

Show HN: LifeEnsured, privately manage your on-line life after you pass. - michaelaiello
http://www.lifeensured.com

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michaelaiello
Hacker News Invite Code: YCHN

LifeEnsured is a service which lets you control the distribution and care of
your on-line assets after you pass away.

We will modify, transfer or erase your on-line accounts, send final email
messages and pass on important files after you are gone. Additionally, we have
a growing list of services which we will execute when we have received
notification of your passing (i.e. making a web services call, physically
printing and mailing a document)

We spoke with quite a few folks about what they want to have happen to their
on-line life after they are gone and asked what they thought of a service that
would assist with this. Most importantly we asked what would make them use it.
We did our best to write our results up in an "OKTrends" style data based
report here: <http://www.blog.lifeensured.com/?p=16>

The best reasons for using our service we heard were:

1\. I want to reduce the emotional or administrative burden on my family

2\. I want to preserve wealth for my descendants

3\. I want to communicate information

4\. I want to be remembered

The biggest hurdles and causes of skepticism we heard were:

1\. I don’t trust you, how do I know you are a credible company

2\. I don’t see a need

3\. I have a legal objection

4\. I have a philosophical objection

To address these we

1\. Partnered with a leading life-insurance distribution company and
established an Irrevocable Trust Fund to execute wishes. The fund outlives the
company in case something bad happens.

2\. Put together a list of 50 uses for the product and worked with estate
planners to determine the features that address the biggest existing
headaches.

3\. Hired a great trust Lawyer to review everything and help us establish a
legal structure that provides value to clients when they sign up, a real
Digital Asset Trust.

4\. Became comfortable with the fact that on-line end-of-life planning isn't
for everyone, but for some, it is very important.

We are in beta but believe we are at a point where some broader feedback would
help!

Thanks

~~~
deadmansshoes
Is this US only? I don't see this on your FAQ, but references to social
security would imply it is.

Can a one-off fee be payable by the estate?

~~~
michaelaiello
Thanks. Our social security end-of-life detection is US only. You can still
use the service outside of the US but this feature won't work (unless you have
a SSN).

We don't have an option to be paid by the estate - claims to an estate are
generally quite difficult to collect upon unless an attorney is involved
beforehand. We liken our model to any pre-planned end-of-life care service,
paid before you pass away.

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TamDenholm
While i find this an interesting service i also cant help think about their
first customer death. It must be kind of strange moment for the founder
thinking "Yay! We completed customer cycle, but someone had to die for that to
happen."

I'm not saying this is either a good or bad thing, just, ye know, weird.

~~~
Semiapies
Rather like the first job for a new funeral home in that way.

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moioci
One of the biggest challenges here seems to be that the web as we know it will
likely be nearly unrecognizable 10 years from now, yet yours is a product with
a timeline of several decades. Imagine in 10 years how paltry a 100MB file
upload limit will likely seem.

~~~
michaelaiello
Thanks. It’s tough (but usually fun) to try to think about how to build
something that will be around for decades. The idea with the 100MB today is
that it’ll hold any important documents which you’d like. As the space
requirement increases – we’ll increase the allocation.

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trickjarrett
This was a business idea I tossed around about 2 years ago, I seriously
considered making the leap and going for it because it is a necessary niche of
the modern day. But the more I planned and worked on it, the more I realized
it wasn't something I wanted to get into. Death is a hard thing to process for
me.

Ultimately I set it aside. I couldn't do it. So I wish you and the others in
this market the best, and hope you find the success you're seeking.

~~~
michaelaiello
Thanks for the encouragement and acknowledgement of the need. If you’ve got
any lingering thoughts / ideas on the topic, it would be great to hear them.
Feel free to send me an email Michael.Aiello@lifeensured.com or give me a ring
347-227-0189

We hope we can shift the focus a bit away from the “this is for something when
you die” to – “hey, it’s good practice is to really claim ownership of your
digital assets and have this stuff sorted”

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JonLim
Morbid, but very necessary app. How do you notify people? Via phone? Email?

~~~
michaelaiello
Thanks. Clients set up the (email) notifications themselves. When we receive
verification that you have passed, we send out these emails on the client’s
behalf. To perform verification that the client has passed, we call the folks
who are listed as verifiers.

~~~
JonLim
Ah. Very cool (sorta?) Thanks, good luck with it!

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listrophy
One of my friends started <https://www.entrustet.com/> a few years back. Looks
like it's effectively the same service as LifeEnsured.

~~~
michaelaiello
Thanks. Entrustet has made some good headway in the space. We hope the
LifeEnsured feature set, positioning and execution help us become the most
trusted company in the space.

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FiddlerClamp
The serious, formal, and somber text on sites like this ("after you
pass...on...into death!") makes me wonder if there's a market for a snarky
site that will do the same thing, but present itself in a more amusing, ironic
sort of way.

Gawker or 4chan aficionados may want a Gawker- or 4-chan styled service, after
all.

------
dfgonzalez
Shouldn't this be cheaper the younger I am?

My chances of dying at 27 are not as high as 24 USD per year.

~~~
michaelaiello
Thanks. We toyed with the idea of charging different prices based on age. The
problems we encountered are.

1) difficult to verify age online 2) creates a weird step when registering
[who asks for my age when I register for a site?] 3) impression it gives to
older users.

We realize that this is standard practice in the insurance world (likelihood
of a young person passing away is significantly lower than an older person)
but we don’t think this is something we should be doing with an online
service… What do you think? How can we make it better?

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mathgladiator
I would like an API please. My dark humor would force me to write a bot to
make tweets from hell.

~~~
michaelaiello
One of our free services is making an HTTP POST or GET (authenticated if you'd
like) to a web server when we receive notification of your passing. We hope
you chose to use it for something a bit happier - like triggering your private
keys to expire etc.

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danvoell
Looks like <http://www.entrustet.com>

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danvoell
When I first read the title I thought it was an app for the reincarnated.

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coolgeek
Required feature: notify all of my friends that they were left behind.

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workhorse
The verbiage on the site is well written.

Kudos.

