Before I built anything, I looked at every other option

Before I wrote a line of this app, I did the thing my old consulting job drilled into me: look at everything that already exists first. Every app, every service, every gadget that promises to help you capture a parent's life story.

I'll spare you the weekend I lost to it. Here's what I found.

The weekly-question apps — StoryWorth and the ones like it — have a lovely idea. Email your mom a question every week, she writes back, a year later there's a book. On paper it's perfect. In practice it leans on two things people are bad at: writing and consistency. Every prompt is a small piece of homework sitting in an inbox, and the moment a few weeks get skipped, the momentum's gone. A lot of these end as half-finished books. It's a good fit for someone who loves to write and never misses a week, which is not most parents.

The voice-prompt tools, like Remento, are a step smarter — they let people speak their answers instead of typing. That solves the writing part, which matters. But you're still working down a list of prompts, one a week, and it still feels like an assignment. "Answer prompt fourteen" is a very different thing from "tell me a story." One's a chore. The other's a visit.

Ghostwriters and personal historians give you the best result money can buy — a real person interviews your parent for hours and produces a beautiful book. The catch is the usual one for luxury goods: thousands of dollars, and weeks of work. Which quietly sorts the world into families who can afford to save their stories and families who can't. That bothers me more than it probably should.

And then there's just recording it yourself. Free, easy to start. And then the file sits on your phone forever. Three hours of your dad talking is precious and also unsearchable, unshared, and — be honest — unwatched. The recording was never the finish line. Someone actually reading it is.

When I stepped back, the pattern was hard to miss. Every option failed normal people the same two ways: it either made them do the hard part themselves — write, keep at it, transcribe — or it charged a lot for someone else to do it. Nobody had simply taken the hard part away.

And the hard part, I'm fairly sure now, is everything that happens after the talking. The writing. The organizing. Turning a mess into something readable.

So that's the gap I built into. With MemoirTalk your parent does only the easy, human thing — they talk, like they're catching up with someone — and the app takes care of the rest. No prompts to grind through, no typing, no transcribing, no four-figure bill.

I'm not going to pretend nothing else is any good. StoryWorth helped a lot of families; ghostwriters do beautiful work. But if you've got a parent who'd never sit down and write, and you're not looking to spend a fortune — that's who I built this for. That's most of us.

— Jeff

This is the gap I built into →