For years I’ve written things to my boys. Sometimes emails, sometimes notes. I write about what’s going on in their lives: funny moments, big moments, sad moments. When I go back and read them, it’s amazing how much of our life together comes rushing back.
I wrote most often before flights. Just in case.
That might sound heavy. Honestly, it was, because I hate flying. But writing to my kids gave me some peace in the moment. I’m a dad, and there are things I want my boys to hear in my words, whether they’re eight, eighteen, or forty.
Being who I am, I also over-engineered it. I set up a Gmail account for them years ago. I still have it, but every so often I get an email warning me to log in or the account will be deleted. That made me nervous. So I built my own setup: I email the letters to an address on AWS, and they’re stored in a locked-down S3 bucket.
Eventually, though, something started to bother me. If something actually happened to me, nobody would know those messages existed. They sat in AWS accounts protected by MFA, behind passwords only I knew, on devices my family might not be able to unlock.
I’d done the work of writing them. I hadn’t done the work of making sure they’d ever arrive. My backup plan was a sticky note under my keyboard, which isn’t exactly a great security model.
That was the beginning of If Required.
Then I started thinking about everything else
I’m the technical one in our family. I know where the photos are backed up (Apple, Google, and Dropbox, naturally) and which accounts matter. I know where the important documents are, how the computers are set up, and what subscriptions we pay for.
My wife doesn’t need to know all of it, because I’m here.
(In fairness, she has told me every one of her passwords and PINs. I remember exactly zero of them.)
If I suddenly weren’t here, she wouldn’t just be dealing with losing her husband. She’d also be trying to reverse-engineer our life. Where are the photos? What’s the computer password? Which accounts matter? Who handles this? What did Taylor set up here? And somewhere in all of that would be the letters I’d written for our boys.
I hated the idea of handing my family a scavenger hunt at exactly the moment they shouldn’t have to solve one.
I build systems for a living
Maybe this stuck with me because of how my brain works. I’ve spent most of my career building systems meant to keep working when things go wrong. Before that, I served in the Marines and the National Guard. A lot of my professional life has come down to the same few questions. What happens when the normal path fails? Who takes over? What do they need to know?
At some point it hit me that I’d spent far more time on those questions at work than at home. My family had a pretty significant single point of failure.
Me.
So I built something
At first, If Required was just for me. I wanted one private place to write things down for specific people:
- a letter for my wife
- the things I want my boys to know
- where our photos are
- instructions for things that make perfect sense to me today but wouldn’t make sense to someone piecing them together later
I didn’t want to build a password manager or a will, and I definitely didn’t want to build a “digital legacy platform.” There are already good tools for passwords, legal documents, and financial information. If Required sits between all of those. It holds the stuff your family would otherwise be left to figure out on their own.
Here’s how it works:
- You write personal letters and practical instructions, and you choose who receives each one.
- You pick trusted people who have to confirm that something has happened before anything is released.
- Kids who don’t have an email address yet can have their letters held by an adult you choose.
- If there’s something you don’t want stored online at all, don’t put it there. Keep the original offline and leave directions for where to find it.
I’m not trying to get your whole life into an app. I just want the people you love to have a place to start.
Building it was the easy part
I’m comfortable building software. Launching something like this publicly has been much harder, because eventually I have to say, “I built something for if something happens to me.” That’s a strange sentence to put on the internet.
It would be easier to launch something about productivity or AI or saving time. This asks people to think about something most of us would rather assume we have plenty of time for. I kept it quiet for a long time because of that.
But the more I built it for my own family, the more I noticed the same pattern everywhere. One person knows where everything is. One person manages the accounts, takes the photos, understands the technology, and knows what the kids need. As long as that person is around, there’s no problem.
Until there is.
Now I’m putting it out there
I don’t have a growth team or a launch machine behind this. It’s me. My goal right now is pretty small: find people who recognize this problem and learn from them.
I’m looking for the person who reads this and thinks, yeah, I’m the one who knows where everything is. If ten people I’ve never met set this up for their families and tell me it gives them a little more peace of mind, that’ll mean more to me than any spike in downloads.
Using it already changed something for me
There are now things my wife and boys won’t have to wonder about. The words I care about aren’t trapped in an S3 bucket anymore, and someone would know where to start.
There’s a strange comfort in that. It’s what I hope If Required gives other people: the feeling that you took care of something important.
You don’t need my app to do the most important part
If one person came to mind while you were reading this, do something for them today. Write them a letter; five sentences is fine. Write down the one thing your spouse would struggle to find. Tell someone where the photos are backed up, or who they should call. Put it somewhere safe. You can organize the rest later.
We tend to think preparing for something bad is morbid. I’ve started to see it as a way of taking care of people.
That’s why I built If Required, and why I’m finally letting other people use it.
Dad first. Founder second.
— Taylor