The Story of LifeScribe: An App to Create Your Digital Autobiography

Summary: I’ve launched a new digital autobiography app called LifeScribe which I’d love for you to try.

I’ve been writing about creating and preserving our digital data for over 20 years, first on my Lifestream Blog site and subsequently on my Digital Legacy Management resource site. I thought early on about how our previous generation only had letters, stories, photographs and maybe some home movies. Nowadays we have all of those in digital form along with a ton more data we create either actively or passively with tools on our phones and elsewhere. This includes ancestry information, career details, location data in our photos and elsewhere and so much more. I thought about how we could create a rich visual and interactive autobiography by collecting this data and publishing it in a compelling way to tell our life story for friends and family. I built a prototype for myself cobbled together using WordPress and a few other tools. It was clunky to build and use, so the friction never let me take it too far. But I always felt that such an app would be a great and useful way to allow anyone to create a similar experience and had dreams of building a tool to create something for this in the future.

Then when my Father passed away a few years ago I found myself scrambling to gather photos, videos and other assets to prepare digitally for his memorial. I created a shared Google drive folder for friends and family to contribute to and I also scanned photos, digitzed videos and more. I spent time with friends and family reminiscing about shared stories and experiences. Then I tried to find a web service to share some of these items with friends and family ahead of the service. I struggled to find a website that met some of the basic criteria wanted. This combination of having to scramble and do all this work while in a state of grief was pretty overwhelming. It really struck me as a problem I’d like to help fix in the future if I could.

I then came to the realization that if a biography was created while our loved ones were still alive and then gracefully transitioned to a memorial site when they died, I could greatly reduce the issues I encountered. This would tackle two things I care greatly about at the same time. I even thought of the mechanics for this process which require co-ordination with family members.

I’ve recently had amazing success building apps and have gained confidence in the ability for newer AI models to code stuff. that I finally decided to try something much grander than what I’ve built so far. Yes, the plan was to try and build the autobiography and memorial tool I’ve been dreaming of. I began by creating a plan file for Claude which has become my favorite coding model so far. The plan file basically contained some pretty detailed requirements about what I wanted to build. I had Claude review that and then interview me with questions to flesh out the plan file much more before we started working on anything.

Claude did so much more than just coding the app. It provided guidance on third party tools and costs, provided Dev Ops support with step by step instructions for moving my app from my computer to a hosted server, with all the necessary configurations and tools needed. I went from app concept (granted I’ve been thinking about this project for years) to launched app in beta in less than seven days. I feel it would have taken a small team a few months to achieve what Claude did in this timeframe and I don’t think I’m exagerating. Besides the app it helped write all the website copy, created a multi-step email onboarding plan, generated some basic SEO and did image edits for several of the assets. A true one stop shop for dev, design, marketing, ops and more. I still can’t fathom what it helped me accomplish. It just doesn’t seem real.

So this week I’m launching what has now become LifeScribe in beta for everyone to try for free. You can visit the site and join the waitlist and I will be inviting folks to test things out and give me feedback during this early phase. The sites are private by default but I’ve shared mine publicly to give you an idea of what my envisioned autobiography looks like. I plan to continue working on some of the core features with hopes to release publicly very soon. I really hope you give it a try and let me know what you think.