January 30, 2025 • 28 mins
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What if you could preserve the voices and stories of your loved ones for generations, just like hiring a top-notch biographer? Join us as we speak with Charlie Greene, the visionary co-founder and CEO of Remento, a startup revolutionizing how we capture and treasure personal narratives. Greene shares his deeply personal journey, sparked by a childhood of cherished home videos and profound family experiences, which led him to create a platform that makes documenting life stories accessible and heartfelt for everyone. Through Remento, families can now turn simple voice recordings into beautifully crafted memoirs, preserving the emotional resonance of a loved one's voice in a tangible way.
Explore the innovative process that Remento employs, from AI-driven storytelling prompts to polished narratives, all culminating in a stunning hardcover book. This episode reveals how technology, once a barrier, now facilitates intimate and meaningful family interactions, even tackling difficult histories that were previously avoided. Greene draws powerful parallels between Remento’s mission and documentary filmmaking, underscoring the profound impact of capturing personal stories for posterity. Discover how everyday technology can become a bridge to the past, strengthening family connections and ensuring that the voices of our loved ones continue to tell their stories for years to come.
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Hosted and produced by Gary Pageau
Edited by Olivia Pageau
Announcer: Erin Manning
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Erin Manning (00:02):
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the
photo imaging industry'sleading news source.
Here's your host, Gary Pageau.
The Dead Pixels Society podcastis brought to you by MediaClip,
Advertek Printing, andIndependent Photo Imagers.
Gary Pageau (00:18):
Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels
Society podcast.
I'm your , G ary Pageau, andtoday we're joined by Charlie
Greene, who's the co-founder andCEO of Remento, and he's based
in Los Angeles, California.
Hi, Charlie, how are you today?
Charlie Greene (00:33):
Yeah, I'm great, Gary.
Thank you so much for having me.
Gary Pageau (00:36):
So Remento's been around for about four years.
But first, who are you and howdid you get involved in doing
this startup?
Charlie Greene (00:44):
I have always personally been deeply excited
and passionate aboutstorytelling, which in a large
respect, stems from the factthat I grew up in a home with
parents who were I joke likefreakishly obsessed with the
home video camcorder, and theyinspired a deep appreciation for
the value of documenting themoments that shape our lives,
(01:07):
which very much connects intowhat we're building with Remento
, which is a product that isdesigned to make it as easy as
possible to document the storiesof an aging relative without
them having to write a singleword.
For many years, if you wantedto have a memoir written, you
would either have to write ityourself or hire someone to
write it for you, and what we'vebuilt is a piece of technology
(01:29):
that will guide either you or aloved one in documenting a
life's worth of stories in aphysical hardcover book, again
without having to write a singleword.
Gary Pageau (01:38):
So let's talk a little bit about how you decided
that needed to become a product.
Was there a personal storythere where you realized X
relative had a great life story?
Maybe they were getting on inyears and you needed to capture
that.
Was there a personal story thattriggered this?
Charlie Greene (01:59):
Yeah, there was for me and I would say there
probably is.
I know there is for many of themembers of our team who are
very connected to the mission ofwhy this actually matters.
In my case, I mentioned that inmy family there was always a
video camcorder rolling, and allof the content from the first
decade of my life took on atotally different meaning after
my dad passed away just a coupledays after my 10th birthday and
(02:21):
I grew up spending so much timewishing I could ask him
questions about pieces of hislife that I never had a chance
to learn about and would findmyself drawn to the video from
my childhood as a way to stayconnected with him.
So I grew up really cherishingall of that video and then flash
forward a little over 15 yearslater.
(02:42):
My mom is diagnosed with stagethree lung cancer and it becomes
really clear in that momentthat it is very likely that my
future kids will never have achance to meet either of their
grandparents.
And I was reflecting, as my momwas getting ready for her
chemotherapy treatment, what Ihad of her in terms of
documentation.
I had hundreds had of her interms of documentation.
(03:08):
I had hundreds, maybe thousandsof photos and definitely
hundreds of videos, but I didn'thave anything that was longer
than eight seconds long in termsof video, and I just remember
thinking my mom's lived throughthe digital age and I actually
have just as good ofdocumentation of my parents from
the 90s as I do from you know,in which I carried an iPhone
around.
So her and I sat down and werecorded what has historically
and academically been called anoral history interview, which
(03:30):
was effectively me just printingout a bunch of listicles about
what to ask your parents beforethey die questions like mine and
pulling out some scrapbooks,and we just sat down and we
recorded her answers and I Ifigured I would hear the stories
that you know, we, as children,when we hear, roll our eyes
cause we've heard them so manytimes from our parents.
But she spent that entire timetelling me things about her life
(03:51):
that I never knew, and it leftme wondering why was it that it
took a cancer diagnosis for meto a?
You know, learn all of thisfrom her and then be you know,
capture it in a capacity whereit could be carried into the
future, and so that's what weset out to do was to find a way
to take what is the greatopportunity to get to know the
(04:12):
people we love better and todocument their stories for the
future, and again, try to makethat process as easy and simple
and technology enabled aspossible.
Gary Pageau (04:22):
So roll that back a little bit to you and your
background.
Did you have a technologybackground getting into this one
?
Where'd you go to school?
What did you do?
Or is this something like I seethe need, I'm going to find the
pieces?
Or did you have a technologybackground?
Charlie Greene (04:38):
Well, I didn't have a technology background
myself.
I wasn't ever coding, but I hadalways been drawn to different
ways of being able to createmedia, so I spent a lot of time
making documentary films.
I started my career injournalism, then I moved into
speech writing.
I was a speech writer in theObama administration for several
years before moving into bigmedia 21st Century Fox and then,
(05:00):
ultimately, the Walt DisneyCompany and then I had an
opportunity to go to businessschool and I found myself
contemplating either going towork in big media or trying to
start something of my own.
As I started contemplating whatthat would look like, I
couldn't help but think back tothis experience that I had with
my mom and just felt so excitedabout the idea of trying to
bring an experience that broughtso much value and joy into our
(05:22):
family's experience hopefullyinto others.
And I'll say honestly, when weset out to build a company, we
had no idea if we were going todo that, but we knew that if we
could find a way to encouragepeople to document their stories
before it was too late, itwould be of incredible value.
Gary Pageau (05:38):
And so how big is your team and who's involved?
Charlie Greene (05:41):
Yeah, so it's a product-led team, so the company
is a product.
So we have engineers who workwith us, we have product leaders
who work with us, we havedesigners who work for us, and
then we have people on themarketing side as well, and then
, finally, people who supportour customers.
So there are about 10 of us intotal.
