Around—Our memo for internal clarity, focus, and vision
The startup memo that explains what we are, what we do, and why, and why it matters
We are building Around—a calming bereavement experience (see website). Around is a startup in the deathcare and deathtech category, in Chandigarh, India.
This post serves us for our internal clarity, focus, and the vision. In this post, I talk about the following.
01. The backstory
02. Key elements of the memo
03. The product principles
04. The design and content principles
05. The shape of the story
06. The differentiator
07. The team
08. The market
01. The Backstory—my personal experience
My father died of cancer in the year 2011. During one of those evenings, I thought of inviting our family and friends to share our memories and obituaries or tributes for my father, and I found forevermissed. Nobody joined to build conversations and even my own experience was ordinary. I wrote a few essays on my personal blog—not to mention ocassionally replying to someone on Facebook too.
In 2017, my grandmother died and I again felt like sharing memories and building conversations. I wrote a Medium post. Yet another fragmented experience. During Covid, I lost a couple of my college friends in India. I thought of raising funds to support their family via GoFundMe, but it is not available in India.
In 2022, my contact Andrea Drugay died of cancer and I was happy to see their obituary page on Obit—the family could curate obituaries and raise funds.
Some quick research about such products where I could set up personalized obituaries or other forms of memories or legacy, or raise funds, introduced me to other tools and services in this category—Deathcare or Deathtech, and we saw Cake, Bare, Recompose, Obit, Gathering Us, Good Trust, and many others.
02. The Memo
Pitch
Helping the bereaved get post-life services and a unified experience for all post-life planning, building memories and raising funds
Product Vision
To bring more calmness, assurance, and a unified experience in our bereavement times by building the right memories and the deathcare experience for the family and the loved ones.
Mission
To bring calmness in every bereaved by assurance, calmness, structure, and a unified experience for their in-grief needs and wants.
Vision—tagline
Calmness, assurance, order for the bereaved
Answers to some questions
Why are we in business?
We want to calm the bereaved for their in-grief wants, needs, and goals—for the near-death times and for the after-life needs.
Speaking in the plain English, what does the business do?
We help the bereaved build thoughtful conversations and memories of their loved ones, and raise funds, and find service providers in the near-death or after-death moments. We enable them to plan for post-life challenges for their own family and loved ones.
Why is our work so essential right now?
Death is inevitable. The use of technology in our lives worldwide means that people are likely to adopt something useful when they are bereaved—for their different types of immediate needs, and for support. Around builds more calmness, assurance, and structure in their grieving times and it builds a kind of death positivity as well.
What unique needs does the business meet for customers?
Different types of stories—obituaries, thoughtful Q&A, and deep essays, and connect with service providers for a unified and frictionless bereavement experience. They can plan their own post-life checklist and wishlist—affordably.
What inspired you to found the company?
My personal experiences saw this gap, and using a few products for such use cases gave me the right directions and the incentive to build something. Competition gives us the validation that there is a market, and there is a scope to elevate the experience-centric value for the customers.
What differentiates us from our competitors?
We focus on unifying their experience for different types of needs and goals—memories, raising funds, connecting with experts, and we build a lot of educational content to bring calmness, assurance, and structure in their bereavement experience.
What underlying philosophies and values have shaped the business so far?
We are system thinkers and when we design our business, we do not lose the focus on customer-centricity. We build foundations that scale in multi-dimensional view—use cases for customers, industry footprints via events and community, influencers and relationships, and bringing the experts and providers closer to their audiences—a win-win in every sense. We think and plan for big—every field in the form and every message on the screen has a merit, meaning, and relevance for the users.
We have one eye on the attention to detail and the other eye on the vision.
What impact do we want to have on the world around us?
We envision that people should be more calm, and prepared when someone dies in their family or in their contacts. It also means that people will be more aware and educated about how dying is part of our life and how preparing for it helps everyone in their family and loved ones—a culture of preparedness and acceptance Around them.
How will you define success for the company beyond profitability and market leadership?
“Seeing tonnes of stories of how people share their memories and conversations, and building that culture of co-designing the legacy of the dead ones—where people find meaning, context, and relation in how we co-create and co-design this experience collectively—from diverse audiences.”—this means success to us.
What is your distribution strategy?
