The Slow Work: Why I Built One Final Message

Around 2010, microblogging was a different place. Bots were mostly nonexistent, and the platforms ran on human interaction rather than disinformation and personal branding. I'd strike up conversations with interesting people and have genuine exchanges. One of them was someone working through serious mental health struggles. I was never a confidant or a caretaker, but the conversations were real. Then one day they went offline with no warning, and I imagined the worst.

Then one day they went offline with no warning, and I imagined the worst.

That stayed with me. I thought it would be useful to be able to send one final message if I ever stopped logging on. I bought a few domain names and planned to build something. But I had a demanding full-time job in technology, and like a lot of my ideas, it took a back seat.

An idea I sat on for a decade

I spent more than twenty years as a principal solution architect, most of it building systems for retail customers. The thing I carry from that work is simple: the products I designed kept the customer in front of mind, and security and privacy were never afterthoughts. That standard is now the foundation of everything we build.

The idea sat for nearly a decade. What brought it back was Teresa's father passing away. Teresa was helping her mother work through years of paperwork, bills, and personal belongings. Her father had lived a remarkably full life, from the Navy to a monastery to a PhD in botany to a university presidency, and every stage left behind mementos, papers, and souvenirs. He had a will, so the family knew who was receiving what and how his assets would be handled. He had even asked Teresa to write his obituary, and because they were close, she had what she needed.

The gap a will leaves behind

But watching from the outside, I realized something. All of that "stuff" had stories and instructions attached to it that no will could capture. If Teresa hadn't had that relationship, that context would have been lost. That was the gap estate planning leaves wide open.

I thought a message-based format would be enough to fill it. I was wrong, and it took early testers to show me why. Legacy planning is slow work. It starts with the critical things, like passwords, and then grows a long tail over time. It isn't just knowing where the car's title is. It's knowing the car needs to idle for fifteen minutes on cold mornings. That accumulated context, captured a little at a time, is the real value of what we built.

Legacy planning is slow work. It starts with the critical things, like passwords, and then grows a long tail over time.

One Final Message is not a digital dead man's switch. It's a place to do the slow work of legacy planning, organizing your documents, your data, and the context that has to travel with them. Our plans meet people at different stages: solo travelers who just want to stay in touch over a short trip, long-term planners building a complete record of their estate and its stories, and whistleblowers making sure important work doesn't disappear.

For people who do need a straightforward final message, particularly in immigration and human rights work, we offer a complementary product called The Beacon, which we are forming a nonprofit around.

If there's one thing I'd want someone to take away, it's this: start thinking about all the areas of your life beyond the obvious data points, and consider what you'd want the people you leave behind to actually understand.