That number has ebbed andflowed over time, but it's
(06:01):
people who are really committedto the mission and are always
focused on building product thatis able to, you know, help
people create these amazingstories.
Gary Pageau (06:10):
So walk us through the process, because you've
mentioned, you know, a printedbook, which, of course, as
someone who is deeply involvedin the output space, I'm very
excited by that.
But also you know you've gotall these other assets to.
You know, video clips and allthat.
So just walk through theprocess of are those used as
prompts or what's the process toget to the story?
(06:34):
Because, as I have foundthrough my journey through the
photo industry, most peopledon't know how to tell a story
right.
They don't understand thebasics of beginning, middle and
end theme or whatever, and theyneed some sort of guidance for
that.
So what is the Remento process?
Charlie Greene (06:53):
So what we tried to do, basically, was recreate
what it would feel like if youor your family had hired a
professional biographer to writeyour biography for you.
And if you hired a biographer,the first thing they would do is
would sit down with you formany hours and interview you
about your life, and manybiographers that we spoke with
when we were building thisproduct shared that they would
(07:15):
speak with members of yourfamily to be able to understand
the moments that your familyfeels like were relevant to your
life as well.
So if you're buying Remento for,let's say, an aging parent, the
first thing that you'll beprompted to do is add into
Remento the themes that you'reinterested in learning about,
and we can do that for you ifyou want.
(07:36):
But if you want to customizethe experience, you can't.
So you say I really want tolearn about this person's
childhood, and they had aspecific, very interesting
experience, perhaps with themilitary early in their career.
I want to learn about that.
And then what Rementa will dois we'll send your loved one,
the storyteller, a newstorytelling prompt every week
for a year, or more frequentlyif you change the setting.
They receive an SMS textmessage and or an email
(08:00):
prompting them to click a biggreen button that turns into a
big red recording button that,when they press, invites them to
start talking about that memory.
And what Remento will do is itwill interview them
asynchronously about thatexperience, hearing what is
being said, and asking follow-upquestions in real time.
Importantly, that persondoesn't need to download any
(08:23):
apps.
There are no logins, there areno downloads.
Many of our storytellers areover the age of 90 and have no
problems using our technologybecause we explicitly built it
for them.
Okay, and then, once they'verecorded their story, we have
built what we call speech tostory technology, which will
take the recording, it'll turnit into a transcript and then it
will present that transcript inone of three formats either a
(08:46):
cleaned transcript, which isremoving the ums, the ahs and
the extraneous language that'snot relevant to the story.
That's perfect for the familymember that can speak in
paragraphs.
We all know that person who youwould actually want to read
what they said.
Most don't speak that way.
So what we'll do is offer youthe ability to use the
technology to turn it intosomething, a story that's
(09:07):
written in either the first orthe third person, which feels a
lot more like you had hired thatbiographer to take the input
and turn it into a polishedfinal version, and then we'll
take all of that content andthen we'll print it into a
hardcover, beautifully colorprinted physical book that
people can hold in their hands.
And our special touches that weadd QR codes to the inside that,
(09:29):
when you scan, we'll link backto the recording that was used
to write each story.
So what we hear from ourcustomers, who are our
storytellers, is this is mymemoir and it wrote itself.
Could not have been easier.
I did it in a couple minuteseach week.
It was easier than having aFaceTime call Right and from
their families.
What they share is I lovehaving this physical book in my
(09:49):
hand of these stories, butwhat's just as important is
knowing that I will always havemy loved one's voice at my
fingertips, and that's somethingthat, for any of us who have
lost someone in our lives, issomething that sure you know
anything to have.
Gary Pageau (10:03):
So when you're talking about like the content
to get it started, you know,let's say, for example, you were
to um a gift to the box, forexample for the holiday season,
for an aged parent, right, sodoes the person who's buying it
or starting it, or, you know,buying the service.
Do they have to pre-load itwith prompts and things to to of
(10:26):
?
Is there a questionnaire theyhave to fill out?
Because I know you can likethey'll show the on the website.
It says you know they show youa picture and they say what's
happening on this photo?
So that has to come fromsomewhere.
Charlie Greene (10:36):
So I remember when I did this with my mom and
myself like the hack togetherversion I was so overwhelmed
with figuring out what to askher.
When do I ask her about herchildhood?
Do I just bring this photo thatI have of her that I'm trying to
get into the conversation.
How do I do that?
So we, very early in ourjourney, built a scientific
advisory board.
Part of these folks are peoplewith deep expertise in memory
(11:00):
and recall and reminiscing,including for people who have
cognitive impairments, and theother group are people who have
conducted tens of thousands oflife story interviews and
together these folks helped usdevelop a bank of questions
which are written in a way thatis specifically designed to
inspire really interesting andcompelling stories.
So you use our Remento questionbank to pick questions from
(11:24):
Again.
You can pick them yourself orwe can just pick them for you
question bank to pick questionsfrom Again.
You can pick them yourself orwe can just pick them for you.
And other people will actuallyupload photographs to be used as
prompts, just as you mentioned,send their loved one a photo
saying what was happening inthis photo, and then the story
becomes about the photo.
Gary Pageau (11:39):
I mean, that's quite an emotional experience,
Like when you hear these audioclips of people talking about
some of those photos becausethey're in their 80s or 90s and
it was from their you knowservice in World War Two or
Korea or you know going toWoodstock or you know, who knows
what was going on I mentioned.
Just having that audioavailable as part of the QR code
(12:02):
is also just wonderful.
Charlie Greene (12:06):
It works in both directions right.
People who have a visualstimulus tell better stories,
great stories, you said.
People don't know how to tellgreat stories.
The best stories have specificsin them what did it feel like?
Who was around?
What happened before?
What happened after?
Speaking in generalities is notthe way to tell a great story,
and photographs can help anchorpeople in the specifics.
(12:29):
And then, of course, being ableto, as the person who's
watching or listening to a story, being able to see the
photograph right there makes thestorytelling all the more
compelling.
Gary Pageau (12:40):
And then the deliverable is kind of a hybrid
product, right, Because you'vegot the printed book and I mean,
how many pages do theygenerally run the hardbound?
Charlie Greene (12:48):
printed book.
So they can be printed up to380 pages right now.
Gary Pageau (12:55):
And can pictures be put in there, or is that?
Charlie Greene (12:58):
Yeah, pictures are all put in there and they're
color printed, really beautifulhigh premium paper.
Gary Pageau (13:04):
It's designed to be a keepsake, but you also have
the hybrid component of you knowthe digital assets.
They can pull down fromwherever you're doing your
storage, I imagine, and is thereany kind of guarantee or
something that those assets willalways be there?
