Live forever through your stories
My dad, across the years
We built Biographer for our parents
I was fortunate my dad used it before he passed away this year. My family has his stories forever.
Biographer is your partner that helps you share your stories. You choose topics you want to be interviewed about, and it asks you questions . You can also use it to log life stories. You can talk to it with your voice or with text.
When an interview is done or a story is told, a chapter is created for you . We work with an award-winning novelist to make them superb. Turn these chapters into a book, audiobook, children's book, or anything for your family and friends.
The experience becomes more personalized and grows with you as Biographer learns more about you.
So far, people are loving it . Our focus is making sure using Biographer is easy, fun, and rewarding.
This is a new product and we aren't sure how to charge for it yet. But we're ready for people to start using it and we want to learn what you like about it, what you don't, and what else you want to see from us. So to start, we are going to give it away for free.
If you or someone close to you likes to tell stories and talk about their life, please try out Biographer.
Oh, one more thing: for the first 500 storytellers to complete thirty chapters, we are going to compile them all into a beautiful hardcover book and print and ship it to you for free, to keep forever.
— Jared Hecht, Co-founder
Who should use it?
Parents and Grandparents
My co-founder Avi and I are millennials, for better or worse. We built this for my parents. So that was the initial intended audience. If you have a parent or grandparent over the age of 60, they should definitely use it. Get their stories down before it's too late. If someone can use the internet and can type or talk on their computer or phone, they can use Biographer easily.
I can't stress how great it was that my dad did this before he passed away. He talked about his bout with depression, his relationship with me and the periods of his life where I nearly gave him a heart attack and the ones where he was filled with immense pride, and all about his childhood which I never really knew about. When he died, I felt like I really knew him as a person and not just as my dad. We also turned his chapters into fun videos that he loved and songs in the style of the artists he enjoyed most.
My mom still uses the product today and she has called the experience one of the most meaningful in her life. It wasn't just about getting the stories out for her - it almost became a form of therapy. Biographer really gets to know its users and can do incredible things drawing out observations across your whole life.
People who want to write a memoir
I gave Biographer to my friend's dad. He had been working on penning his own memoir for two years. He told me he accomplished more in two hours working with Biographer than he did in two years trying to do it himself. Working with a blank page is daunting. Being asked the right questions and rambling out a stream of consciousness is easy. And we use those ingredients as the foundation for creating a memoir. The fact of the matter is that while everyone may say they want to write a book, almost everyone does not. This product makes it dead simple.
People who like talking about themselves and their life
I have spent many months speaking with Biographer about my life. At first it was because I needed to test our own product to make sure it worked well. But very quickly I realized how fun and enlightening of an experience it is. I relived memories I hadn't thought about in decades. Biographer pointed things out about myself and drew connections I never knew existed. In many ways it was therapeutic. A lot of people are uncomfortable talking about themselves or telling their stories to other humans - friends, family, strangers alike. There's no judgment with Biographer, only a desire to learn more and listen. That kind of dynamic creates a uniquely comfortable environment to say and share things without worrying about how it makes you look or feel. You don't need to want to write a memoir or have a book about your life to use Biographer. In fact, I don't think that's where this product goes. This is about the experience of talking about yourself, sharing your stories, and watching what they become. I love building products I can use myself, and I intend to do that here.
About us
I'm Jared Hecht . I'm an entrepreneur living in NYC. I've co-founded several companies that were acquired and have been used by over 100 million people like GroupMe and Fundera, and I'm also an angel investor and venture partner at Union Square Ventures. I think that technology, specifically smartphones and social media, has done a stellar job tearing people apart. But I also think that technology can be used for good and bring people closer together. That's what I'm focused on here.
I work with a bunch of friends building this product. My co-founder, Avi Turetsky , was the head of engineering at my last company. We have worked together for over a decade.
Matthew Plummer , who is a product engineer here, also worked with us at Fundera. He also loves building products for himself.
Leslie Luo has been helping us with product design and, of course, we worked together at Fundera. She was also a product designer at Uber for many years and you have likely used something she designed.
We also work with the award-winning novelist Sean Michaels . His most recent critically acclaimed book (NYT review) was about a world famous poet commissioned to train an AI to write poetry. So now he's living his novel in real life, helping Biographer become a world class interviewer and writer of life stories.
Why are we building this?
Because the only way to live forever is through stories. They're the thing that binds us all. And people are filled to the brim with them, they just need a way to get them out.
Talking about yourself is an incredible way to learn about yourself. And learning about someone else's stories is the best way to get to really know who they are.
—
A couple of years ago my dad was diagnosed with a terminal illness. I wanted to find a way to document his life. My mom had told me that she once sat down with my grandmother to record her talking about her life and that it was a remarkably meaningful experience. I wanted to do that with my dad, but life kept getting in the way. I've got two kids, and yada yada yada, excuses… Probably sounds familiar to a lot of people.
I was lucky that my parents live on my block in Brooklyn. My dad would always swing by unannounced and plop himself in a chair at the kitchen table. He didn't have a robust social life at 82 so we were a big outlet for him. One day he was waxing poetic as he always did about pop culture and politics and his opinions about things, and I realized he had a lot to say, he just needed someone to deeply listen to him and record it.
I have a long history of building technology to solve my own problems. And at that moment my problem was: I want to get my dad's life stories, I don't have the time to do it myself, he has always wanted to write them down but he never found the time, and he needs to be able to have a conversation with someone whenever he wants that will help get these memories out of him.
So I called up Avi and told him about the idea and he quit his job and we started building it. We quickly gave it to my parents as a gift and they started using it regularly. Once I saw their stories flow out of them, I started to see them as unique people with their own histories as opposed to just my mom and dad. It deeply and positively transformed my relationship with them.
