StoryWorth Founder interview on the Mormon Channel

Get twenty dollars off the annual fee at StoryWorth.com/extreme

Segment 3 Episode 86 of Extreme Genes

Host: Scott Fisher with guest Nick Baum

Fisher: Welcome back to Extreme Genes, America’s Family History Show and ExtremeGenes.com. Fisher here, your Radio Roots Sleuth, and I will tell you that at RootsTech, as we were looking at all kinds of new products that were coming out, I don’t think anything made anybody more excited than this, “StoryWorth.com.” And I got to meet its inventor, we’ve become good friends, Nick Baum is on the phone with us right now. Nick, how are you?

Nick: Great. It’s good to talk to you again. I’m glad we finally got a chance to meet in person at RootsTech.

Fisher: Well, you know, Nick’s project kind of began around the time as mine. We’re watching our growth kind of parallel, and you guys ran away with the best new product for family history at RootsTech, and there was such a good reason for it. I’ll let you explain exactly how it works, Nick.

Nick: Great. So StoryWorth is really the easiest way to record your family’s stories. The idea is, if you’re into genealogy you can get your whole family involved telling stories about their life, and really collect these stories from all family members. The way we make it this easy is we do it all over email and over the phone. So if your relatives aren’t super tech savvy or you don’t have a lot of time to spend on it, we make it super, super easy for them. You sign your relatives up, each week we send them one question about their life, things like, and “What is your favorite memory of your grandmother?” Or, “Tell me about the day you got engaged.” And all they have to do is reply with a story.

Fisher: Yeah. One story, once a week, and in a year you’ve got 52 stories, which is unbelievable.

Nick: Right. People are often surprised. We offer printed books now and when they order the book we say, “Well, you have 237 pages.”

Fisher: [Laughs]

Nick: They can’t believe they’ve written 237 pages in a year.

Fisher: Exactly. And it’s done so easily. What I like about it is that so many seniors, and those are the people we really need to get to first, they are often really struggling when it comes to computers and that type of thing. You even have a phone version. Tell us how that one works.

Nick: So, again, we try to keep it as simple as possible. So for the phone version, you really just have to call in to our phone number once a week and it asks you to record the story just like you would record a voice note. So the nice thing is it that it works with any phone, it doesn’t have to be a smart phone, it even can be a landline. If they have a cell phone, we’ll also send them the question by SMS, and if they have an email address they can start the call directly from the email we send them. But at the simplest level it’s really just call in and we’ll ask you the question and just record the story. And we save the recording, we email it to your family, and now we also offer transcription. So if you want to get that recording transcribed and have the text of it, we can do that as well.

Fisher: Is that all automated, Nick?

Nick: It’s all automated, yes. For the transcription, we actually work with real humans, right? So automatic transcription isn’t quite up to par, but for you, it just requires a click of a button and then we handle finding the person to transcribe it and sending it back to you.

Fisher: Isn’t that incredible? And I can only imagine the gems, the treasures that have come from this already. You’ve only been around, what, 2 or 3 years?

Nick: Yeah. We’re a little over 2 years old right now, so we’re just starting out, but we feel very lucky that we’re getting so many people interested in family history by making it easy.

Fisher: Give us some of the feedback that you’ve got and a couple of stories that have come back.

Nick: Sure. So, one of the things that I’ve been really happy to see is that people use it for such a wide range of times in their life. So, recently we worked with one customer who was preparing a gift for her mother’s birthday, and so she collected stories about her mother from all of her mother’s friends and she compiled those into a book, which I thought, was a really lovely thought and a really lovely gift.

Fisher: Sweet.

Nick: On the other end, a very touching moment for me was when I got a phone call, just last week, from a customer whose mother sadly passed away, and as you know, it is never a fun call to get, but she was calling to thank us because she has a full collection of stories from her mother that she told me she would never have gotten otherwise. Her mother really opened up to her through this medium, and she spontaneously called just to express her gratitude. So often we don’t think to have these conversations until it can be too late, and I feel very lucky that we can make that happen and get so easy.

