The opportunity for a business like this to scale has some investors interested, but the jury is out as to how users (and children) will respond. Its an incredibly unique idea though, and the amount of commissioned story content introduces a nice barrier to entry. I’m sure there are many people watching this launch very closely. The next beg step for the company will be around user acquisition & retention, as well as some innovation around story distribution (e.g. hardcover print?, kindle, iphone).

I checked out the beta this evening and was impressed. A minor criticism I’d have is that the user experience of the website leaves a little to be desired. Creating, personalizing, and exporting a story is a rather simple process, but their selection of background/link colors, and use of content and hierarchy made the experience a little difficult. It was also a bit buggy, for example, when using firefox the global nav lettering is white against a light-blue background. In addition, recommendation features, which will be just as important for this company as it was for Netflix, are not easily located. And when I finally read my story, the names of my characters are constantly highlighted in orange which actually keeps me from enjoying the uniquely personalized experience.

But these are easy issues to fix, and the site is still in beta afterall. The stories are engaging and the artwork is fantastic. The fact that I can personalize a unique bedtime story for a child with just a few clicks is something I’ve never done before on the internet. Most importantly, this company has found a way for technology to enable quality time between parents and their children, and for that reason I hope this company is tremendously successful.