breathe.ink

Your voice, in ink.

Dan Le Van · April 2026

When my first child was born,
I realized something.

If I died tomorrow, every value and every story I'd want to pass on would die with me.

Then I looked the other way.

My parents came here as refugees. A country, a language, a world only they remember.
When they go, it goes with them.

So I started writing a book.

I got to chapter seven.

I couldn't remember what I'd said.

I kept repeating stories.

I wanted to reorganize everything.

I was stuck in an infinite loop.

I'm a bad writer.

I'm a good programmer.

So I built the tool I wished existed.

Families who want to preserve their parents' stories

North America

35M

households with a parent 65+

3M senior-living residents

1.7M hospice enrollments / year

Canada

3.5M

households with a parent 65+

400K senior-living residents

190K palliative care / year

Addressable households: adult aged 30-55 with a living parent 65+ (subset of ~130M US and 15.7M Canadian total households). Senior-living and palliative figures represent institutional storyteller populations aligned with slide 12 channels. Sources: Pew Research 2022, Statistics Canada 2024, CDC FastStats, NHPCO Facts & Figures 2024, CIHI Access to Palliative Care 2023.

Zoom out from the personal to the universal. The mirror shows the same three metrics for North America and for Canada: households (the core B2C market), senior-living residents, and annual palliative care. Both sides matter. The US-scale number establishes category size; the Canadian column sets up the "built here, for here" positioning on slide 14. Household math: 35M North American households have an adult 30-55 with a living parent 65+. Bottom-up: ~42M Americans in their 40s (US Census), 54% of whom have a living parent 65+ (Pew Research 2022); add the 30s and 50s brackets; convert to households at ~1.5 eligible adults per household. Canada contributes ~3.5M on the same method at ~1/9 population scale (StatsCan 2024). Institutional adjacencies map to slide 12 channels. Senior living: ~2.2M in US long-term care plus ~1M in US independent senior living (CDC, industry data) and ~400K in Canadian LTC and retirement homes. Palliative care: 1.72M US hospice enrollments in 2022 (NHPCO 2024) and ~190K Canadians receiving palliative care annually (CIHI: 58% of ~334K Canadian deaths per year). Frame palliative care as emotional urgency rather than morbidity. Families regret not capturing a loved one's voice in time. That's precisely what the product fixes. If the conversation goes toward use cases: the fastest-growing consumer wedge is intergenerational. Grandkids visiting grandparents, asking questions, recording the answers. It extends the audience down by two decades and turns the book into an heirloom built collaboratively rather than a solo homework assignment. If challenged on the 3.5M Canadian household figure: Canada has 15.7M total households (StatsCan 2024). 3.5M is the subset where a 30-55 adult has a living parent 65+, mirroring the US Pew distribution at Canada's population scale. We use the conservative end.

$20-40M

StoryWorth ARR (incumbent)

60-70%

drop off within months

The demand is massive. The retention is broken.

Remento is growing fast. The appetite is real. Our product takes a different approach: no weekly prompts, no homework. We fix the retention pain that sits beneath these numbers.

RevenueCat 2025 State of Subscription Apps: Social & Lifestyle has the lowest retention of any app category.

StoryWorth built a $20-40M business and Remento is scaling fast. That's proof the appetite for family memoirs is real and durable. Both rely on the weekly-email-prompt model, which is why users churn at 60-70%. Our approach removes that homework layer entirely: talk when you have something to say, and the AI organizes behind the scenes. Same market, different product philosophy. Sourcing the 60-70%: triangulated from aggregated StoryWorth user reports on Reddit (r/gifts) and Trustpilot, plus RevenueCat's 2025 State of Subscription Apps, which puts Social & Lifestyle (the closest analogous category) at roughly 36% annual retention, the lowest of any app segment. Neither StoryWorth nor Remento publishes retention data; the 60-70% is a defensible triangulation rather than a company-disclosed metric.

Stories get more valuable
when organized by theme,
not by calendar.

How it works

1

Talk

One button. Any time. No weekly prompts.

2

We organize

AI finds themes across your stories — you never rewrite a word.

3

You get a book

Printed, themed, yours. No subscription.

Every story makes the rest more meaningful.

1 story

3 stories

10 stories

Themes and connections emerge — the kind you didn't consciously plan.

Before launch, four institutions have reached out.

Hospital cancer center

Patients recording legacy stories for their families.

Police department

A yearbook of the wildest stories from the precinct. Recurring institutional purchase.

Retirement homes

Story Hour sessions, resident collections, families as downstream buyers.

Shelters & outreach

Stories from people experiencing homelessness. Voices that would otherwise go unrecorded.

Plus: friends, family, and the founder's own book in progress.

Business model

$49

Digital

$99

Paperback

$149

Hardcover

89% contribution margin

Break-even at 28 books/month

No subscription. Pay only when the book is ready.

Why now

10×

drop in AI transcription cost since 2024

75%+

elderly smartphone adoption in North America

$20-40M

ARR gap left open by incumbent churn

And no Canadian champion. 40M Canadians. Two official languages. Families that deserve a memoir tool built here, shipped here, and serving them in French and English — not a US app that treats Canada as an afterthought.

Team & runway

Dan Le Van

Solo founder, Montreal. Programmer by trade. NEQ-registered sole prop; Quebec CCPC incorporation in progress.

[FOUNDER_BIO — one paragraph — pending]

12-month runway: $110K CAD (non-dilutive)

PAE Volet 1 · PME MTL Young Business · PAE Prêt démarrage · NRC-IRAP · SR&ED (Y1 filing)

By month 12: incorporated CCPC · 200 paying customers · 3 institutional partnerships · SR&ED filed

Building Canada's champion for family stories — in Montreal, for every province.

Talk when you remember.
We'll make it last.

breathe.ink · dan@levan.cloud