We built Biographer for my dad.

It's simple. Create an account and start talking with your biographer. It begins with a short interview to get to know you, then goes into topics like your parents, your first job or how you met. When you're ready, press Write Story and it writes the story for you.

If you just want to tell a story, you can do that, too. No interview required.

You can type, talk, or have your biographer talk out loud to you. You can change any story however you want, by editing it yourself or by telling your biographer what to change. Add photos and they'll go in your book next to your stories.

The more you use it, the more personal it gets. A couple of conversations in, you'll feel like you're talking with someone who has known you your whole life.

Nothing. Your biographer, every conversation, and every written story are free, and you don't need a card.

You pay only for what you make: a printed hardcover from $39 plus shipping, and extras like songs, comics and children's books.

Only you and the people you invite. You can share a story with family, or invite them to add their own memories.

Besides your book, you can turn your stories into a children's book, an audiobook, an album of songs about your life, or a comic. Those are extras, each priced before you make it.

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 invited my parents 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.

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.

When we first built Biographer I wanted it to be both an interviewer 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, talk to Biographer with your voice or by typing, immediately see the stories that are written once you finish, and can also just tell whatever stories are on your mind. You can upload photos, and your stories and photos become a printed hardcover book.

Right now the core of Biographer is simple: you talk with your biographer, we turn that conversation into a written story, and those stories become a hardcover book you can have forever.

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.

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 a place to preserve their life stories, 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.

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.