(Photo from Leaves.us)
- In the aftermath of the destruction from Hurricane Katrina at his parents’ Mississippi home, Mike O’Donnell came up with the idea behind Leaves, a digital platform for families to record their stories and preserve family keepsakes.
When Hurricane Katrina destroyed his parents’ home in Pass Christian in 2005, Mike O’Donnell, a tech entrepreneur, turned tragedy into a business idea.
“The Mississippi oceanfront home I bought my parents was destroyed by a 25-foot tidal wave,” he recalled.
The devastation of Katrina meant that O’Donnell’s family lost countless irreplaceable mementos — photo albums, birthday cards, home movies, and old letters.
In the aftermath of the destruction, O’Donnell came up with the idea behind Leaves, a digital platform for families to record their stories and preserve family keepsakes.
“Family trees show the branches and the names, but where are the leaves?” the company asks, adding, “Leaves are the stories, the voices, the memories, the moments that make those lives real.”
Hence, the company’s name – Leaves, a living family archive.
After traveling to dozens of retirement communities and investing a quarter of a million dollars into the company, O’Donnell paused business operations in 2013 because the company’s target market, seniors, did not trust themselves to write coherent stories.
Nearly a decade later, artificial intelligence gave O’Donnell a way to bring his idea back to life.
O’Donnell relaunched Leaves in 2022 with an AI-powered storytelling engine that allows users to respond to prompts verbally or in writing as well as upload photographs and videos to accompany the stories.
The platform’s “virtual biographer” can then turn those memories into an audiocast narrated in the user’s voice, a video, or a written narrative.
“Most people are not good interviewers, writers, editors, or personal story producers,” O’Donnell said. “AI is very good at that.”
Now, the company operating out of Florida but “germinated” in Mississippi while walking through the damage of his parents’ home is preparing to launch an expanded version of its platform that will allow families to create a multigenerational network for sharing and preserving photographs, documents, stories, and memories.
“I also built a tool called ‘Forever Voice’ that allows users to generate a virtual version of themselves that uses an AI-generated clone of their voice to interact with loved ones long after they’ve passed,” O’Donnell said. “I’ve additionally created an intelligent media hub that seamlessly captures the story behind every photo uploaded to the platform, giving future generations far more insight into your life than they would get from a context-less photo.”
He said despite not spending “a single penny on user growth or advertising,” the company has attracted over 2,000 users to the platform and 5,000 combined app downloads.
“After we officially launch our newest version of the platform in October, we plan on spending $50,000 per month on user growth,” O’Donnell said.
