Death is difficult and not knowing where your deceased loved ones have placed their will, life insurance, or property documents is a maddening process. Michael Swift built an app to ease the pain.
Swift’s brother-in-law passed away and his family had difficulty locating important papers needed to settle the estate so everyone could grieve properly. After that frustrating experience, he came up with the concept for LyfeShare, a tech product intended to store priority documents. You wouldn’t put proprietary information on Dropbox, right? That question is rhetorical. This service provides armed forces-level security.
With successful janitorial and real estate businesses, Swift knew the multiples in tech would be substantial, although a potential exit wasn’t his driver. He wanted elders to get comfortable with storing sensitive information digitally so their loved ones weren’t scrambling post-death.
But the product hadn’t been completed. Swift was introduced to corporate strategist Nicole Hardy, a no-nonsense executer who helped him put the team together to rebuild the web and mobile app. Hardy understands needing to know where all documents are buried. Her father, who passed away a couple years ago, was diligent about letting her know all she would ever need was stored away in manila envelopes in a weathered black file cabinet (“He would have been the poster child for LyfeShare.”)
Hardy, impressed with the clarity of Swift’s vision, said the company needed a strong chief technology officer. She recruited one of the best security savants in the US, Tom Miller. Among his career highlights, Miller has served as chief strategist after landing a $1.2 billion Army account.
On the heels of a small raise powered by angel investors, the three principles sat with LEVEL to discuss how they’re planning to ease the pain of life after death.
LEVEL: Michael, you’ve built many businesses. Some have been successful and others have failed. How did you come up with this one and how did you convince yourself it will work?
Michael Swift: It came about from a personal tragedy of my own in October 2021. My sister's husband passed. And this is in Louisiana, so I'm back home with her sitting down, going through everything, trying to figure out what's what, what's for him, what's not for him. Just sitting there seeing the expression on her face as we're going through all that information, trying to find documents and all. I'm a telecommunications engineer by trade. I did that over 20 years. And I'm sitting there thinking the entire time: There has to be a better way to do this to where people are more organized, the information that they have is current, and so forth. When I got back to Atlanta, I started to lay everything out.
What was the first call you made once you had the shell of the idea?
Swift: The first call I made was trying to find a developing group to put the app together for me. My main concern was finding someone to do the coding, finding someone to be able to take my idea and lay it out. At that time, I didn't want a lot of people involved because I didn't want the idea to be skewed. I had a clear idea of where I wanted it to go and how I wanted it to work.
The three of you use the term global solution for this product. It truly is a solution for humans at large and not just a subset.
Swift:I knew it was something everyone could use because every day you see someone has passed and their affairs don't get settled because people are fighting over this and that, or waiting for this to be found in order to [complete an end goal]. This was something that could be used all over the world. I wanted it to be something that was user-friendly, intuitive, could perform multiple functions, not only serve as something for end-of-life planning. [It can be used for] making video memories for grandkids, or for anyone, really. That's why I set out to make it as something not just for the end of life or for seniors, but for everyone.
Nicole, your father had all the documents you needed in one place.
Nicole Hardy: I thank God that he was so organized, because my father passed away suddenly when I was eight months pregnant. And so, had I had to frantically search or try to figure it out at a time like that… It was traumatizing enough because my father and I were extremely close, but having access to everything [was helpful]. And not just him being organized but him really having prepared, him having focused on end-of-life planning, I cannot impress enough how important it is for us to handle our business while we're alive. Having life insurance policies, having directives, knowing that we were handling his final wishes the way he wanted them to, gave us such an amazing peace of mind.
You were initially brought on as a consultant. What were some of the first people you put into place?
Hardy: To be quite frank, at the onset, I didn't have any direct interaction with the technology. It was still under development. I had some software development offerings that my company had, but we were at the time mainly focusing on the consulting aspect. One day, just maybe about a month into the project, I was saying, "We need to see some of the mockups. I need to see the wireframes. I need to at least… I understand you don't have a demo for your technology that you can share but ... "
"I cannot impress enough how important it is for us to handle our business while we're alive." — Nicole Hardy, Head of Strategic Partnerships
I started to ask questions about the technology. And it became very clear that I needed to dive into some of these technology meetings with [Michael] and this tech partner. The company was totally handling the build, but I needed to look under the hood. And thank God I did, because the originally contracted company was not able to build the software. And so the first part of building the team was me realizing that I needed to bring not just consulting experience, but my entire software development team on this project. We ended up rebuilding and rebranding LyfeShare from scratch.
You also brought a powerful CTO onboard.
Hardy: I needed someone to lead our development team in a way that made it so that we were creating something never before seen. And so Tom Miller came along in an amazing way, nothing but God. Tom, too, had an experience, having lost a loved one, going through issues with the estate. I remember my first conversation with Tom, he told me he had something called a dead book. And I was like, "What's the dead book, Tom?" And he was like, "This is my notebook where I write all the stuff in that if I die, this is what you need.."
What Tom brought to the table was enterprise grade knowledge. Now this software that we're building, this mobile app, this web app, we're not just building an MVP, we're building an enterprise grade solution that can now pass standards that the federal government has for cybersecurity and that Fortune 500 companies build to. And as an early stage tech startup, that's a game changer.
Tom, security was a high priority for this product. How did you go about making sure LyfeShare could not be hacked?
Tom Miller: We subjected the solution to the hardest tests out there. We did penetration testing, we did simulations to try and hack the system. We tried to do all of these different things, and luckily, we found some things. We made the corrections to the point where now it's a super hardened system. It's been certified, HIPAA-compliant, it's California Privacy Act compliant. It's the European Union compliance, it's Canadian compliance, and finance and IRS compliant.
We worked extremely hard. We're not finished, because things change. Technology changes all the time. But I'm proud of the development team and what we were able to accomplish. For a small startup like this to have this level of sophistication, not just with the security piece, but with some of the technology that we've employed... I mean, we have a patent pending on code that nobody has. Everybody wishes they had it, but nobody has it.
You just don't see that in startup life—at least I haven't. But we've been able to pull it off. I think from a technology standpoint, this is one of the best solutions I've done.