Charlie Greene (13:21):
Well, it's a question that people ask us all
the time, and I'm not in thebusiness of predicting the
future, right so for me to sithere and say I will store your
assets indefinitely forever,unless we're operating on the
blockchain, which even thenopens questions as to the
durability of that medium.
So what we do is we let ourcustomers download any of the
content that's recorded onMemento at any time, for free.
(13:42):
That, as long as we're able tohost your content, we will, and
we'll make sure that the QRcodes link to it, because it's
the most compelling way toengage with the content rather
than being forgotten about in aGoogle Drive.
That was one of the things Idid with my mom.
I edited all the content, I putit together and then I got
forgotten about because therewasn't a physical thing for us
to hold on to.
With Fermento, you have thephysical product and the digital
(14:03):
, and we make it really easy tobe able to back up everything
either locally to your device orto a cloud account like a
Google Drive or a Dropbox.
Gary Pageau (14:12):
So one of the things that I think is
interesting is how you knowyou've got this AI-powered
questioning, storyboarding, lifeinquisition system that creates
a physical, printed product atthe end.
It almost goes counter to whatpeople are doing with a lot of
(14:32):
the ai stuff.
Right, it's got to stay indigital, it's got to be digital.
It's got this all thiswonderful stuff.
Was that always the plan fromthe beginning, when you were
pitching this to supporters andinvestors and whatnot?
That, hey, we're going to beprinting stuff?
Charlie Greene (14:47):
I would say the thing that we were really
focused on at the beginning wasgetting people to record life
stories right, okay, and what werealized was there were two
problems, right.
The first problem was that ittakes a lot of work right and
the second is a lot of videocontent that doesn't actually so
(15:12):
.
What we did was we came to therealization that if we can make
the final product a physicalproduct, it creates a really
clear destination for a familyto work towards creating what we
refer to in the product spaceas value legibility, and if we
can find a way to use anytechnology available to be able
to make the process of gettingthere easy, we could overcome
(15:36):
the hurdle of people actuallyadopting so, and there are so
many exciting uses of ai rightnow right and of course, feels
like a lot of them are solvingproblems that may or may not
actually exist in the world,exactly kind of like nfts right
and that's kind of yeah whoneeds an nft.
I mean like they're great, right, but I don't think anyone woke
up today and realized that anNFT was solving their problem.
(15:59):
Perhaps, I'm doing things thatthey'd rather not be regulated,
which leads to a whole differentset of questions than looking
for AI.
Rather than looking for aproblem for AI to solve, we've
used AI to solve what has alwaysbeen a very clear problem for
(16:22):
us to address.
Gary Pageau (16:24):
Yeah, you know it's interesting.
You said because you know youand I met at the Visual First
Conference in October and thatwas kind of the theme of the
thing was, ai is just a tool toaid in your business.
It's not a thing in and ofitself.
So I think that's a prettyvaluable way of looking at it.
It's helping you get to whereyou want to go because, honestly
, you know, 10 years ago thetechnology existed to do what
(16:49):
you're doing now.
It was just would have been farmore labor intensive.
Charlie Greene (16:54):
Yeah, you know it couldn't have been automated.
You know you couldn't conductan interview in real time
without a human being that waslistening and asking
contextually relevant follow-upquestions and then processing a
transcript into a story Likethese are large language models
at work and for many of ourcustomers it's the first time
(17:15):
they're actually seeing thesethings manifest in a way that
feels valuable to them, separatefrom typing an interesting
prompt into chat GPT like writea poem for my spouse, right?
You know, even three years ago,what we are doing now was not
possible in the way that it iscurrently instrumented today.
Gary Pageau (17:33):
Have you had any experience with customers who
have struggled with difficultstories?
Right, you know, because noteverything's happy, right, not
everything is positive andsometimes people aren't
comfortable talking about that,but that still may be an
important piece to their story.
What has been your experience,just in a broad spectrum, with
(17:55):
your customers who have had todeal with some serious issues
with their in their stories?
Charlie Greene (18:00):
yeah, of course.
I mean, not not everyone'sstory is happy, right?
You know a couple things Iwould share.
Um, there's been some reallyimportant academic research that
has been created about theimportance of sharing family
stories with your family,specific children, with very
clear documentation that tellingstories of resilience, of
(18:23):
challenge, of hardship within afamily can foster emotional
resilience within children byhearing that story.
I think a lot of us think whenwe have kids, we wanna shield
them from the hardships that ourfamily has.
That's exactly that's where Iwas going with that, but
actually there's a lot ofresearch that shows that sharing
with have kids we want toshield them from the hardships
that our family has.
Exactly that's where I wasgoing with that.
But actually there's a lot ofresearch that shows that sharing
with your kids the kinds ofthings that your family has
overcome actually primes them tobe able to understand that they
(18:45):
come from a lineage that canhandle adversity, and the
research is bulletproof on thatfront.
You know, when we started this,we went into it knowing that
some people will have hadexperiences in their path they
don't want to talk about and,from a product perspective, we
have to make sure that if you'reasked a question about a topic
that you're not interested intalking about, you don't feel
like you're being bullied intodoing it Right.
Gary Pageau (19:06):
Tell us about that time you were in jail.
Charlie Greene (19:21):
Yeah, exactly, but actually the challenge that
we have to solve and we spendmore time focused on solving is
actually the exact reverse ofthis problem, which I'll explain
through an anecdote.
One of the first people whoonboarded onto the Remento
platform was my wife'sgrandmother, who had some
experiences in her past that mywife's mother had said don't ask
Gami about these experiences,she doesn't like to talk about
them, and Lily knew full wellnot to ask these questions.
This was a version of Rementothat was actually a live
conversation.
Gary Pageau (19:40):
Right.
Charlie Greene (19:41):
And I'll never forget.
Lily was asking her grandmotherabout one of these experiences
that had nothing to do with theareas to stay away from, and it
very naturally segued into thearea that Lily was not supposed
to ask about.
Gary Pageau (19:54):
Right.
Charlie Greene (19:55):
And the grandma just started talking about this,
this thing that she had talkedabout before wow and at the end
we asked gammy.
I asked gammy, like gammy, Ididn't know that um, why was it
that you were comfortablesharing this today?
And she said I've always beencomfortable.
No one in the family has everasked about it.
Oh interesting, and that, for us, is something that we spend a
(20:18):
lot of time thinking about youknow, where are the areas within
a family that feel like they'retaboo, that they feel like
things that we don't talk aboutbecause we shouldn't, when in
actuality they are just thingsthat we haven't asked questions
about?
That's something that we seevery specifically with members
of the military and veterans whospend long portions of their
(20:40):
life uncomfortable talking abouttheir service.
Sure, they age actually becomecomfortable talking about things
that they haven't in the past.
