From the founders

LifeLately was an idea Rollins and I had been sitting on for years, but the need became undeniably real the day my wife and I welcomed our girls into the world.

Two things hit me almost immediately.

The first: I didn’t have a record of the core moments of my life. I’d been quietly distancing myself from social media for years, and without realizing it, the capturing had stopped too. All I had was an unsorted camera roll, a scattering of half-filled Moleskines, and memories that were already starting to blur. I started wondering, how are my daughters going to know my stories when my memory fades? How do I hold onto the small things? How do I tell them the story of our early days together with any real accuracy or detail?

The second: I was getting worse at staying close to the people who mattered to me. I wasn’t looping anyone in. I was busy living the life I wanted to be sharing. Old relationships were quietly going stale under surface-level check-ins, and I wasn’t making space for new ones to grow. When I did get on a call with someone, I’d spend most of it recapping, giving updates, instead of actually going deep. It’s not just about frequency. It was also about depth.

What we came realize is that these two problems are the same problem. If you’re not capturing life as it happens, it’s very difficult to meaningfully share — with a future version of yourself or with the people you love. And if you have nothing real to share, your connections never develop.

We built LifeLately to solve this for ourselves first — to make it easy enough to actually capture the moments worth keeping, and to share them with the people who deserve more. With the hope that it might help others do the same!

— Matt Kasner