Zibby: Weekly Update - 2026-06-26

I’m building Zibby because I think family stories are one of the most undervalued “assets” we have. They shape identity, relationships, and how we make sense of our lives. The problem is that most of them die in the gaps between holidays, phone calls, and “we should really write that down sometime.”

This week was a reminder that the work is real, the demand is real, and the execution bar is also very real.

What went well

1) Zibby cleared the critical Founder Institute milestone of Investor Review .

Not a victory lap. Just the kind of progress that tells me that at least the work I’m putting in is not only showing itself in the quality of deliverables, but in the viability of Zibby as a concept and myself as its steward

2) The conversations were awesome as always.

Old peers, mentors, colleagues. I went in looking for feedback on Zibby and came out with something better: people started telling me how it could actually change their lives. And then, almost inevitably, they started sharing their own family lore. That’s still my favorite signal. If the idea lands, people don’t talk about features. They tell stories.

3) I talked with another founder in this space.

This is a hard nut to crack. It’s emotional. It’s personal. It’s not “growth hackable” in the dumb way. But it’s encouraging seeing other builders find meaning in the challenge. Also, the economics are there if you get the habit loop right.

4) I got to speak with the professor whose interview pushed me to leap.

This one mattered. Zibby is a product about identity, memory, relationships, legacy. That means we will need emotional hooks. We will need habits. We will need to be intentional about what we’re asking people to do and how often we’re asking.

So I asked the question directly: can you build this into a habit in a healthy way, or does it drift into something destructive?

The answer was: yes, it can be healthy. Also yes, there are red lines.

The red line is rumination.

That’s the line I’m not crossing. If a product like this pushes people into spirals, that’s a failure, even if the metrics look great. Part of building in public for Zibby is that trust and safety, privacy, and community welfare are going to be visible, not buried in a policy page. More to come as we do the work.

Also, one of the most surprising (and honestly motivating) findings from her research: in studies of hundreds of adolescents, basically everyone wanted to hear more family stories from their grandparents. Not “some.” Not “half.” Almost all of them.

5) Azure Account / Entra Tenant Migration.

Operationally unsexy. Strategically necessary. We got in to Azure’s Startup program but with that, it made sense to create a new resource group, Entra tenant, etc. Yeah there’s work arounds to keep things as they are, but it was a good time to see what it takes to take to do a clean deploy. If nothing else to validate our bicep and deploy process as will be needed when we scale out of a dev instance.

There were lessons learned. Mostly order of operations of services and what I should just script instead of fighting the system.

What didn’t go well

1) Sleep took a major hit.

Missed a gym day. No yoga. I can rationalize it, but I’m not going to. When sleep goes, everything else gets more expensive.

2) I didn’t ship the POC onboarding flow like I planned.

This is not a “nice to have.” Onboarding is the front door. It’s also the first real test of whether Zibby feels easy, safe, and worth repeating. If I want testers, and if I want growth, this has to be tight.

3) Deck visuals are weaker than they should be.

I wanted more product screenshots, but I didn’t have high-enough quality seeded content ready in the new tenant. That’s on me. Investors (and testers) don’t buy abstraction. They buy clarity.

4) Outreach reality check.

I didn’t hear back from Active Senior groups in Austin, and a lot of cold outreach for interviews got ignored or trashed. I need to stop treating silence as a surprise and start treating it as the default. If I want “yes,” I need volume, better targeting, warmer intros, and a tighter value exchange.

What I’m doing next week

• Continue outreach to Active Senior groups in Austin where I can actually show up with value and be useful.

• Ship v1 onboarding. No excuses.

• Finish a high-fidelity seeded account so screenshots and product storytelling stop being hypothetical.

• Dial in holiday MVTs / mini Zibby experiences that are simple, shippable, and measurable.

• Refine the deck and pitch based on feedback and what’s actually true right now.

• Explore moving onboarding AI to local Apple Foundation Models for cost and privacy. If I can get both, I want both.

The one sentence I’m carrying forward

Zibby can only “win” if it makes people’s lives better in real ways, not if it just makes them come back.