What We're Learning from Eulogies
And a bit of how we became a Top 3 Destination for them online.
Hey folks,
Quick update from inside the software world that drives our little engine that could!
When we shipped the free eulogy generator we thought of it as a side door, not the main attraction — a simple way for people who had never planned to write a Death Note to find their way to us through the worst week of their lives.
We assumed most people would use it once, leave, and that would be that.
Wow. We were' so wrong.
Six months in, the data tells a different story. Eulogies are not the side door. They are the front door. And the people walking through it are not who I expected! And that’s really neat because we’ve learned a ton from our users and customers.
Here are a few of those things:
Most of the people writing eulogies are burying a parent.
The eulogy generator asks who the deceased was to you. Roughly a third of all eulogies — by a wide margin — are written by adult children for their late parent.
The second most common category is parents writing for a child they have outlived. That second one is not a category I was emotionally prepared to find at the top of any chart. But it is there. Quietly. Week after week.
And some of our users come back, for months, and continue to generate eulogies for their children as part of their grief process. Wow, this is such an honor, truly, to be part of something so intimate and important.
We take that really seriously.
Next, are spouses which are surprisingly far down the list. Below that are close friends. Below that? Siblings. I am still chewing on what that means. My working theory is that when a spouse dies, the surviving partner is often not the one giving the eulogy — the children are. The eulogy is a generational moment more often than a marital one.
Regardless, we take care of them all.
People do not want a formal funeral speech. They want a personal one.
Our tone selector offers four options: Personal & Warm, Formal & Dignified, Celebratory & Uplifting, Reflective & Thoughtful. Two-thirds of every eulogy generated picks Personal. Formal comes in dead last — ten times less common than Personal, and noticeably behind even Reflective.
The American funeral has been changing for a long time. I think this is one of the cleanest signals I have seen of where it is going. The room does not want a stranger reading a prayer. The room wants a daughter who is willing to be specific about the smell of her father’s garage.
What people are searching for is itself the story.
I went and pulled the Search Console data this morning to sanity-check what we are seeing in the product. The top phrases that bring people to DeathNote, by clicks, are these:
Free ai eulogy generator
Free eulogy generator
Eulogy generator
AI eulogy generator free
AI funeral speech
Can ai write a eulogy for me
We rank in the top three for almost all of them. The pattern is consistent. People are not searching for grief support. They are not searching for legacy planning. They are searching, very specifically, for help writing a eulogy — for free, with AI, right now.
The urgency is in the words themselves. Free shows up in three of the top ten queries. Generator in four. AI in three. The room people are walking in from is loud, brief, and unambiguous.
And the languages! Persian, Hebrew, Korean, Tamil, Japanese, Bulgarian, Norwegian, Finnish, Arabic, Hungarian, Afrikaans, Thai. A page we translated about a paramedic in Austin into Afrikaans is now one of our top-ranking long-tail entries.
Somebody in Tehran is searching for funeral speech text in Persian and finding us. Somebody in Helsinki searches muistopuhe esimerkki — eulogy example in Finnish — and we are there. I do not entirely know who these people are. I just know they are finding us, in their own language, on the worst week of their year.
And we’re here for them.
The growth is not coming from features. It is coming from the moment.
In the past few months we shipped multiple notes, multiple recipients, library translations in 50 languages, eulogy examples, tone guides, all of it. I expected most of the lift to come from product changes. It did not.
The lift is coming from the same place every week — somebody, somewhere, sits down at a kitchen table the night before a service and types a name into a free tool. That has happened roughly twice as often this week as it did last week. Which was already a record week.
Daily search impressions on our pages went from about 800 to about 1,200 in the first half of May. Daily clicks doubled. The same lift shows up in three independent places at once.
I do not love using the word “growth” here. It feels strange next to what these moments actually are. But I want to be honest with you about what we are seeing, because it is shaping what we build next.
What this means for what we ship next.
We are no longer treating the eulogy generator as a marketing surface. It is the product, for a lot of people. So we are going to invest in it like one — better drafts, better tone matching, better support for the speaker who is going to read it, not just the writer who is generating it.
We are also looking harder at the moment around the eulogy. The car ride to the funeral home. The notebook page where someone is trying to remember one specific story. The eight minutes a person actually stands at the front of the room. There is a lot of unbuilt product in those eight minutes.
DeathNote started as a tool to make sure your words survive you. It still is. But it turns out the more urgent version of that promise — for most people, most of the time — is to make sure the right words show up at the funeral itself.
And we’ll continue to build towards that.
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