Charlie Green lost his dad just after his tenth birthday. What saved him, in the way that only unexpected things can save you, was a box of home videos recorded by two parents who apparently never met a Kodak moment they didn’t film. Years later, when his mom was diagnosed with lung cancer, Charlie sat down with her and asked her to tell him her stories. What he learned stunned him. He discovered an entirely different person underneath the one he thought he already knew completely. And when he asked his mom why she had never shared any of this before, she told him, simply, that she didn’t think he cared.
That answer is the reason Remento exists. And that answer is also the reason I think every pre-need agent and funeral home owner in this country needs to pay attention to what Charlie built.
Here is the core problem in our profession right now. Only about a quarter of people ever pre-plan and fund their funeral. When you ask most people why they haven’t done it, they’ll tell you their kids know what they want, that the family will handle it. They’re not hostile to the idea. They’re just completely uninspired by the conversation we’re inviting them into. Paperwork. Insurance. Lump sum pricing. There is nothing in that list that makes a person feel anything other than mildly uncomfortable and slightly bored. So they put it off, and we let them, and then one day they die without a plan and their family spends the worst two days of their lives making financial decisions while they’re in shock.
Remento changes the entry point to this whole process. Instead of opening with funeral planning, you open with legacy. With stories. With the question of what a person actually wants to leave behind for the people they love.
The way the product works is straightforward and genuinely clever. Once someone starts a Remento project, they receive a storytelling prompt every week, delivered by email, text message, or a regular phone call. They respond by speaking for a few minutes into their phone. No writing required. Remento’s speech-to-story technology then converts those recordings into polished, biographer-quality written stories, preserving the person’s word choices, their vocal patterns, the specific details they chose to share. Those stories accumulate over time and get printed into a hardcover keepsake book, up to 380 pages, complete with photos and, here’s the part that really gets me, QR codes at the top of every chapter that link directly back to the original voice recording. So the book doesn’t just hold the stories. It holds the person’s voice, permanently, for every generation that comes after.
Charlie held up his mom’s book during our conversation. About a hundred pages, eight by ten inches, hardcover. You can run multiple volumes if you need them. The annual cost is ninety-nine dollars. For a family that wanted to hear their grandmother’s voice again, or a grandchild who never got the chance to meet someone, there is no meaningful price on what that book actually is.
The product is built to be collaborative from the start. Family members can join the project, ask their own questions, respond to stories as they come in. One Remento customer told Charlie that her mom’s grandchildren range from four years old to twenty-nine, and each of them is asking completely different things. The four-year-old wants to know what grandma was like in preschool. The twenty-nine-year-old is asking about her marriage, her decision to have kids, what it felt like to raise a family. That range of genuine curiosity coming at a storyteller every week is, according to Charlie, the single most powerful driver of continued engagement. People stop telling their stories when they feel like they’re speaking into a vacuum. Once they realize there is a real audience listening right now, the whole dynamic shifts.
For funeral homes and pre-need agents, the strategic implications here are significant and I do not think most people have fully thought them through yet.
First, there is the front-door problem. Legacy is a conversation people will actually have. Funeral planning is a conversation most people will avoid until they absolutely cannot anymore. If you lead with Remento at a seminar, or offer it as part of a pre-need consultation, or give it as a bonus when someone sets an appointment, you are leading with something that creates genuine emotional engagement. The funeral plan becomes the natural next step in a process they are already invested in, rather than the awkward main event everyone is quietly hoping to skip.
Second, there is the relationship window that almost nobody in this profession is working. Charlie pointed out that the average gap between when someone signs a pre-need contract and when they pass is somewhere between seven and twelve years. That is a long time during which most funeral homes do essentially nothing to maintain the relationship. A person who is actively building their Remento legacy book, whose family members are receiving notifications and responding to stories, whose children and grandchildren are getting drawn into this process, that person becomes an evangelist. When they talk to their friends about it, they are going to talk about where it came from and who helped them understand why it mattered. That is word-of-mouth referral built into the product itself.
Third, Remento works in aftercare. When a family has just lost someone and you introduce the idea of capturing the stories of the people still with them, you are meeting them exactly where they are emotionally. They understand, more acutely than they ever have before, what it means to wish you had someone’s voice one more time. Charlie mentioned that people are paying fifty dollars a month to keep a deceased family member’s phone line active just to call the voicemail. We can do better than that for the people we serve.
The estate planner who approached Charlie after a panel discussion put it well. He said that all the planning they help people do, the financial, the medical, the memorial logistics, is necessary and important. But none of it addresses the question that might matter most: how do you want to be remembered? What is the emotional inheritance you are choosing to leave behind? Remento is the only tool I have found that actually answers that question in a form families can hold in their hands, scan with their phones, and pass down for generations.
Your family does not need to hear you recite the three values that guided your life. They want to know what surprised you on your wedding day. What it felt like to bring your first child home. What was going through your head when you dropped your kid off at college. Those are the stories that make a person real across time. Remento is built to capture exactly those moments, from exactly the people who will never think to write them down on their own.
If you want to talk about how to build Remento into your pre-need process, reach out through the contact links on the podcast. I am building the systems around this and I am glad to walk you through it.
-John
