Email John Heald to display obituaries on your website.

Interview Excerpt:

Nancy: You launched in 2008, Legacy.com launched in 1998, is that correct?

Jeff: Correct.

Nancy: Legacy.com is pretty popular and is pretty profitable. Can you tell our funeral directors what the difference is between tributes.com and legacy.com?

Jeff: I think first of all as a compliment to Legacy, it’s a large business. I founded Monster.com in 1994 and Legacy is really in that first wave of companies. One of the things I’ve seen is a lot has changed, especially with the World Wide Web. And with the advent of Friendster and Napster, early and Myspace and Facebook, we’ve seen a transition from the traditional one point zero website to a two point zero website and as a result we’ve learned al lot along the way. I think the other thing about Legacy, it’s really a software as a service business for the newspaper industry. With about 800 newspaper clients in North America, Eurpe and Australia, their central focus is really on servicing the obituary software function of the newspapers. When I was thinking about founding and starting Tributes, I thought it might be interesting to focus on the consumer, very much in the way Monster focused on the consumer. And one of the things I realized right away is the consumer’s first real relationship was with the funeral home. So I went about doing the research and discovered that with funeral homes, there was a much different service model with the newspaper that I thought we could provide. So one of the main differences with Tributes is that our central client is the funeral home and ultimately the family and that is very different form legacy with the newspaper as their primary client. I think the other thing that we looked at, when I think about what Tributes really offers it’s a storied life. And one of the main things that happens with the newspaper section is it’s actually an obituary or a death notice which is limited to the cost per line or column inch. Which means that it’s a very small, two inch by two inch listing if when the funeral is typically; it’s not really a traditional obituary any longer. And what Legacy does, is pick up that little bit of information and then republish it out on the web. What we’ve done is go out the families and to the funeral homes look if you put together a three page document, that tells the story of your mother’s life, you should be able to put that whole thing online. And that’s where Tributes... it is all about a tribute to someone’s life. And that every life has a story and we’d really like to read about it and learn about it and be a part of it and that’s a big central thesis of Tributes.com

Obituaries Chat Transcript