Parallel channels:
Obituaries’ listings via newspapers and social media, and then reaching out to them (Account Based qualified funnel to onboard them)
Social media, mostly organic—to build voice and awareness
Reaching out to influencers worldwide, building relationships, content marketing by hosting them in interviews and events
Content marketing to build brand that invests in deathcare education with helps us connect with industry experts—a passive mode to general leads
Connect with funeral homes and hospitals
Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.
Death is inevitable, and the bereavement practices are also inevitable. We were positively surprised to see this story by Vox where they talk about death positive millennials sentiment and which was a huge positive for our product.
03. Product Principles
Stay calm: They are in grief, and they might be clueless. We are building their support system to make them feel calm—for whatever they might need—notify contacts, hire a consultant in alternate funerals or in grief therapy, or just want to help them voice out their memories about the died person? We are here—stay calm.
Be assured: In their in-grief moments, we build assurance for your immediate needs. We are designing their confidence to take the right actions in their bereavement moments.
In order: When they are emotionally charged, they are dealing with too many emotions, questions, things to do, people to contact, consoling others, explaining it to kids, and responding to phone calls. We are Around, to build the right order and structure to deal with all these.
Unified experience: Around is around for your unified experience—emotional, tangible, meaningful
04. Design Principles
Give the directions: Designing the wayfinding within different types of interactions is foundational—the interface elements are designed to bring the assurance that we promise before they sign up, and it should calm them.
Design the message: Every word matters, design the message that builds their journey, gives them confidence, and the interaction should communicate the result, outcome, or the impact.
Show progress—design for their momentum, or for their immediate and direct goals.
Show the higher success—find an opportunity to show the higher success that they are achieving, even in the intermediate steps
Related readings:
Our work is a function of timing (blog post)
Curiosity and leadership (blog post), and asking questions (blog post)
Foundational clarity in our work (blog post)
Content supply chain for customer experience (Medium post)
Collective intelligence and leadership (blog post)
05. Shape of the story
John is bereaved and they find Around via LinkedIn. Every story has a shape and here is John’s story on Around.
Story inspiration source
Before and After
06. The differentiator
Among the competition—Many of our competitions are doing very well—their products are comprehensive and their customers are happy. It gives us the confidence that there is a market, and we want to build our differentiator around the experience. We are focused on unifying the customers’ experience—helping them build stories, raise funds, and hire experts while planning their own post-life checklist.
Around is designed as a service too where we plan to build a lot of education and advocacy for the deathcare and post-life planning awareness. We know how to design an intersection of system, business, and a product.
Our principles and standards—System thinking and immaculate experience design strategy, and attention to detail
Unique value for the users—Elite plan for on-demand artwork, visualizations for data lakes, bridges or walls for public reference
07. The team
Founders know each other for many years—they have worked together in many agency projects, and their own side products. We are designing Around as a system that scales with time, with a well-designed taxonomy servicing as the base data models.
The domain expertise
Studied competition, using those products: We studied the competition, created new accounts in their products to see the value and usability, how they onboard customers. It shows that there is a market.
Spoke to their founders, and industry experts: In parallel, we built relationships with industry experts—their founders, advisors, and experts in surviving, and spoke to them to gain a deeper understanding of the domain.
Built voice: Our LinkedIn and Twitter pages show how we have been building our domain experience, and relationships, and some momentum and public opinion among our audiences. We believe in codesigning the experiences and the voice with industry experts, here is an example from one of our LinkedIn posts.
08. The market and the sentiment
The sentiment
This Vox story shows how the consumer sentiment for death is changing recently. The Around team studied this story in detail, and got an insight into the market, the competition, and it gives a good insight into the consumer pulse in deathcare and deathcare category startups.
Another story by Market Watch strengthened our belief in what we are making. While doing market research and the surveys with the customers and gathering information around the market size, we were keen to study the consumer sentiment—the subjectivity in this domain.
These two stories are a good sign for what we are building.
Our inspiration:
Why millennials are the “death positive” generation—a Vox story
Obituaries are important, worth rethinking and reviving—a Poynter story
Many experts and leaders in deathcare, grieftech, bereavement, alternate funerals, and post-life experience—we are working with them in different ways to build the collective voice in this category
PS: I am excited to share and publish this post on the first day of this new year 2024; I plan to update this post for a few more details within a few days.