Comment by michaelaiello | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelaiello | Hacker News Reader

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

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?

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.

After almost getting killed while traveling in Cambodia (reckless motorcycle driver hit me), I was wondering about this. It dawned on me that it might take a few years for distant acquaintances to find out what happened, and a few people might just wonder why I dropped off the map. It also occurred to me that a couple bank accounts/brokerage accounts I had, no one knew about and I'd already gone to paperless statements. Things like that.

I guess in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't be a big deal in comparison to getting killed, but I started thinking about how people would do estate planning now that "their papers" aren't necessarily papers in a desk or safe deposit box any more, but frequently digital and password protected. This seems like a service that's going to be more important as time passes, and kudos for identifying the real objections people would have to and working through them. Good luck, this is going to be something that gets more and more important as we digitize things more and create physical copies less.

Edit: Quick feedback - you might want a more sober color scheme, was kind of jarring seeing the standard Web 2.0 app color scheme and design when clicking over. Or maybe not, but it's probably worth testing. After a couple google searches, looks like a lot of passing-away type websites look more like this - http://www.funeralhomeresource.com/

Thanks for the feedback. We debated quite a bit on the design/colors/name. We tried to optimize for what will best communicate 1) We are trustworthy 2) we'll be around forever and 3) this is going to be easy to do. Once we get some more use of the site we'll do some real testing on the design.

It is going to be tough to market. Estate planners are lawyers and thus can't ethically take affiliate payments, so they have little reason to push your products. I assume you are aware of http://LegacyLocker.com/

Agree – cracking this market is an interesting challenge. One of the biggest hurdles we’ve got is that people really don’t like thinking about their own demise. As for estate planners, we are working with a few and the feedback so far has been very positive, basically it has been “this is great, how can we work together to provide this service for my clients.”

Yep, we are aware of LegacyLocker and the other players. We are hoping we can build the best product and the most trusted company in the space.

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