The Birth of Chptr: Life, Death, and Communal Remembrance

January 2020 was a total blur. My spouse, Jessica, and I were drowning in the chaos that comes with news that a second child is on the way (just a year after our first arrived). By the end of February, as the earliest news of the pandemic reached the shores of the US, we were watching Hamilton on Broadway for the first time (a birthday present for me), blissfully unaware of what was to come. 

Then, everything changed... for all of us.

As COVID spread across the country, Jessica passionately developed 60-second video tributes for each of the first victims, people who had tragically passed from the virus we knew so little about. Daily, I sat quietly and listened-in on almost every interview she conducted (we were both working from home), and spent hours each evening philosophizing about life. Jessica and I kept circling around what we felt was a pretty simple problem… so why the fuck hadn’t anyone solved for it yet? 

From our perspective, memorialization was broken and we were all suffering as a result. Without a proper way to encapsulate the lives of lost loved ones, Americans were forced to grieve through our own individual memories, ones that would inevitably fade as time went on. With each passing year, the unique connections that bonded a community of individuals to each other after someone they loved had died would weaken, until the power that was generated by that emotional network evaporated. The result? We were losing a wealth of meaningful connections and learnings from the lives of those who passed. .

This is probably a good time to take a step back and give you some context.

Jess and I moved to New York from Las Vegas a few years before COVID hit the city. We had both, separately, relocated to the desert for career pursuits: she as the news anchor for NBC and me, first as the head of entertainment for The Cosmopolitan and later as an entrepreneur. 

My first endeavor as a founder was Life is Beautiful, a top music festival based out of Las Vegas. My partner was the late Tony Hsieh (another story for another time) and our mission was to drive awareness and support for young people facing escalating mental health issues. 

A blind date in 2015 threw a curveball in both of our lives. I left Life is Beautiful, and she left Sin City for a new opportunity with CBS in New York. We started a new life together out east, barreling towards a global pandemic that would come years later and disrupt everything. 

So while the general public fueled the great hand sanitizer, Lysol wipes, and toilet paper famine that would define the second quarter of 2020 and Jess created her beautiful early tribute videos, I was diving into a rabbit hole of research on memorialization. Months later, she and I would emerge with a vision for the future of honoring life's purpose through communal storytelling.

A lot has happened in two years since we sketched the original framework for Chptr (initially conceived as an art project called Obit.by). We wrote a business plan and pitch deck, only to light both on fire and rebuild as I navigated On Deck's 9th Founders Fellowship program. We built a collective of deeply engaged advisors—many of whom became our first Angel investors—and pressure-tested the idea with a group of people who were mourning loved ones IRL. We built an MVP, wrote detailed GTM and growth plans, and walked hand-in-hand with each of our beta users as we collaborated on their loved one's Chptr. We immersed ourselves in the grief-journeys our users were almost blindly navigating through, trying to serve as companions along the way.

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“Thanks so much for all your attention and help in setting up the [CHPTR] for Sandy. She was a truly wonderful soul and the light of my life. I am thankful I was so blessed and I cannot thank you enough.”

Jack Eitelgeorge, 80yo, Husband (Chptr #2, March 2021)

With each passing week our Chptr family grew. We hired and welcomed new investors, advisors, and partners. Having previously succumbed to the evils of a first-time founder’s ego, I made a decision early on to surround myself with experts with a desire to teach their determined yet non-technical founder. 

Today, we celebrate two beginnings. The first is the official launch of Chptr on Product Hunt (the first of what I hope will be many). The second is as a growing community actively seeking new members in the form of grieving individuals.
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“Thanks again for thinking of Noelle on this first [CHPTR] launch 😊😊😊. She would be over the moon knowing that she still had a special place in our thoughts 💕”‍

Jade Esposito, 41, Best Friend (Chptr #3, July 2021)

We have all lost someone we loved. That fact is one of our greatest points of commonality. All too often it feels as if we are leaving those individuals behind as we move on in our lives. Despite all our efforts, memories dissolve over the years, only to get replaced by new ones — not necessarily better, just new. With time, as those stories fade, we risk forgetting how exactly that person made us better, kinder, stronger. 

Then, almost suddenly, we see future generations begin to build new lives, often without knowledge of who came before them, and the benefit of having their predecessors’ stories — those life learnings — readily accessible.

We are doing a disservice to ourselves, to our heirs, and to humankind by allowing this to continue. When someone’s life ends, the impact they had on their community should reverberate for generations. Their stories, wisdom, successes, and failures should ripple out to the farthest corners of the globe, should have the chance to find a lost and unsuspecting person desperately looking for that particular flavor of inspiration.

To feel inspired by other people, to feel loved and supported by them, is truly a gift. For me, the greatest gift I have ever experienced is the love and support of my wife and kids. Back in 2020, as I struggled to decide if I should retire from live entertainment and make a pivot at 40 years old into a totally new space, I knew that I was making a decision not just for myself, but for my family and our future. 

In 2008, as the biggest global recession in modern history hit, I was a new graduate with a masters degree and a job in a prestigious leadership development program with Caesars Entertainment. I was riding a high right up until the world collapsed. What I learned back then was that when the lights turn out, two things are true: 1) full recovery is going to take longer than you can imagine and 2) when the lights turn back on, the world will likely be unrecognizable. In early 2020, at the very early stages of the pandemic, I sensed the same thing was happening. This time, I was a bit more experienced. So I asked my wife one morning how she felt about me “retiring from live entertainment and charting a new path in death memorialization.” It shouldn’t have been a surprise that she wholly supported me, and still does to this day. 

So here we go. Our story is not totally unique, but it is uniquely ours. We are in the middle of our launch and Product Hunt is a major milestone for us on our mission to help people around the world capture, retain, and access the kind of inspiration we can only find in other people, in each other. 

For those who are joining us for the first time, welcome. This is a safe place for you to grieve and grow, and we’ll be by your side every step of the way. For those who have been with us the entire time, thank you for believing in Chptr and in us personally. We are eternally grateful.

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Be good to each other,

Rehan Choudhry 
Co-founder, Chptr

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