Rockstar Roadshow with Jen Farley
Jen Farley: I believe that there is a rockstar within all of us so I’m going out and talking to people that I know that are rock stars in what they do. Today I’m talking to my friend Ariana Del Re. Ariana has created a new company called Write My LifeBook and I wanted to meet with her today so she can share her experience of one creating a new product and of putting it out there and being a small business owner and watching something launch into the world that she came up with from her heart and her creative spirit. So welcome Ariana Del Re.
Ariana Del Re: I’m excited to be here today.
Jen Farley: So, tell me how this idea came up about Write My LifeBook?
Ariana Del Re: The idea came up when I was thinking about my own grandmother. I had a very close relationship with my grandmother growing up and my grandmother always told lots of stories. As she got older, I started thinking about writing her stories down. At some point I could tell that her memory was starting to not be as clear as it had been and so I took that opportunity to document my grandmother’s stories. Then once I had documented them and recorded them I had to figure out how to actually take that and create it into a book; which is a lot more difficult than it sounds! In doing that I ended up coming up with a process for how to tell a life story.
I thought that this could be something that could be really valuable to other people and so I actually went down the rabbit hole of how can I do this and it ended up after a couple years and lots of work developing into a digital platform.
The really neat thing about it is that it’s hard for people to sit down and write their life story but the platform just goes through and asks them natural questions about their life and as they’re answering the questions it continues to be responsive to their answers. So it gives them more questions related to their life experience and as it does that it starts to record the information for them and then from that it creates their biography. Then their biography is printed for them including pictures in a really nicely designed book which then they receive in the mail.
Jen Farley, Rockstar Roadshow Series
Jen Farley: Wow. How long does that process take from sitting down and answering questions and do you need someone else to help to do this?
Ariana Del Re: As I was creating this platform I had my grandmother in mind and my grandmother was a very bright woman but she didn’t have a lot of technology related skills because of the time that she had grown up. I wanted to make it something that was very intuitive. The life stories are broken down into sections which is really nice because of the way our brain’s store memories. They store them kind of along this timeline so as they’re walking through their childhood and they’re walking through their school years the memories just sort of organically start coming back.
(The time for) each section really depends on the individual. If I was going through a section pretty quickly it might take me a half-hour to an hour to fill out a section. Some people it might be a little bit longer for some people a little bit less time. In terms of doing it by yourself, I had my grandmother in mind so it is designed for somebody with limited technology skills to be able to do on their own. However I think the really wonderful part of doing it is that it’s something that a granddaughter can work on with her grandmother. I have two children. My children are 13 and 10 and my children could work on it with my husband’s grandmother or their own grandmother and through that process it would give them a lot of opportunity to talk through some of the stories and for them to to do it as a project together.
Jen Farley: Yeah. Then they get this keepsake that becomes an heirloom.
Ariana Del Re: It is a biography so it does cover the whole story of their life. All the different aspects that make that story up and it’s told like a biography and then throughout the book there are portions where they can add their own extended text so their voice ends up in the book as well. It’s really the only book platform that does it that way.
