5 min read

The story behind MonuDesk

I never planned to build software for monuments. This is how it happened.

It started with a QR code.

A few years ago I started RememberTag, a memorial QR code you attach to a headstone or urn so families can save photos, videos, and stories of their loved ones.

To grow it, I needed to reach the people closest to families in those moments: monument dealers. So I started calling them. Then visiting them. Then talking to them every week.

That is how I ended up in the monument industry. Not as a tech guy parachuting in, but as someone they invited to the table.

The software they were using was bad. Really bad.

Once I got close with these dealers, I started seeing the apps they were running their shops on. Some charged thousands of dollars a month. None of them looked good. None of them did the things dealers actually needed.

Customers were paying a lot of money for very little. And every single dealer I talked to had a list of things their software could not do.

I kept hearing the same ideas in conversation after conversation. Things that seemed obvious. Things nobody had built.

"I had the relationships. I had the feedback loop. I could pick up the phone and ask, what do you wish existed? And they would tell me. Every time."

It became a no brainer.

I had everything I needed. The connections. The trust. The questions to ask. The people willing to answer them.

So I pulled in my engineering team, the same one I built RememberTag with, and we started building MonuDesk.

Built in conversation. Not behind a screen.

MonuDesk was not built by just ChatGPT-ing the heck out of it. It was not built by us sitting in a room guessing what monument shops need.

It was built in real conversations with monument professionals. A lot of them. We rolled out trials slowly. We had weekly calls with customers. We still do that with the ones who want them. There is a feedback button right inside the app that goes straight to me.

That is the whole recipe.