SNW INTERVIEW - Oct 13 - Jeremy Toeman is the co-founder of Legacy Locker, a repository for virtual information located in San Francisco. – Jenn Rubin
How did you get the idea to start Legacy Locker?
A couple of years ago, my grandmother passed away. She was 94-years-old
but fairly Internet-savvy. She e-mailed with tons of friends and
family, and she even played bridge on Yahoo. When she passed away, my
father and I wanted to get into her Hotmail account to let people know
what had happened. There were people she was in touch with that the
rest of the family didn’t necessarily know. After a bit of trying, we
realized it was a futile effort and gave up.
A year later, I was on a plane and had one of those moments where I wondered, if something happened right now, what would happen to all my stuff? My wife and I have two kids. We have a will and an estate plan in place by a family lawyer to take care of all our things. Yet I started thinking about all the online things in my world – my e-mail address, my computer login – and realized they would all disappear because nobody has my passwords.
The plane landed. I promptly called my business partner and said we have to do something about this. We launched in April, and we have both a free and paid service.
What are some of the features?
With Legacy Locker, it is somewhere between an online will and an
online safety deposit box for your online stuff. While creating an
account, you assign what is called a verifier. This person is a family
lawyer, spouse or parent. It’s someone who would verify that something
has happened to you.
Then, you create a series of what we call digital assets. A digital asset is your username and password for an account, such as e-mail, PayPal, eBay, a blog, LinkedIn, Twitter or pretty much anything you have online. Next, you assign your digital assets to a digital beneficiary. Again, this could be a spouse, business partner, friend, family member, etc.
The site securely stores all this information, and in the inevitable event of someone’s passing, it is distributed to the people that you had specified. You can even add little notes as to what you want to have happen to your accounts, whether it’s keep your blog online forever or shut down your Facebook account.
How many members does Legacy Locker currently have?
We have several thousand users. The majority of the users are on the
free plan, but we have enough paying users to be cash flow positive,
which is great for a start-up that is less than a year old.
How much does Legacy Locker cost?
In addition to the free account, there are two types of paid accounts.
One has an annual fee that is $29.99 a year. The other one has a
one-time fee, and that’s $299.
What are some of the differences between free and paid accounts?
You can only have three digital assets with a free account. Both paid
accounts give you access to the full feature set, which includes
unlimited digital assets and digital beneficiaries, as well as 10
uploaded scanned documents and five uploaded videos.
Scanned documents could include a copy of your actual will that you might have scanned in, a deed to a house, a stock certificate or any other important physical documents.
Say I have a scan of my passport on my Legacy Locker account. So if I’m ever traveling and lose my passport, I can go to any Internet cafe anywhere in the world, print it out and take it to my embassy or whatever I need to do.
How did you grow Legacy Locker?
We follow very traditional models for a brand new type of service. Our
model shows that additional use equals additional revenue to cover all
growth costs. We charge users for a service, and our infrastructure
costs are fairly low. We did raise funding to build the site, but the
ongoing maintenance is fairly low as well.
Unlike a lot of Internet companies, where there is an amazing service but a lack of clarity as to what people will pay for, people are used to paying for lawyers or for a safety deposit box.
Why would someone want to use Legacy Locker as opposed to going through a wills lawyer?
First, we recommend that everybody have some type of protection for
their physical assets. Then, they should think about the online side.
It’s not the kind of thing that you want to burden a family lawyer
with. They don’t want to maintain lists of passwords. Plus, you’re
probably updating your password maybe once, twice a year or more.
Again, that’s not something that your lawyer should be doing for you.
So, we believe that we are a complement to an actual will, estate plan or trust.
If you update your e-mail password, will it update automatically in your Legacy Locker account?
You have to do it manually right now, but the good thing is it takes
seconds. For the system to be able to automatically track passwords, we
would need to somehow integrate with all the different potential
services out there. It is something we’ve been looking into for the
future.
Would you ever offer any white label solutions?
Absolutely. We’re talking to estate planners, who might want to brand
it for their own brand to their clientele. Another avenue is possibly
with banks or insurance. That is a part of where our big growth will be
– letting huge companies offer our service to either their employees as
a benefits program or to other customer bases like that.
Are there any other companies offering a service similar to your own? Who would you consider your main competition?
One is Deathswitch.net, and another is called SlightlyMorbid.com.
These are homegrown systems that are very cool. The difference is our
focus is on bringing awareness to the estate planner industry.
