If you’ve had to clean out your grandparents’ house after they’ve passed, then you might be all too familiar with how much stuff we typically gather over time. As humans, it is our natural instinct to collect personal items, from baseball cards and license plates to family photos and mementos.
The more we collect, the more stuff we accumulate. And then we die. What happens to all of our items after we’re gone?
According to Durham-based startup SaveOr, all of our items can easily be categorized and tagged for family members, friends and charities to have after we’re gone, reducing the stress and difficulty for the family members and friends left behind of sorting through hundreds or even thousands of items.
Founder and Duke University senior Matthew Scola created SaveOr after sorting through his great-grandparents’ house after they passed. They had possessions that dated back to when their ancestors immigrated from Italy. But unfortunately for Scola and his family, they weren’t fully certain about what was most important or valuable of everything in that house.
After that experience—and then seeing it potentially happening again with his grandparents—Scola realized that there was no easy solution for people to tell the stories behind their items, collaborate on who gets what from a person’s estate and downsize their personal property while still alive. He researched the currently available “solutions” and talked with independent consultants and estate planning attorneys and confirmed that this was a common problem.
With SaveOr’s app-based platform, managing thousands of items can be as easy as listing an item on Facebook Marketplace.
Users can take multiple photos of individual items and add details such as the item’s location and description. The items can also be tagged with audio and visual documentation, so that if a specific item has a story behind it, the user can explain it in full detail.
Scola found this personal product aspect to be most important to him when he asked his grandmother why she had a rusty, wooden ice cream scoop on her counter that she never used. The scoop once belonged to his great grandfather when he got his first job scooping ice cream on the streets of Camden, New Jersey, after immigrating from Italy.
“It was kept as a testament to his work ethic and to remember where we’ve come as a family,” he said. “That’s something I want to have on my desk when I’m older, but it probably would have been trashed if the story wasn’t told.”
Having to sort through thousands of items can be stressful, especially when it overlaps with the emotional burden of dealing with a death. Scola also realized that a lot of stress can come from fights between family members—especially siblings—when choosing between specific items.
Described as similar to a dating app, SaveOr allows family members to say YES or NO to each individual listed item, making communication easier and more efficient without creating more overwhelm. This solution was also added to include room for downsizing projects, as more older adults are starting to move into smaller homes with room for fewer items.
By being able to offer items to specific people and, hopefully in the future, to charities, SaveOr creates the potential to reduce trash and its emissions as an added bonus.
Scola’s unique approach to making estate planning more personal and active is what got him and SaveOr into the 2023-2024 cohort of the Melissa & Doug Entrepreneurs Accelerator, a year-long intensive program designed for Duke students who are committed to launching and growing their companies. (We’ve previously profiled Hayha Bots and Alleviate Health from the current cohort.)
Scola said there are third-party options that will sort through belongings on someone’s behalf, which not only takes away personal connections to the items, but also makes the process more expensive. SaveOr’s SaaS platform is offered as an annual subscription for $40/year or a lifetime payment of $270, both of which provide full access to SaveOr and unlimited item additions, invitees and more.
Scola also plans to offer SaveOr as a B2B platform to estate advisors as an option people can choose when they come in for an estate consultation. That way, no one will have to make those hard decisions while in the midst of an even harder situation of dealing with the death of a loved one.
“SaveOr is so important to me because I see the impact that it can make on many families,” Scola said. “Everyone will end up passing away. The last thing that I would want for such a tough event with my parents is to affect my relationship with my siblings. That’s something that I want to help navigate, as well as being able to give back through recycling and giving items to charities in the future.”