And if our company Remento canserve as a way of facilitating
very meaningful and importantconnection around those topics
within a family, we want to beable to be the excuse for that
conversation to happen.
Gary Pageau (21:08):
I'm just fascinated kind of with the parallels
between your background as adocumentary filmmaker, whatever,
and this sort of thing.
It must be very gratifying tosee this not really being
democratized, but protestizedright when everyone can
literally have a documentary ora biography made about them.
Charlie Greene (21:20):
It's something I think about a lot.
I remember watching a 60Minutes episode years ago that
highlighted what StevenSpielberg was doing with the
Shoah Foundation Right, which isan effort that has collected
millions of dollars to documentthe stories of living Holocaust
survivors.
Erin Manning (21:38):
Right.
Charlie Greene (21:38):
And talk about a group of people whose stories
deserve to be documented in highfidelity with big 4K cameras.
Some people have even beenfilmed in three-dimensional
cages so that we can createavatars and holograms of them,
today and in the future.
Gary Pageau (21:55):
Right.
Charlie Greene (21:56):
I just remember thinking to myself as a society,
of course, we should documentthose stories.
Gary Pageau (22:01):
Right.
Charlie Greene (22:02):
In 40 years, for you personally, you will care
so much more about the story ofyour mom or your dad than one of
their stories.
And why is it the case that inmy pocket, where I have on my
camera currently four differentcameras, I don't feel compelled
to ask my mom a question abouther childhood in my pocket?
(22:22):
where I have on my cameracurrently four different cameras
I don't feel compelled to askmy mom a question about her
childhood, Right.
So the idea of democratizingthe capture of family stories
and memories has been somethingthat we've been really inspired
to try to do.
And yeah, to your point, it'sdeeply humbling to be able to
scale that.
Gary Pageau (22:34):
Speaking of scaling it just kind of round numbers
how well have you done in thefour years?
Are you reaching your targetsor your goals?
Charlie Greene (22:41):
uh, yeah, I mean again deeply humbling, like
what we hear, what we hear frompeople.
Um, when we talk about whatwe're building is almost always
one of two things, which is,either there is someone in my
life that this would be perfectfor right or I wish it wasn't
too late to do this with someoneI love right.
Gary Pageau (23:01):
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about, because most
both my parents have passedright.
So it's it's very much becauseyou know, going through their
stuff is like wow, you know,didn't know this, didn't know
that this had been good to know.
So I I get what you're sayingabout that the opportunity
missed opportunity missed.
Charlie Greene (23:16):
We hear about that exact moment from so many
families.
Like the process of writing anobituary, sometimes, in the
hours after someone has passedaway, realize that you have gaps
in understanding that person'slife.
Just hours after it's becometoo late to ask those questions.
Gary Pageau (23:33):
So yeah, the challenge for us.
Charlie Greene (23:35):
The thing that is most invigorating and also
most frustrating is how do Iconvince you or your son to make
the time to do this with you,Because at one point it will
become too late and we want tomake sure that we don't get to
the point where we haven't donethis at that point.
Gary Pageau (23:51):
Well, here's a product suggestion.
Don't have to take me up on it,but you could have, just like
obituary, this as a summary,just, and it creates a you know
three paragraph summary forsomeone, just throwing it out
there, just.
It's a great idea.
Charlie Greene (24:04):
Look, what we're focused on doing right now is
collecting life stories, right,right, for some of our customers
, they have hours and hours ofvideo.
Sure, that becomes incrediblyexciting when it comes to both
creating this book, which is thedeliverable that people expect
when they buy our product.
But our company, over time,looks to be much more than a
(24:26):
book printing business.
We're looking to be theplatform where all of those
precious memories not the onesthat are posted to Facebook that
we love, but the ones thatactually deserve to be
memorialized- in a moremeaningful and important way
exist Once you have that content.
Whether it's cranking out anobituary or turning those
recordings into a documentary,or recreating your loved one as
(24:48):
a hologram, like those are allthings that you only have the
opportunity to do if you'veactually collected the
foundational through the processof creating your book.
We're putting you on thejourney of doing.
Gary Pageau (24:59):
You kind of laid out sort of the future of sort
of this thing.
But we'll always have theprinted book, right?
Charlie Greene (25:05):
That's right.
Yeah, exactly, we'll never takethat away and we'll print out
as many as you want, by the way.
So you get one book when youpurchase, memento included.
And then our great partners atRPI shout out to the team at RPI
will happily print as manycopies as you'd like for your
family.
Gary Pageau (25:19):
They're going to store a copy of it somewhere for
you.
Charlie Greene (25:21):
We store the copies and we send it to them
whenever you want to orderadditionals.
Have you?
Gary Pageau (25:26):
had to deal much with unhappy people at some
point.
I'm just curious, because youmay get people who are dealing
with how you haven't got itright or told the story.
I'm just curious how you wouldeven got it right or told the
story.
I'm just curious how you wouldeven cope with that or deal with
that, because I imagine you'vegotten one at least right.
Charlie Greene (25:44):
Yeah, I mean, if you're building product and you
don't have any unhappycustomers, it's probably the
case that you don't have anycustomers, and we spend a lot of
time listening to our customers, and the only thing better than
hearing customers share reallypowerful stories about how
they've captured the stories ofpeople they love is getting
critical product feedback, andwe get it all the time because
(26:06):
we're doing a lot of differentthings and we have really bold
ambitions about how to supportour customers in the future.
So, yeah, we get tons offeedback.
Some of it is it's incrediblyfrustrated customers who are
saying why on earth is Rementonot available in German?
My storyteller doesn't speakEnglish.
We get people who arefrustrated that they can't
customize every single part oftheir book and also love the
(26:29):
simplicity of the process ofbuilding their book, and then we
get all sorts of differentfeedback as questions and
requests for the future.
I think the biggest surprisefor me in terms of feedback has
been around what we callgrandparent proofing our product
.
I always assumed that therewould be a really strong
correlation between age and techsavviness.
As you age, you become techsavvy, and what's actually
(26:52):
proven to be the case is thatcorrelation is much less strong
than I thought.
We have people who are in their80s and in their 90s who are
logging into Remento.
They're recording their stories, they're picking new questions
for themselves to answer,they're gifting our product to
their friends and family.
And then we also have people intheir 60s who get a text
message from us and say I don'tknow how to open my texts.
(27:13):
For those people, there's onlyso much we can do, other than
suggest someone who you knowsupport them through that
exercise Awesome.
Gary Pageau (27:22):
So, Charlie, this has been great.
So where can people go for moreinformation to learn about
Remento or talk to you aboutpartnerships or fun stuff like
that?
Where can people go for moreinformation?
