What happens in
your Founding session.
90 minutes. Your family. A Senior Archivist. Your first photographs.
By the end of this session your archive exists — not as a promise, but as a fact.
What we ask you to bring
Three Photographs
Not your best photographs. Not the ones already framed. The ones in the box nobody has looked at in years. The ones where you don't know everyone's name. Those are the ones that matter most.
One Person Who Remembers
A family member who knew the people in the photographs. A parent. An aunt or uncle. Anyone who carries context that exists nowhere else. Their presence in the first session changes everything.
Fifteen Minutes of Preparation
Think about one person whose story you most want to preserve. Not their biography — their voice. The particular way they described things. What they said about what mattered. What they never said but you understood anyway.
What happens in the room
The session opens with three questions. Not about your archive. About your family.
Who is the person whose story you most want to preserve?
What do you want your great-grandchildren to know about them that they would never find in a document?
What is one thing that person knew about how to live that you wish more people understood?
These questions are not small talk. They are the architecture of your archive. Every photograph you label after this session will be labeled in the context of what you said in these first fifteen minutes.
The First Photograph
Your Archivist surfaces the first photograph. Often this is the moment families describe as when it became real. You begin labeling — not facts, but the story behind the facts. Who is in this photograph and what were they like? What was happening that day beyond what the camera shows? What would you want someone to know about this moment in fifty years?
The Contributor Network
Your Archivist walks you through inviting your family contributors. Each contributor receives their first photograph email that evening. By the end of your first day your archive already has multiple perspectives being built.
The Archive Structure
Your decades are mapped. The gaps are identified. You can see — visually — which parts of the story are documented and which parts are waiting. This map becomes your guide for everything that follows.
The First Essence Deposit
The session closes with your first direct deposit — something only you know, in your own words, about the person or period you most want to preserve. This becomes the seed of your AI entity's understanding of what mattered.
What exists when you leave
Your archive is initialized and legally documented
Your first photographs are labeled with real stories
Your contributor network is active and receiving photograph emails
Your Custodian is designated with formal estate standing
Your first nightly photograph email is scheduled for 9pm tonight
Most families describe the Founding session as the moment they understood what they had been missing.
Not the technology. Not the product.
The conversation.
The specific, unhurried conversation about the specific people who made them who they are — a conversation modern life almost never creates space for.
The archive is what remains after that conversation.
The conversation is the product.
The Founding begins at $2,500.
Every archive starts with this conversation.
Yours can begin whenever you are ready.