Built a tool that notifies your family automatically if you go quiet. Zero customers so far — here's the idea, and what I think I'm missing

I've spent the last few months building Dad Is Dead — a digital legacy tool that stores your important documents, passwords, and final wishes, then automatically notifies the people you trust the moment they actually need access.

The idea came from a problem I kept running into thinking about my own family: everyone agrees they should "get their affairs in order," and almost nobody does. Partly it's avoidance. But partly it's a real design gap — even people who do write everything down never solve the actual trigger problem: who decides when it's time for someone else to get access, and how do they know?

So the whole product is built around one mechanism — a proof-of-life escalation, in four steps:

1. Reminder — periodic check-ins (weekly, or whatever cadence you set)
2. Miss enough of them — after several missed reminders, custodians get a heads-up notification
3. Grace window — a final warning goes to you directly; if you confirm you're fine, everything resets immediately, no matter how far the escalation got
4. Access granted — only if the grace window also passes unanswered do custodians get into the vault

Access isn't all-or-nothing, either. You choose per item whether it's visible now, visible only once access is actually granted, or hidden — and you can restrict any of that to specific custodians instead of everyone on the list. So a spouse can see the whole vault, while an adult child only ever sees the one letter addressed to them, nothing else. That took more of the design time than the escalation logic did, honestly — "who sees what, and when" turned out to be a much harder problem than "who gets notified."

Everything sits in one AES-256 encrypted place: legal documents, financial accounts, digital credentials, funeral wishes, photos, and recorded final messages.

It's live, it works, it's $9/mo to start with a 30-day money-back guarantee — and it has zero real customers. That's the part I'm actually here about.

My theory: most people don't feel this problem while they're the one being asked to plan for their own death — they feel it while they're the one cleaning up after someone else, with no plan in place. Which means "everyone should have this" is true but useless as a marketing thesis; the sharper audience is probably people who just went through that mess for a parent or spouse and are now paranoid about leaving the same one behind.

If that's you, or you've been putting off your own version of this — I'd genuinely like to know: was the hard part finding the accounts, getting into them, or not knowing what they actually wanted done? Trying to figure out if any of the mechanisms above are solving the real problem, or ones I made up in my head.

(This is one of four small Azure-native tools I run solo — the rest are on my IH profile if you're curious what else I'm building.)