Charlie Greene (27:33):
Well, the easiest thing to do is to Google
us.
The company's name is Remento.
It's like the words remember orrecord, or reflect and memento
combined into one.
It turns out it's a lot easierto build a company around a word
that doesn't exist, if you wantto show up when people Google
it, than if you try to find aword that does.
(27:54):
Yeah, you can Google ourcompany and if you have
questions, you can reach outdirectly through our website.
And yeah, we'd love to be intouch.
Gary Pageau (28:01):
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Charlie.
Great to meet you.
Take care, pleasure.
Erin Manning (28:06):
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel
Society podcast.
Read more great stories andsign up for the newsletter at
wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the
photo imaging industry'sleading news source.
Here's your host, Gary Pageau.
The Dead Pixels Society podcastis brought to you by MediaClip,
Advertek Printing, andIndependent Photo Imagers.
Gary Pageau (00:18):
Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels
Society podcast.
I'm your , G ary Pageau, andtoday we're joined by Charlie
Greene, who's the co-founder andCEO of Remento, and he's based
in Los Angeles, California.
Hi, Charlie, how are you today?
Charlie Greene (00:33):
Yeah, I'm great, Gary.
Thank you so much for having me.
Gary Pageau (00:36):
So Remento's been around for about four years.
But first, who are you and howdid you get involved in doing
this startup?
Charlie Greene (00:44):
I have always personally been deeply excited
and passionate aboutstorytelling, which in a large
respect, stems from the factthat I grew up in a home with
parents who were I joke likefreakishly obsessed with the
home video camcorder, and theyinspired a deep appreciation for
the value of documenting themoments that shape our lives,
(01:07):
which very much connects intowhat we're building with Remento
, which is a product that isdesigned to make it as easy as
possible to document the storiesof an aging relative without
them having to write a singleword.
For many years, if you wantedto have a memoir written, you
would either have to write ityourself or hire someone to
write it for you, and what we'vebuilt is a piece of technology
(01:29):
that will guide either you or aloved one in documenting a
life's worth of stories in aphysical hardcover book, again
without having to write a singleword.
Gary Pageau (01:38):
So let's talk a little bit about how you decided
that needed to become a product.
Was there a personal storythere where you realized X
relative had a great life story?
Maybe they were getting on inyears and you needed to capture
that.
Was there a personal story thattriggered this?
Charlie Greene (01:59):
Yeah, there was for me and I would say there
probably is.
I know there is for many of themembers of our team who are
very connected to the mission ofwhy this actually matters.
In my case, I mentioned that inmy family there was always a
video camcorder rolling, and allof the content from the first
decade of my life took on atotally different meaning after
my dad passed away just a coupledays after my 10th birthday and
(02:21):
I grew up spending so much timewishing I could ask him
questions about pieces of hislife that I never had a chance
to learn about and would findmyself drawn to the video from
my childhood as a way to stayconnected with him.
So I grew up really cherishingall of that video and then flash
forward a little over 15 yearslater.
(02:42):
My mom is diagnosed with stagethree lung cancer and it becomes
really clear in that momentthat it is very likely that my
future kids will never have achance to meet either of their
grandparents.
And I was reflecting, as my momwas getting ready for her
chemotherapy treatment, what Ihad of her in terms of
documentation.
I had hundreds had of her interms of documentation.
(03:08):
I had hundreds, maybe thousandsof photos and definitely
hundreds of videos, but I didn'thave anything that was longer
than eight seconds long in termsof video, and I just remember
thinking my mom's lived throughthe digital age and I actually
have just as good ofdocumentation of my parents from
the 90s as I do from you know,in which I carried an iPhone
around.
So her and I sat down and werecorded what has historically
and academically been called anoral history interview, which
(03:30):
was effectively me just printingout a bunch of listicles about
what to ask your parents beforethey die questions like mine and
pulling out some scrapbooks,and we just sat down and we
recorded her answers and I Ifigured I would hear the stories
that you know, we, as children,when we hear, roll our eyes
cause we've heard them so manytimes from our parents.
But she spent that entire timetelling me things about her life
(03:51):
that I never knew, and it leftme wondering why was it that it
took a cancer diagnosis for meto a?
You know, learn all of thisfrom her and then be you know,
capture it in a capacity whereit could be carried into the
future, and so that's what weset out to do was to find a way
to take what is the greatopportunity to get to know the
(04:12):
people we love better and todocument their stories for the
future, and again, try to makethat process as easy and simple
and technology enabled aspossible.
Gary Pageau (04:22):
So roll that back a little bit to you and your
background.
Did you have a technologybackground getting into this one
?
Where'd you go to school?
What did you do?
Or is this something like I seethe need, I'm going to find the
pieces?
Or did you have a technologybackground?
Charlie Greene (04:38):
Well, I didn't have a technology background
myself.
I wasn't ever coding, but I hadalways been drawn to different
ways of being able to createmedia, so I spent a lot of time
making documentary films.
I started my career injournalism, then I moved into
speech writing.
I was a speech writer in theObama administration for several
years before moving into bigmedia 21st Century Fox and then,
(05:00):
ultimately, the Walt DisneyCompany and then I had an
opportunity to go to businessschool and I found myself
contemplating either going towork in big media or trying to
start something of my own.
As I started contemplating whatthat would look like, I
couldn't help but think back tothis experience that I had with
my mom and just felt so excitedabout the idea of trying to
bring an experience that broughtso much value and joy into our
(05:22):
family's experience hopefullyinto others.
And I'll say honestly, when weset out to build a company, we
had no idea if we were going todo that, but we knew that if we
could find a way to encouragepeople to document their stories
before it was too late, itwould be of incredible value.
Gary Pageau (05:38):
And so how big is your team and who's involved?
Charlie Greene (05:41):
Yeah, so it's a product-led team, so the company
is a product.
So we have engineers who workwith us, we have product leaders
who work with us, we havedesigners who work for us, and
then we have people on themarketing side as well, and then
, finally, people who supportour customers.
So there are about 10 of us intotal.
That number has ebbed andflowed over time, but it's
(06:01):
people who are really committedto the mission and are always
focused on building product thatis able to, you know, help
people create these amazingstories.
Gary Pageau (06:10):
So walk us through the process, because you've
mentioned, you know, a printedbook, which, of course, as
someone who is deeply involvedin the output space, I'm very
excited by that.
But also you know you've gotall these other assets to.
You know, video clips and allthat.
So just walk through theprocess of are those used as
prompts or what's the process toget to the story?
(06:34):
Because, as I have foundthrough my journey through the
photo industry, most peopledon't know how to tell a story
right.
They don't understand thebasics of beginning, middle and
end theme or whatever, and theyneed some sort of guidance for
that.