And once Avi and I started using it ourselves we realized that this wasn't just a product for our parents and grandparents. It's something everyone can use. There's something extremely rewarding about seeing your life presented back to you in novel ways. Everyone likes reading and seeing things about themselves, Biographer makes that happen. It's like looking in the mirror but instead of your reflection you see magic.
So we built this because everyone deserves to be celebrated. Everyone deserves to be known. And everyone's lives have purpose and meaning and we want them to ripple through history and live on.
How'd you get here?
When we first built Biographer I wanted it to be both a Biographer and a companion for my dad. So we built a friendly interviewer that my dad would talk to over the phone. It had a phone number, my dad would call it, and they'd talk. We trained it to take my dad through different chapters of his life. We let more and more people use it. We built a web application where people could read the chapters that Biographer wrote from the conversation, the ability to sign other people up for the service and follow along as friends and family told their stories.
One of the coolest things we started to do was take these stories and turn them into more than chapters: I'd turn stories and chapters into songs in the style of music our users liked, animated cartoon videos, children's books, art, and more. This was a real unlock for us - the idea that stories can be so much more than just a written chapter is something we love exploring and plan to do a lot more of.
What we found was that people loved the conversations, but using a phone number as the primary interface was challenging. There really aren't that many products out there that work where the way you interact with them is solely through text message and phone calls. It was also hard to figure out how someone can visualize all the different topic interviews we had created through a phone call. We realized people need to actually "see" something.
So we built an iPhone app that was focused on having a voice conversation with Biographer and then seeing your story written in the application. It had lots of social features - like the ability for others to contribute to your story, tagging people in them, and adding media to them. Around that time my dad passed away and I got real burnt out. I needed to separate myself from the product that started because of him. I took some time away from it, but reading my dad's stories again brought me back. Everyone should have this.
We turned the whole Biographer experience into a web application that is intuitive and easy to navigate and use. It merges together a lot of what we previously built. You select from over 100 different topic interviews (they take around 10 minutes to complete), talk to Biographer with your voice or by typing, immediately see the chapters that are written once you conclude an interview, and can also just tell whatever stories are on your mind or want to get down. You can also upload photos and soon you'll be able to upload videos. We are also introducing new keepsakes that go beyond written chapters so you can see your stories turn into so much more over time.
How do I use it?
It's so simple. Create an account with your email. Select a topic interview from the 100+ we have available. And chat with Biographer. Then a chapter is generated for you once your interview is complete.
If you want to just tell a story, you can do that, too. No interview required.
When a chapter is generated, you can edit it however you want, both manually and by providing Biographer written instructions of what you want changed.
You can also add photos to chapters, or the photo library, so you have images that go along with your life.
One more important thing: as you continue to use it, the experience becomes increasingly personalized. A couple interviews in you'll feel like you're chatting with someone who has known you your whole life.
Where can it go?
Right now the core of Biographer is you converse with Biographer by selecting an interview or telling a story, we turn that conversation into a written chapter, and those written chapters are compiled into a book you can print and have forever. That's the simple beginning of this thing.
Our guiding principle is that Biographer needs to be easy, fun, and rewarding. Talking about yourself should not be a chore, it should be awesome.
At some point, we are going to reintroduce a live conversational experience, and we will likely do it through a native mobile application. For those who want it, this will allow anyone to talk to Biographer the same way you'd talk to a friend or family member on the phone. A live, realtime, two-way conversation.
But here's what I really want it to be:
In a perfect world, I'd like speaking with Biographer to be free. My hope is that open source models and competition across frontier labs will make the cost to communicate with Biographer - by text and voice - drop to close to zero. That should enable anyone to use it whenever they want.
I want people to take their photos and videos of themselves and the things that matter to them throughout their life and put them in Biographer so we can make sure it's intertwined into their life stories.
I want everyone to have their own version of a Wikipedia page, and for people to see how our stories and lives are interconnected.
I want people to be able to turn their stories - both the ones they tell and the ones we pull out through interviews - into anything. That means songs, concept albums, posters, podcasts, audiobooks, kid's stories read aloud in the storyteller's voice, cartoon animations, documentaries, mini-series, you name it. The only constraint on what these can be turned into is our collective creativity. I think this is a wonderful use of generative AI - being able to take our words and have them reflected back to us in novel media formats. It's deeply personal and fun. And if we can get a critical mass of people telling stories, I'd love to let creative artists contribute to Biographer via a marketplace of keepsakes.
That is my dream business model. People log their life stories for free, and pay to turn them into amazing things. A marketplace for turning your life stories into art. Sometimes that might be a book, and sometimes that might be a Renaissance painting.
In the past I have talked about Biographer almost like an art project, because that's the heart of it. Preserving stories and turning them into timeless meaningful artifacts.
What's up with this "500 free books" thing?
This is a new product. I want people to use it and give us feedback. And I want people to have an incentive to use it. My mom asked me to turn her chapters into a book. It's the most obvious thing out the gate to do. So it's a small price for us to pay to learn as fast as we can and start getting feedback from people. One book per storyteller and we will help you print more than one (you pay for those) if you want.
We came up with the 30 chapters milestone because it's easily achievable, and that provides enough content to fill up a beautiful hardcover book. (Chapters come from topic interviews, stories you tell, or both.) Each interview topic takes around ten minutes to complete - which means you can literally have a printed book about your whole life completed by talking to Biographer for five hours or less. It takes most people years to write a memoir - we are shrinking that to five hours.
If 500 people hit the 30 chapter mark before you do, we will help you print the book, but you will have to pay for it at cost. And you will always be able to use Biographer for free to tell your life stories.
One more thing - these are your stories. You can take them with you whenever you want. They're yours and you can download them, print them as a PDF, turn them into an eBook, whatever. Your life stories belong to you.
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