Nick's grandmother had this way of telling stories. She'd start with something small, like the pattern on a tablecloth, and somehow end up describing an entire summer in 1952. The names of neighbors. The song that was on the radio. What the rain smelled like when it came through the screen door.
Nobody wrote any of it down.
When she passed, we realized we could remember the feeling of those stories but not the details. Not enough of them. We tried asking other relatives, but everyone had different pieces. Some pieces were already gone.
That's the moment Kindred Tales started, even if we didn't know it yet.
Nick had left his law career to build software products. Rebecca was working as a licensed psychologist, spending her days helping people find the words for things they didn't know how to say. Between the two of us, we thought we could build something better than what existed. Something simpler than sitting down with a blank page. Something that even the most tech-resistant parent could actually use.
So we built it. We started with weekly prompts sent by email, because we knew our own parents would never download an app. We added speech-to-text, because Nick's dad would talk for an hour but wouldn't type a paragraph. And we built Ali, a guided interviewer who asks the follow-up questions that pull out stories people didn't know they had.
Ali exists because of Rebecca's background. She understood that most people don't struggle with a lack of stories. They struggle with a lack of permission to tell them. "I don't have anything interesting to say" is something we hear constantly. Ali's job is to prove that wrong, gently and patiently, one question at a time.
We've watched families receive their finished books and open them at kitchen tables, on couches, in living rooms. Some people laugh. A lot of people cry. Almost everyone says some version of the same thing: "I didn't know that about them."
That's what we're building for. Not the book itself, really, but that sentence. The moment someone discovers a piece of their family that would have disappeared.
We're a small company. Two founders, a handful of people who care about this as much as we do, and a growing number of families trusting us with something irreplaceable. We don't take that lightly.
When you email our support team, you're reaching a real person. Often it's one of us. We've been known to send personalized video walkthroughs when someone's parent gets stuck on a feature. That's not scalable, and we don't care. These are people's life stories. We treat them that way.