So what is the Remento process?
Charlie Greene (06:53):
So what we tried to do, basically, was recreate
what it would feel like if youor your family had hired a
professional biographer to writeyour biography for you.
And if you hired a biographer,the first thing they would do is
would sit down with you formany hours and interview you
about your life, and manybiographers that we spoke with
when we were building thisproduct shared that they would
(07:15):
speak with members of yourfamily to be able to understand
the moments that your familyfeels like were relevant to your
life as well.
So if you're buying Remento for,let's say, an aging parent, the
first thing that you'll beprompted to do is add into
Remento the themes that you'reinterested in learning about,
and we can do that for you ifyou want.
(07:36):
But if you want to customizethe experience, you can't.
So you say I really want tolearn about this person's
childhood, and they had aspecific, very interesting
experience, perhaps with themilitary early in their career.
I want to learn about that.
And then what Rementa will dois we'll send your loved one,
the storyteller, a newstorytelling prompt every week
for a year, or more frequentlyif you change the setting.
They receive an SMS textmessage and or an email
(08:00):
prompting them to click a biggreen button that turns into a
big red recording button that,when they press, invites them to
start talking about that memory.
And what Remento will do is itwill interview them
asynchronously about thatexperience, hearing what is
being said, and asking follow-upquestions in real time.
Importantly, that persondoesn't need to download any
(08:23):
apps.
There are no logins, there areno downloads.
Many of our storytellers areover the age of 90 and have no
problems using our technologybecause we explicitly built it
for them.
Okay, and then, once they'verecorded their story, we have
built what we call speech tostory technology, which will
take the recording, it'll turnit into a transcript and then it
will present that transcript inone of three formats either a
(08:46):
cleaned transcript, which isremoving the ums, the ahs and
the extraneous language that'snot relevant to the story.
That's perfect for the familymember that can speak in
paragraphs.
We all know that person who youwould actually want to read
what they said.
Most don't speak that way.
So what we'll do is offer youthe ability to use the
technology to turn it intosomething, a story that's
(09:07):
written in either the first orthe third person, which feels a
lot more like you had hired thatbiographer to take the input
and turn it into a polishedfinal version, and then we'll
take all of that content andthen we'll print it into a
hardcover, beautifully colorprinted physical book that
people can hold in their hands.
And our special touches that weadd QR codes to the inside that,
(09:29):
when you scan, we'll link backto the recording that was used
to write each story.
So what we hear from ourcustomers, who are our
storytellers, is this is mymemoir and it wrote itself.
Could not have been easier.
I did it in a couple minuteseach week.
It was easier than having aFaceTime call Right and from
their families.
What they share is I lovehaving this physical book in my
(09:49):
hand of these stories, butwhat's just as important is
knowing that I will always havemy loved one's voice at my
fingertips, and that's somethingthat, for any of us who have
lost someone in our lives, issomething that sure you know
anything to have.
Gary Pageau (10:03):
So when you're talking about like the content
to get it started, you know,let's say, for example, you were
to um a gift to the box, forexample for the holiday season,
for an aged parent, right, sodoes the person who's buying it
or starting it, or, you know,buying the service.
Do they have to pre-load itwith prompts and things to to of
(10:26):
?
Is there a questionnaire theyhave to fill out?
Because I know you can likethey'll show the on the website.
It says you know they show youa picture and they say what's
happening on this photo?
So that has to come fromsomewhere.
Charlie Greene (10:36):
So I remember when I did this with my mom and
myself like the hack togetherversion I was so overwhelmed
with figuring out what to askher.
When do I ask her about herchildhood?
Do I just bring this photo thatI have of her that I'm trying to
get into the conversation.
How do I do that?
So we, very early in ourjourney, built a scientific
advisory board.
Part of these folks are peoplewith deep expertise in memory
(11:00):
and recall and reminiscing,including for people who have
cognitive impairments, and theother group are people who have
conducted tens of thousands oflife story interviews and
together these folks helped usdevelop a bank of questions
which are written in a way thatis specifically designed to
inspire really interesting andcompelling stories.
So you use our Remento questionbank to pick questions from
(11:24):
Again.
You can pick them yourself orwe can just pick them for you
question bank to pick questionsfrom Again.
You can pick them yourself orwe can just pick them for you.
And other people will actuallyupload photographs to be used as
prompts, just as you mentioned,send their loved one a photo
saying what was happening inthis photo, and then the story
becomes about the photo.
Gary Pageau (11:39):
I mean, that's quite an emotional experience,
Like when you hear these audioclips of people talking about
some of those photos becausethey're in their 80s or 90s and
it was from their you knowservice in World War Two or
Korea or you know going toWoodstock or you know, who knows
what was going on I mentioned.
Just having that audioavailable as part of the QR code
(12:02):
is also just wonderful.
Charlie Greene (12:06):
It works in both directions right.
People who have a visualstimulus tell better stories,
great stories, you said.
People don't know how to tellgreat stories.
The best stories have specificsin them what did it feel like?
Who was around?
What happened before?
What happened after?
Speaking in generalities is notthe way to tell a great story,
and photographs can help anchorpeople in the specifics.
(12:29):
And then, of course, being ableto, as the person who's
watching or listening to a story, being able to see the
photograph right there makes thestorytelling all the more
compelling.
Gary Pageau (12:40):
And then the deliverable is kind of a hybrid
product, right, Because you'vegot the printed book and I mean,
how many pages do theygenerally run the hardbound?
Charlie Greene (12:48):
printed book.
So they can be printed up to380 pages right now.
Gary Pageau (12:55):
And can pictures be put in there, or is that?
Charlie Greene (12:58):
Yeah, pictures are all put in there and they're
color printed, really beautifulhigh premium paper.
Gary Pageau (13:04):
It's designed to be a keepsake, but you also have
the hybrid component of you knowthe digital assets.
They can pull down fromwherever you're doing your
storage, I imagine, and is thereany kind of guarantee or
something that those assets willalways be there?
Charlie Greene (13:21):
Well, it's a question that people ask us all
the time, and I'm not in thebusiness of predicting the
future, right so for me to sithere and say I will store your
assets indefinitely forever,unless we're operating on the
blockchain, which even thenopens questions as to the
durability of that medium.
So what we do is we let ourcustomers download any of the
content that's recorded onMemento at any time, for free.
(13:42):
That, as long as we're able tohost your content, we will, and
we'll make sure that the QRcodes link to it, because it's
the most compelling way toengage with the content rather
than being forgotten about in aGoogle Drive.
That was one of the things Idid with my mom.
I edited all the content, I putit together and then I got
forgotten about because therewasn't a physical thing for us
to hold on to.
