A friend said it was a business. I decided it was not, and built it anyway.
A friend gave me an idea over a conversation: someone should build a proper way to sort out your affairs before you die, so your family is not left doing detective work. He thought it could be a business.
I have spent close to forty years around operations and resilience, so I did the unglamorous thing and assessed it properly before getting excited. The honest answer was: not a business, at least not a solo one.
Here is why, because the reasoning is more useful than the verdict.
The part everyone imagines charging for, telling the banks and utilities that someone has died, is already free. The UK government's Tell Us Once covers the public sector, and services like Settld and Life Ledger notify hundreds of companies at no cost to the family. The "keep all your accounts in one place" vault has a long graveyard behind it: dozens of digital-legacy startups have already shut down, taking their users' plans with them. And the genuinely hard part, chasing every provider to closure, is exactly what well-funded companies are building through insurers, at a scale a solo founder cannot match.
So as a venture, the evidence said park it. I did.
But one version of the idea survives all of that, and it is the version that does not need to be a business at all.
Everyone who dies leaves their family a map problem: what did they have, and what did they want done with it. No company needs to own that map. In fact a company owning it is the weakness, because the company can be sold, retired, or shut down while your family still needs it. The map just needs to be a file: encrypted, in open formats, with the key shared across people you trust, and one printed page that says how to open it.
That is a thing I could build in a way that is genuinely independent of me. So I did, and I made it free.
It is called Executor File. It is a plain, encrypted file listing every account, asset and liability with your instructions, plus one printed page for your executor. No account, no subscription, no server, no company that can fold. It opens with two standard, free tools, so it still works years from now even if I and the whole project have vanished.
The wider problem, and the honest landscape of what already exists, is written up here: https://executorfile.com/learn/your-digital-estate
And if you want to set one up for yourself, it takes about an hour: https://executorfile.com/get-started
Not every good idea is a business. Some are just worth making.