Fisher: Yeah, isn’t that a great thing to do! You create a product that serves so many people in such a great way. That’s a great business to have and we bring this up, of course… and I wanted to talk to you because Mother’s Day is just around the corner. I was thinking, “What would be a great thing for Mother’s Day?” I can’t imagine anything better than StoryWorth.

Nick: That’s true, and we actually do get a lot of sign ups around Mother’s Day. It does make for a good gift. The way you do it is this—if you go to our website, and because you’ve been such a supporter of our product,  I wanted give something back to your listeners, I’ve set up a promo code and it’s “StoryWorth.com/Extreme.” If you sign up at that link you will get 20% off your subscription and then you can invite your mother, set up some questions and then she can basically start recording her stories for the year to come. At the end of the year, if you have a good collection of stories, then you can go ahead and order the books and get a physical copy of them.

Fisher: It’s just a phenomenal thing because people are always struggling to find the time and ask the right questions. Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. How do you pick the questions? Or can the customer pick the questions? Explain that to us.

Nick: That’s a great question. So we have hundreds of questions that you can choose from, and we try to spend all different times of your life, whether it’s childhood or work or love or travel. By default we’ll select some suggestions, but you have full control over which questions get sent out, so you can change them, you can remove some, you can add others, and of course you can write your own. I really encourage people to do that because the best stories are the ones that come from the most personal questions. One way we make sure that always the good questions are getting sent out is that we’ll actually send our customers the questions that we’re going to send their relatives ahead of time. So every Friday we say, “Hey, on Monday we’re going to send out these questions. Do you want to change any of them?”

Fisher: That’s a great way to go. Okay, so on Fridays you send that out, then on Monday they get the question and then they have pretty much what — a week to get it done?

Nick: Exactly usually we send them out once a week and we find that that’s a good manageable schedule. Of course then some people batch them up they’ll save a couple and do them on the weekend and catch up.

Fisher: Now, in the books, that you’ve put together, you’ve probably read a few stories that touched your heart a little bit, Nick. What have you seen?

Nick: One of the things that I should point out is that we actually don’t read the stories. We are very, very serious about privacy, and so we want people to feel comfortable sharing their personal stories with only their family members. We never look at the stories. So, one of the things we’ve been doing for Mother’s Day is reaching out to customers and asking them if they would like to share a story about their mother for our community, and so we’ve been posting those on our blog. One that I particularly like is a customer’s mother who was actually working during World War II in a garment factory creating garments for the military, and so she has the story about real kind of Rosie the Riveter moments.

Fisher: Right.

Nick: It’s actually been really fun. Our community lead, Hope, has been collecting these stories and it’s just amazing to hear the incredible women and how inspiring they are.

Fisher: You know, you’re right, we have lost so many World War II people now and men and women from that era. And I liked what you mentioned earlier too, you can recapture stories of your people simply by getting in touch with friends or great aunts and uncles and they can fill in a lot of holes for you through this.

Nick: That’s right, Scott. So on that topic I actually have a bit of a personal anecdote which is that my wife’s father sadly passed away when she was college, and of course, my wife was one of the earliest StoryWorth users and she found out her aunt, (her father’s sister) had been getting a lot of stories about his life and their life growing up together that she would never have gotten otherwise, that she just wouldn’t have thought to ask about them. She’s getting these very rich stories about her father, even though he passed he passed away 13 years ago. So yes, inviting siblings, inviting friends is a great way to learn.

Fisher: So, once again just for people to understand, you save the voices of these people as they tell the stories, right?

Nick: We save the audio recordings. If you attach pictures when you write an email story, we save the photos. And then of course when you send the email then we save the text. So, really, everything you send us we save for you, to safeguard.

Fisher: Six family members under 80 bucks in an entire year. Unbelievable! What a great service.

Nick: And again, you get 20% off if you sign up at StoryWorth.com/Extreme.

Fisher: That’s right. Just in time for Mother’s Day. Nick, great stuff, great product, great invention! You know, it’s always exciting to meet people with new ideas on how to preserve our family history. In my mind, you’ve got the killer of them all, it’s “StoryWorth.com.” You can get the special discount at StoryWorth.com forward slash Extreme. Thanks so much for joining us.

Nick: Always great to talk.