With Fermento, you have thephysical product and the digital
(14:03):
, and we make it really easy tobe able to back up everything
either locally to your device orto a cloud account like a
Google Drive or a Dropbox.
Gary Pageau (14:12):
So one of the things that I think is
interesting is how you knowyou've got this AI-powered
questioning, storyboarding, lifeinquisition system that creates
a physical, printed product atthe end.
It almost goes counter to whatpeople are doing with a lot of
(14:32):
the ai stuff.
Right, it's got to stay indigital, it's got to be digital.
It's got this all thiswonderful stuff.
Was that always the plan fromthe beginning, when you were
pitching this to supporters andinvestors and whatnot?
That, hey, we're going to beprinting stuff?
Charlie Greene (14:47):
I would say the thing that we were really
focused on at the beginning wasgetting people to record life
stories right, okay, and what werealized was there were two
problems, right.
The first problem was that ittakes a lot of work right and
the second is a lot of videocontent that doesn't actually so
(15:12):
.
What we did was we came to therealization that if we can make
the final product a physicalproduct, it creates a really
clear destination for a familyto work towards creating what we
refer to in the product spaceas value legibility, and if we
can find a way to use anytechnology available to be able
to make the process of gettingthere easy, we could overcome
(15:36):
the hurdle of people actuallyadopting so, and there are so
many exciting uses of ai rightnow right and of course, feels
like a lot of them are solvingproblems that may or may not
actually exist in the world,exactly kind of like nfts right
and that's kind of yeah whoneeds an nft.
I mean like they're great, right, but I don't think anyone woke
up today and realized that anNFT was solving their problem.
(15:59):
Perhaps, I'm doing things thatthey'd rather not be regulated,
which leads to a whole differentset of questions than looking
for AI.
Rather than looking for aproblem for AI to solve, we've
used AI to solve what has alwaysbeen a very clear problem for
(16:22):
us to address.
Gary Pageau (16:24):
Yeah, you know it's interesting.
You said because you know youand I met at the Visual First
Conference in October and thatwas kind of the theme of the
thing was, ai is just a tool toaid in your business.
It's not a thing in and ofitself.
So I think that's a prettyvaluable way of looking at it.
It's helping you get to whereyou want to go because, honestly
, you know, 10 years ago thetechnology existed to do what
(16:49):
you're doing now.
It was just would have been farmore labor intensive.
Charlie Greene (16:54):
Yeah, you know it couldn't have been automated.
You know you couldn't conductan interview in real time
without a human being that waslistening and asking
contextually relevant follow-upquestions and then processing a
transcript into a story Likethese are large language models
at work and for many of ourcustomers it's the first time
(17:15):
they're actually seeing thesethings manifest in a way that
feels valuable to them, separatefrom typing an interesting
prompt into chat GPT like writea poem for my spouse, right?
You know, even three years ago,what we are doing now was not
possible in the way that it iscurrently instrumented today.
Gary Pageau (17:33):
Have you had any experience with customers who
have struggled with difficultstories?
Right, you know, because noteverything's happy, right, not
everything is positive andsometimes people aren't
comfortable talking about that,but that still may be an
important piece to their story.
What has been your experience,just in a broad spectrum, with
(17:55):
your customers who have had todeal with some serious issues
with their in their stories?
Charlie Greene (18:00):
yeah, of course.
I mean, not not everyone'sstory is happy, right?
You know a couple things Iwould share.
Um, there's been some reallyimportant academic research that
has been created about theimportance of sharing family
stories with your family,specific children, with very
clear documentation that tellingstories of resilience, of
(18:23):
challenge, of hardship within afamily can foster emotional
resilience within children byhearing that story.
I think a lot of us think whenwe have kids, we wanna shield
them from the hardships that ourfamily has.
That's exactly that's where Iwas going with that, but
actually there's a lot ofresearch that shows that sharing
with have kids we want toshield them from the hardships
that our family has.
Exactly that's where I wasgoing with that.
But actually there's a lot ofresearch that shows that sharing
with your kids the kinds ofthings that your family has
overcome actually primes them tobe able to understand that they
(18:45):
come from a lineage that canhandle adversity, and the
research is bulletproof on thatfront.
You know, when we started this,we went into it knowing that
some people will have hadexperiences in their path they
don't want to talk about and,from a product perspective, we
have to make sure that if you'reasked a question about a topic
that you're not interested intalking about, you don't feel
like you're being bullied intodoing it Right.
Gary Pageau (19:06):
Tell us about that time you were in jail.
Charlie Greene (19:21):
Yeah, exactly, but actually the challenge that
we have to solve and we spendmore time focused on solving is
actually the exact reverse ofthis problem, which I'll explain
through an anecdote.
One of the first people whoonboarded onto the Remento
platform was my wife'sgrandmother, who had some
experiences in her past that mywife's mother had said don't ask
Gami about these experiences,she doesn't like to talk about
them, and Lily knew full wellnot to ask these questions.
This was a version of Rementothat was actually a live
conversation.
Gary Pageau (19:40):
Right.
Charlie Greene (19:41):
And I'll never forget.
Lily was asking her grandmotherabout one of these experiences
that had nothing to do with theareas to stay away from, and it
very naturally segued into thearea that Lily was not supposed
to ask about.
Gary Pageau (19:54):
Right.
Charlie Greene (19:55):
And the grandma just started talking about this,
this thing that she had talkedabout before wow and at the end
we asked gammy.
I asked gammy, like gammy, Ididn't know that um, why was it
that you were comfortablesharing this today?
And she said I've always beencomfortable.
No one in the family has everasked about it.
Oh interesting, and that, for us, is something that we spend a
(20:18):
lot of time thinking about youknow, where are the areas within
a family that feel like they'retaboo, that they feel like
things that we don't talk aboutbecause we shouldn't, when in
actuality they are just thingsthat we haven't asked questions
about?
That's something that we seevery specifically with members
of the military and veterans whospend long portions of their
(20:40):
life uncomfortable talking abouttheir service.
Sure, they age actually becomecomfortable talking about things
that they haven't in the past.
And if our company Remento canserve as a way of facilitating
very meaningful and importantconnection around those topics
within a family, we want to beable to be the excuse for that
conversation to happen.
Gary Pageau (21:08):
I'm just fascinated kind of with the parallels
between your background as adocumentary filmmaker, whatever,
and this sort of thing.
It must be very gratifying tosee this not really being
democratized, but protestizedright when everyone can
literally have a documentary ora biography made about them.
Charlie Greene (21:20):
It's something I think about a lot.
I remember watching a 60Minutes episode years ago that
highlighted what StevenSpielberg was doing with the
Shoah Foundation Right, which isan effort that has collected
millions of dollars to documentthe stories of living Holocaust
survivors.
