{"id":14412,"date":"2019-03-09T16:41:10","date_gmt":"2019-03-09T16:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/funerals-are-tough-ever-loved-helps-you-pay-for-them.html"},"modified":"2019-03-09T16:41:10","modified_gmt":"2019-03-09T16:41:10","slug":"funerals-are-tough-ever-loved-helps-you-pay-for-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/funerals-are-tough-ever-loved-helps-you-pay-for-them.html","title":{"rendered":"Funerals are tough. Ever Loved helps you pay for them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alison Johnston didn\u2019t<\/span> plan to build a startup around death. An early employee at QA app Aardvark that was bought by Google, she\u2019d founded tutoring app InstaEDU and sold it to Chegg. She made mass market consumer products. But then, \u201cI had a family member who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I thought about how she\u2019d be remembered\u201d she recalls. Inventing the next big social app suddenly felt less consequential.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>I started looking into the funeral industry and discovered that there were very few resources to support and guide families who had recently experienced a death. It was difficult to understand and compare options and prices (which were also much higher than I\u00a0ever\u00a0imagined), and there weren\u2019t good tools to share information and memories with others\u201d Johnston tells me. Bombarded by options and steep costs that average $9,000 per funeral in the US, families in crisis become overwhelmed.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ever Loved co-founder and CEO Alison Johnston<\/p>\n

Johnston\u2019s startup Ever Loved<\/a> wants to provide peace of mind during the rest-in-peace process. It\u2019s a comparison shopping and review site for funeral homes, cemeteries, caskets, urns, and headstones. It offers price guides<\/a> and recommends top Amazon funeral products<\/a> and takes a 5 percent affiliate fee that finances Ever Loved\u2019s free memorial site maker for sharing funeral details plus collecting memories and remembrances. And families can even set up fundraisers<\/a> to cover their costs or support a charity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The startup took seed funding from Social Capital and a slew of angel investors about a year ago. Now <\/span>hundreds of thousands of users are visiting Ever Loved shopping and memorial sites each month. Eventually Ever Loved wants to build its own marketplace of funeral services and products that takes a 10 percent cut of purchases, while also selling commerce software to funeral homes.<\/p>\n

\u201cP<\/span>eople don\u2019t talk about death. It\u2019s taboo in our society and most people don\u2019t plan ahead at all\u201d Johnston tells me. Rushing to arrange end-of-life logistics is enormously painful, and Johnston believes Ever Loved can eliminate some of that stress. \u201cI wanted to explore areas where fewer people in Silicon Valley had experience and that weren\u2019t just for young urban professionals.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a big opportunity to modernize this aging industry with a sustainable business model and empathy as an imperative. 86 percent of funeral homes are independent, Johnston says, so few have the resources to build tech products. One of the few big companies in the space, the $7 billion market cap public Service Corporation International, has rolled up funeral homes and cemeteries but has done little to improve pricing transparency or the user experience for families in hardship. Rates and reviews often aren\u2019t available, so customers can end up overpaying for underwhelming selection.<\/p>\n

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On the startup side, there\u2019s direct competitors like FuneralWise, which is focused on education and forums but lacks robust booking features or a memorial site maker. Funeral360 is Ever Loved\u2019s biggest rival, but Ever Loved\u2019s memorial sites looked better and it had much deeper step-by-step pricing estimates and information on funeral homes.<\/p>\n

Johnston wants to use revenue from end-of-life commerce to subsidize Ever Loved\u2019s memorial and fundraiser features so they can stay free or cheap while generating leads and awareness for the marketplace side. But no one has hit scale and truly become wedding site The Knot but for funerals.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve known Johnston since college, and she\u2019s always had impressive foresight for what was about to blow up. From an extremely early gig at Box.com to QA and on-demand answers with Aardvark to the explosion of online education with InstaEDU, <\/a> she\u2019s managed to get out in front of the megatrends. And tech\u2019s destiny to overhaul unsexy businesses is one of the biggest right now.<\/p>\n

\"\"Amazon has made us expect to see prices and reviews up front, so Ever Loved has gathered rate estimates for about two-thirds of US funeral homes and is pulling in testimonials. You can search for 4-star+ funeral homes nearby and instantly get high-quality results. Meanwhile, funeral homes can sign up to claim their page and add information.<\/p>\n

Facebook popularized online event pages. But its heavy-handed prerogatives, generalist tone, and backlash can make it feel like a disrespectful place to host funeral service details. And with people leaving their hometowns, newspapers can\u2019t spread the info properly. Ever Loved is purpose-built for these serious moments, makes managing invites easy, and also offers a place to collect obituaries, photos, and memories.<\/p>\n

Rather than having to click through a link to a GoFundMe page that can be a chore, Ever Loved hosts fundraisers right on its memorial sites to maximize donations. That\u2019s crucial since funerals cost more than most people have saved. Ever Loved only charges a processing fee and allows visitors to add an additional tip, so it\u2019s no more expensive that popular fundraising sites.<\/p>\n

Next, \u201cthe two big things are truly building out booking through our site and expanding into some of the other end of life logistics\u201d Johnstone tells me. Since the funeral is just the start of the post-death process, Ever Loved is well positioned to move into estate planning. \u201cThere are literally dozens of things you have to do after someone passes away \u2014 contacting the social security office, closing out bank accounts and Facebook profiles\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Johnston reveals that 44 percent of families say they had arguments while divvying up assets \u2014 a process that takes an average of 560 hours aka 3 months of full-time work. As the baby boomer era ends over the next 30 years, $30 trillion in assets are expected to transfer through estates, she claims. Earning a tiny cut of that by giving mourners tools outlining popular ways to divide estates could alleviate disagreements could make Ever Loved<\/a> quite lucrative.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first started out, I was pretty awkward about telling people about this. We\u2019re death averse, and that hinders us in a lot of ways\u201d Johnston concludes. My own family struggled with this, as an unwillingness to accept mortality kept my grandparents from planning for after they were gone. \u201cBut I quickly learned was this was a huge conversation starter rather than a turn off. This is a topic people want to talk about more and educate themselves more on. Tech too often merely makes life and work easier for those who already have it good. Tech that tempers tragedy is a welcome evolution for Silicon Valley.\u201d<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/MPE6pxeQHS4\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alison Johnston didn\u2019t plan to build a startup around death. An early employee at QA app Aardvark that was bought by Google, she\u2019d founded tutoring app InstaEDU and sold it <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-14412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t