Why I'm Building Memolio

How a name change forced me to remember why family stories matter

I’ve been building a personalised children’s book product for months — one that turns a grandparent’s real life story into a watercolour-illustrated keepsake. You answer questions about your grandparent, share a few photos, and we create a completely unique book that a child can hold, read, and keep on their shelf forever.

Until last week, it was called “Who Is Grandpa?”

Then I killed the name.

Not because it was bad. It worked. People understood it immediately. But it had a problem I couldn’t ignore: it only described half the people buying it.

Our actual customers are mostly women — mums, daughters, granddaughters — buying a family memory book for the whole family. “Who Is Grandpa?” left them out. And it forced us into four separate domains across two languages (English and German), which is an SEO nightmare nobody warns you about when you’re picking a product name at 2am.

So I started searching. Over a hundred domain names later — Latin portmanteaus, German compound words, every “love” and “keepsake” variant you can imagine — we landed on Memolio. Memo + folio. Memory + pages of a book. Short, gender-neutral, works in every European language. One domain instead of four.

But renaming a product does something unexpected. It forces you to sit with the question: what is this thing, really?

Strip away the name, the domain, the logo. What’s left?

A bet. A bet that the stories our grandparents carry — stories about wars survived, countries left behind, trades learned, loves lost and found — deserve better than a Facebook post that disappears in a week. Better than a conversation that happens once and then lives only in the memory of whoever was in the room.

My generation is probably the last one that will hear these stories directly. Our grandparents lived through things most of us can barely imagine, and those stories live in their heads — not written down anywhere. Every year, more of them are lost forever. Not because nobody cares, but because nobody thought to ask in time, or nobody knew how to turn the answers into something lasting.

That’s what Memolio is for. You don’t need to be a writer. You don’t need to sit down with a tape recorder and transcribe hours of conversation. You answer a few questions — through WhatsApp or a simple form — share some photos, and we use AI to turn those answers into a personalised illustrated children’s book. Watercolour illustrations of real moments. Real places. Real people.

Not a template where we swap in a name. A completely unique story, built from the life your grandparent actually lived.

The technology behind it is genuinely interesting — I’m building it with n8n workflow automation, AI image generation, and a lot of duct tape — and I’ll write about that too, in the “Build in Public” section of this newsletter. But the technology is not the point. The point is the book on the shelf. The point is a four-year-old asking to hear the story again. The point is connecting generations in a way that lasts longer than a phone call.

We’re not live yet — still in testing, still fixing bugs, still learning from real users what works and what doesn’t. But if this resonates with you, I’d genuinely love to hear about the family story you’d want to preserve. Reply to this post, or just think about it next time you’re with your grandparents.

Some stories are too good to lose.

— H