Erin Manning (21:38):
Right.
Charlie Greene (21:38):
And talk about a group of people whose stories
deserve to be documented in highfidelity with big 4K cameras.
Some people have even beenfilmed in three-dimensional
cages so that we can createavatars and holograms of them,
today and in the future.
Gary Pageau (21:55):
Right.
Charlie Greene (21:56):
I just remember thinking to myself as a society,
of course, we should documentthose stories.
Gary Pageau (22:01):
Right.
Charlie Greene (22:02):
In 40 years, for you personally, you will care
so much more about the story ofyour mom or your dad than one of
their stories.
And why is it the case that inmy pocket, where I have on my
camera currently four differentcameras, I don't feel compelled
to ask my mom a question abouther childhood in my pocket?
(22:22):
where I have on my cameracurrently four different cameras
I don't feel compelled to askmy mom a question about her
childhood, Right.
So the idea of democratizingthe capture of family stories
and memories has been somethingthat we've been really inspired
to try to do.
And yeah, to your point, it'sdeeply humbling to be able to
scale that.
Gary Pageau (22:34):
Speaking of scaling it just kind of round numbers
how well have you done in thefour years?
Are you reaching your targetsor your goals?
Charlie Greene (22:41):
uh, yeah, I mean again deeply humbling, like
what we hear, what we hear frompeople.
Um, when we talk about whatwe're building is almost always
one of two things, which is,either there is someone in my
life that this would be perfectfor right or I wish it wasn't
too late to do this with someoneI love right.
Gary Pageau (23:01):
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about, because most
both my parents have passedright.
So it's it's very much becauseyou know, going through their
stuff is like wow, you know,didn't know this, didn't know
that this had been good to know.
So I I get what you're sayingabout that the opportunity
missed opportunity missed.
Charlie Greene (23:16):
We hear about that exact moment from so many
families.
Like the process of writing anobituary, sometimes, in the
hours after someone has passedaway, realize that you have gaps
in understanding that person'slife.
Just hours after it's becometoo late to ask those questions.
Gary Pageau (23:33):
So yeah, the challenge for us.
Charlie Greene (23:35):
The thing that is most invigorating and also
most frustrating is how do Iconvince you or your son to make
the time to do this with you,Because at one point it will
become too late and we want tomake sure that we don't get to
the point where we haven't donethis at that point.
Gary Pageau (23:51):
Well, here's a product suggestion.
Don't have to take me up on it,but you could have, just like
obituary, this as a summary,just, and it creates a you know
three paragraph summary forsomeone, just throwing it out
there, just.
It's a great idea.
Charlie Greene (24:04):
Look, what we're focused on doing right now is
collecting life stories, right,right, for some of our customers
, they have hours and hours ofvideo.
Sure, that becomes incrediblyexciting when it comes to both
creating this book, which is thedeliverable that people expect
when they buy our product.
But our company, over time,looks to be much more than a
(24:26):
book printing business.
We're looking to be theplatform where all of those
precious memories not the onesthat are posted to Facebook that
we love, but the ones thatactually deserve to be
memorialized- in a moremeaningful and important way
exist Once you have that content.
Whether it's cranking out anobituary or turning those
recordings into a documentary,or recreating your loved one as
(24:48):
a hologram, like those are allthings that you only have the
opportunity to do if you'veactually collected the
foundational through the processof creating your book.
We're putting you on thejourney of doing.
Gary Pageau (24:59):
You kind of laid out sort of the future of sort
of this thing.
But we'll always have theprinted book, right?
Charlie Greene (25:05):
That's right.
Yeah, exactly, we'll never takethat away and we'll print out
as many as you want, by the way.
So you get one book when youpurchase, memento included.
And then our great partners atRPI shout out to the team at RPI
will happily print as manycopies as you'd like for your
family.
Gary Pageau (25:19):
They're going to store a copy of it somewhere for
you.
Charlie Greene (25:21):
We store the copies and we send it to them
whenever you want to orderadditionals.
Have you?
Gary Pageau (25:26):
had to deal much with unhappy people at some
point.
I'm just curious, because youmay get people who are dealing
with how you haven't got itright or told the story.
I'm just curious how you wouldeven got it right or told the
story.
I'm just curious how you wouldeven cope with that or deal with
that, because I imagine you'vegotten one at least right.
Charlie Greene (25:44):
Yeah, I mean, if you're building product and you
don't have any unhappycustomers, it's probably the
case that you don't have anycustomers, and we spend a lot of
time listening to our customers, and the only thing better than
hearing customers share reallypowerful stories about how
they've captured the stories ofpeople they love is getting
critical product feedback, andwe get it all the time because
(26:06):
we're doing a lot of differentthings and we have really bold
ambitions about how to supportour customers in the future.
So, yeah, we get tons offeedback.
Some of it is it's incrediblyfrustrated customers who are
saying why on earth is Rementonot available in German?
My storyteller doesn't speakEnglish.
We get people who arefrustrated that they can't
customize every single part oftheir book and also love the
(26:29):
simplicity of the process ofbuilding their book, and then we
get all sorts of differentfeedback as questions and
requests for the future.
I think the biggest surprisefor me in terms of feedback has
been around what we callgrandparent proofing our product
.
I always assumed that therewould be a really strong
correlation between age and techsavviness.
As you age, you become techsavvy, and what's actually
(26:52):
proven to be the case is thatcorrelation is much less strong
than I thought.
We have people who are in their80s and in their 90s who are
logging into Remento.
They're recording their stories, they're picking new questions
for themselves to answer,they're gifting our product to
their friends and family.
And then we also have people intheir 60s who get a text
message from us and say I don'tknow how to open my texts.
(27:13):
For those people, there's onlyso much we can do, other than
suggest someone who you knowsupport them through that
exercise Awesome.
Gary Pageau (27:22):
So, Charlie, this has been great.
So where can people go for moreinformation to learn about
Remento or talk to you aboutpartnerships or fun stuff like
that?
Where can people go for moreinformation?
Charlie Greene (27:33):
Well, the easiest thing to do is to Google
us.
The company's name is Remento.
It's like the words remember orrecord, or reflect and memento
combined into one.
It turns out it's a lot easierto build a company around a word
that doesn't exist, if you wantto show up when people Google
it, than if you try to find aword that does.
(27:54):
Yeah, you can Google ourcompany and if you have
questions, you can reach outdirectly through our website.
And yeah, we'd love to be intouch.
Gary Pageau (28:01):
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Charlie.
Great to meet you.
Take care, pleasure.
Erin Manning (28:06):
Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel
Society podcast.
Read more great stories andsign up for the newsletter at
wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.
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