Remember the 2007 Hollywood romantic film, PS I Love You about how a young widow, Holly Kennedy (played by Hilary Swank) receives a chain of letters from her dead husband, Gerry (Gerard Butler). The letters, which Gerry had written before succumbing to his brain tumour, were intended to help Holly lead a healthy life and realise her ambition of becoming a footwear designer after his death.
Now, a startup is offering exclusive after-death services just like Holly’s mother played for Gerry to deliver the letters to his wife.
Serial entrepreneur and Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer at Zenga Group of Companies Shabir Momin spoke about his idea of setting up his website psiamgone at a TedX Ulsoor held in Bengaluru on April 30.
Shabir attributes the inspiration behind the idea to the film. And says how often we leave things unplanned for events after our death except for the financial side of it.
With two months to go for its official launch, the company claims that more than a thousand users have already registered for the service.
“This has been achieved just by word of mouth as no formal announcement or promotion has been done as yet. We anticipate over a million users subscribing to this in the first six months of formal launch,” Shabir told The News Minute.
“The potential is very high and to get few millions of users for something like this is not very difficult. A service like this is the need of the hour,” added Shabir.
What kind of offers does the company provide?
“We focus more on desire-based objectives which never goes into a will,” says Shabir.
For example, a user can choose to send flowers, cards, messages to his or her persons of choice eternally after his or her death. The user can also declare who would inherit his or her prized stamp collection.
In addition, the company offers to keep a copy of a user’s will after they have decided on their legally accepted will.
Users can also choose to wipe their online footprint after their death and the company can do that for them. Users can also choose to share their repository of digital content-photos, videos, etc with their selected choice of persons as specified by them.
“It is the choice of the user whether he/she would like to clean up the account and remove all information or keep it alive or share access to a predefined nominated person, if required the user can also pre-configure posts or information’s for future delivery as per his/her choice,” says Shabir.
How expensive is the service?
“We are yet to come with a price point, the base account will be very cost effective as we want this to be used by everyone and we will have to keep it affordable for the masses. While there will be layered services for current and future, which would be up to the user to decide what extent they would want to use and how much they would like to spend. Most of the services would be reasonably priced,” Shabir says.
The moot question- how does the company know a person is dead?
“We have a multi-layered system which not only knows when someone is no more but also has many layers of verification. Only after that is confirmed then the trigger is done to the set rules prescribed by the users,” Shabir said refusing to share further technical details on the same.