I was building this for my parents. Then I found out I was having a daughter.

I wasn't trying to start another company.

I was trying to solve a problem in my own family, and the problem was volume.

My mother told me stories constantly. About her own life, but also about her parents, her brothers and sisters, and relatives I never met. Not one life history—dozens of them, spread across three generations, almost always arriving in the middle of an ordinary conversation.

I wanted to keep them. I just had no practical way to catch them.

She would tell me something I really wanted to remember, and by the time I thought about writing it down, I had already lost half the detail that made the story worth keeping.

Then I started looking at our photo albums.

We have a lot of them. A few have notes written on the pages. Most are blank.

The photographs came through fine. Everything around them didn't—who these people were, what was happening that day, why anyone thought the moment was worth a picture. They're my own family's albums, and I can't explain most of them.

That is the part that actually disappears.

Not the pictures. The context.

So I went looking for something that could fix both halves.

I found genealogy platforms built around family trees, names and dates. I found social networks built around sharing. I found journals and digital scrapbooks that still depended on someone sitting down later to add all the context—which is exactly the thing that never happens.

So I built something myself.

I built Memory Murals around capturing a memory when it gets told, rather than when someone finally sits down to organize it.

You can talk instead of writing. The recording is transcribed. Names spoken out loud can be connected to people in your family, and dates mentioned naturally in a story can help place the memory in time.

Voice became the main path for a simple reason: it's one of the fastest ways to catch a story while someone is actually telling it.

Then I found out I was having a daughter

I was about nine months into building Memory Murals.

And the whole project turned around.

Up to that point, it had been about preserving what my parents and grandparents remembered.

Now it was also about the only way my daughter was ever going to know any of it.

The stories my mother tells me are stories about people my daughter will never meet.

And suddenly it started running the other way, too.

I could capture my daughter's life as she grew up—and this time keep the context with it, instead of someday handing her another shelf of photographs nobody could fully explain.

That was when it stopped feeling like a project and became something I cared about much more deeply.

“Could I have one for my mom?”

Memory Murals was only ever meant for my own family.

Then other people saw it.

They didn't just ask what I had built. They asked whether they could use it for their own mother, father or grandparent.

It turned out the problem I was trying to solve wasn't unusual at all.

A lot of families have photographs of the people they love. They have names, birthdays and family trees.

What they don't always have are the stories that explain them.

And a lot of us carry around the same unfinished intention:

I really need to sit down and ask my parents about their lives.

It doesn't feel urgent.

Right up until it does.

Built for families, not followers

As Memory Murals grew beyond my own family, I started adding features around the ways families actually preserve memories.

Families can privately share access. There are prompts for when someone doesn't know what story to tell next. Memories can hold photographs, video, audio and voice alongside the stories behind them.

But one thing hasn't changed since the version I built for my own family:

This was never going to be another social network.

There is no public feed. It isn't designed around likes, followers or keeping you scrolling.

It's a private collection of the voices, photographs, stories and ordinary moments that make up a family's history—with enough context attached that someone who wasn't there can still understand them.

The ordinary stories are the ones that matter

We document more of our lives than any generation before us. We take thousands of photographs and videos.

And somehow, something important still goes missing.

A photograph can show what a moment looked like.

It can't tell you why everyone was laughing.

It can't tell you what Grandpa always called that old car.

It can't explain why your mother still talks about that tiny house she grew up in.

And it can't answer the questions of someone who wasn't born yet.

That's the gap I was trying to close.

Not more media.

The meaning around it.

So my advice is the same thing I eventually had to tell myself:

Don't wait for the perfect interview or the perfect occasion.

Ask about the first job. The childhood bedroom. The neighborhood friends. The family holidays. The embarrassing stories. The ordinary Tuesday nobody thought was important enough to write down.

Ask while there's no reason to hurry.

That's the whole point.