I've been head down building Memory Companion for months. New features, better questions, smoother editing. The kind of work where you forget to look up.
When I finally did, I noticed something I should have caught earlier. A lot of the people reaching out weren't asking for themselves. They were asking for someone else. A friend's father. A mother who'd been talking about writing her memoir for a decade. A grandmother turning 85 next month.
The product had quietly become a gift idea, and I hadn't designed for that at all.
Here's how it worked. You'd hear about Memory Companion, get excited, and then text the link to your mom. And your mom would open her phone and see a message from you that said:
"hey try this"
Which is, let's be honest, the kind of message that makes a 78-year-old immediately suspicious. Is this spam? Did my son's account get hacked? Why is he sending me a website?
Even if she trusted you completely, she'd still have to click a link, land on a page about an AI that wants to interview her about her life, and decide right there whether to sign in with Google. That's a lot to ask of someone who just wanted to make coffee.
So I built a second way in.
You can still sign up for yourself. But there's now a path for "I'm setting this up for someone else." You tell us who they are, you write them a short note in your own words, and Memory Companion sends them an email that opens with what you wrote.
Something like: "Mom, I came across this and thought of you. It's like having a writer help turn your stories into a book. Call me if you want to talk about it before you try."
Now when she opens her inbox, she sees your words first. Then the explanation. Then, only if she's ready, the way in.
A few friends have used it already, and the reaction has been the same every time: relief. They wanted to share this with a parent but didn't know how to introduce it without it feeling like another thing being sold to them.
My friend Johanna told me the best part was that it gave her a reason to call her dad. She sent the invite, then she called, and they ended up talking for an hour. He hadn't even opened the email yet. They just talked about his childhood instead.
Which, honestly, might be the whole point.
Memory Companion is free during beta. If you've got someone in mind, there's now a less awkward way to introduce them to it.