January 2020 was a total blur. Perfecto was grinding on his agency while Jessica and I were drowning in the chaos that comes with news that a second child is on the way (our first arrived just over a year at the time). By the end of February, as the earliest news of the pandemic arrived to the shores of the US, Rehan and Jess were watching Hamilton on Broadway for the very first time (a birthday present for Rehan), still blissfully unaware of what was to come. Then, things got crazy... for all of us.

As COVID began it's rise to infamy across the country, Jessica passionately developed 60-second video tributes for each of the first victims, those who had tragically passed from the virus we knew so little about. Daily, I sat quietly and listened-in on almost every interview she conducted (we were both working from home), and spent hours each evening philosophizing with Perfecto about life. The question was simple - was the problem we had identified as clear as we were seeing it?

One of Jessica Moore's NY COVID video tributes for CBS

From our perspective, life memorialization was broken and we were all suffering as a result. Without a proper way encapsulate the life purpose of lost loved ones, we were forced to grieve through our own individual memories, ones that would inevitably fade as time went on. With each passing year, the unique connections that bonded a community of individuals to each other by a lost loved one would weaken until the power that was generated by that curated community would evaporate. The result? We were losing a wealth of meaningful connections and learnings that defined a life lived.

So while the general public fueled the great hand-sanitizer, Lysol wipes, and toilette paper famine that would define the second quarter of the year, this pair of soon-to-be co-founders were diving into a rabbit hole of research. Months later, we would emerge with a vision for the future of honoring life's purpose through communal storytelling.

MVP wireframes v1.0, May 8, 2020

CHPTR #1 Rehan's Grandmother, November 23, 2020

A lot has happened in the past 14 months since we initially sketched that original framework for CHPTR (initially conceived as an art project called Obit). We wrote a business plan and pitch deck, only to light both on fire and rebuild as I navigated On Deck's 9th Founders Fellowship program. We built a collective of deeply engaged advisors, ones who would become our first Angel investors, and pressure tested the idea with a group of people who were mourning loved ones IRL. We built an MVP, Perfecto wrote detailed GTM and growth plans, I walked hand-in-hand with each of our beta users as we collaborated on their loved one's CHPTR. We immersed ourselves in the grief-journeys our users were almost blindly navigating through, trying to serve as companions along the way.

“Thanks so much for all your attention and help in setting up the [CHPTR] for Sandy. She was a truly wonderful soul and the light of my life. I am thankful I was so blessed and I cannot thank you enough.”

Jack Eitelgeorge, 80yo, Husband (CHPTR #2)

With each passing week our family grew — a copywriter from Brooklyn, pair of tech-founders in Chicago, a technical wizard and a creative director in the Bay Area, and two couples (one in CA, the other in GA) each individual entrepreneurs and experts in their own right. And those are just a few of you. Each new partner has already added tremendous value, and continues to do so. While you have each certainly heard us say that we've "gotten the egos beaten out of us over the past few years," this group is so much more than just a reaction to that. This group of experts are the manifestation of our deep desire to build a community with a community. To change the world as a family.

Today we celebrate two beginnings, the first being the official launch of the design phase of our product development cycle — a 60-day sprint to develop a fully designed prototype while building the technical foundation for our first product release. The second is this, our first stakeholder newsletter, the recurring vehicle we will use to share updates, big wins, necessary failures, and critical learnings throughout this journey.

Beyond updates, we are going to be incredible focused on you. You are our community, and it is important to us that you are all connected with each other as one. Over the coming weeks we will introduce ways for that to transpire. Until then, dig into the August Newsletter and hit either one of us with questions, comments, ideas, book recommendations, or even a good dad joke.