I've been on sabbatical for a while. A few reasons. I could afford it. I wanted time for my own health, the mental kind and the physical kind. I wanted to work on an idea I actually believed in. And someone in my family was nearing the end of their life, their care was being handled by family, and I wanted to be one of the people doing it. All of that lined up at once, which it usually doesn't.
The main thing a sabbatical gives you is time to think. I've used most of it.
I have ideas constantly. I'm an idea factory. That's not a brag. It's closer to a personality defect, and there's a graveyard of parked domains to prove it. But ideas aren't rare. Everyone I know has good ones. The hard part is caring about a single one long enough to build it.
Some of mine came from the job. Things that annoyed me as a marketing leader, which I went and built:
Others were dumber. I spent real hours working out how you'd build a daily quiz for a reality show I won't admit to watching.
Then the grief of losing those family members hit.
Grief isn't the part I want to write about. What got me was the paperwork. My family spent months closing estates, and every piece of it dragged the grief back up. An account nobody could close. A letter addressed to someone who's gone. A marketing email from a company that didn't know. You're fine for a week, and then a form shows up and you're not.
Closing an estate here takes months, often more than a year. And only about a quarter of American adults have a will, down from a third in 2022, according to Caring.com's annual survey. That number is going down, not up. So most families do this with no instructions, one institution at a time, while grieving.
And the estates keep getting harder. The way we settle someone's financial life was built for one bank, one pension, and one filing cabinet. Nobody dies like that anymore. Someone my age is going to leave behind five rolled-over 401(k)s, crypto on three exchanges, a couple of buy-now-pay-later balances, and subscriptions that keep renewing for years after they're gone. Fifty institutions instead of five, and every one of them has to be told separately.
The other side of it isn't built for this either. Every bank, insurer, and mortgage servicer is answering the same two questions. Is this person dead. Who is allowed to act for them. And every one of them answers alone, usually by having someone squint at a PDF and make a call. There's a person inside each of those companies with a queue of these files on their desk, no good way to move faster, and a family on the other end waiting.
That's what I'm building with Setlr. A tool for the people doing the work, and underneath it, a data layer for death, so that answer gets found once instead of a hundred times.
I didn't pick this because death looked like a market. I picked it because I couldn't put it down. Maybe that's what grief does to you.
I mapped the rest of the category too, because I think it matters and I wanted to see the whole thing: The Death Economy.