While looking for a friend’s wedding registry on Zola, Rachel Medoff was frustrated by the site’s tagline: “Zola is here for all the days along the way.”
Medoff has a background in software and has worked in sales, marketing and operations enabling go-to-market strategies. She has also seen friends get divorced and supported her father through hospice care.
From a personal and professional perspective, she was upset that someone on Zola’s marketing team decided this was a good way to advertise their product; it spoke to the scope of a life without allowing for the reality of the difficult days we all face.
This frustration inspired her to create Melon—Zola for death, as Medoff puts it.
The Durham-based startup provides a marketplace where the bereaved—who may lack the experience or general wherewithal to manage the aftermath of a death—can easily access funeral planning, vendors, and other assorted death care services.
“The first thing that I noticed in my research was that when you search for funeral planning on the internet, nothing comes up,” she said. “It’s this… void in the internet space.”
While there is currently a gap in what we might call the “death tech” market, Medoff said Melon’s biggest competition comes from Ever Loved and Cake.
Ever Loved functions similarly to GoFundMe, allowing users to collect funds and use donations to book a funeral venue. The issue, Medoff said, is that some funeral homes may mark up costs to account for the discounts provided by the site.
Cake, on the other hand, offers users templates for funeral and estate planning, which can be highly state-specific depending on the laws of the region.
“You were given this template and are having to fact-check the template based on where you are in order to make sure that it’s useful,” Medoff said. “Might as well just grab the template and hire a lawyer and a funeral director to do this.”
She said these approaches create a disconnect between the market strategies and what the funeral providers and bereaved are facing.
By contrast, Melon acts as a dual-sided marketplace. For bereaved individuals or funeral planners, it is a no-cost service. On the other side of the marketplace, Melon is a subscription model with three tiers of marketing.
Tier one is free for businesses and allows for three photos to be uploaded on the site along with contact information and a brief description of services. Tier two subscribers can supply a broader carousel of photos and invite customers to leave reviews with comments and images. The last tier shares the same features as tier two, along with an analytics page with information about engagement.
Medoff said the biggest challenge throughout this process is that an overwhelming number of people tell her Melon is a terrible idea because no one wants to talk about death.
“I think honestly the biggest hurdle is, how do you get people facing the inevitability that they’re either going to have to plan their own end of life or plan the end of life of someone that they care deeply about,” she said.
Being part of CED’s eighth GRO Incubator cohort (GrepBeat has previously several fellow cohort members) has been helpful throughout this process. Medoff said her mentor, Brian Sanders, provided her with advice before a demo day that helped her create a more conversational presentation.
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Startup: Melon
Founder: Rachel Medoff (CEO)
Founded: 2024
Team size: 1
Location: Durham, NC
Website: dearmelon.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Medoff also recently attended the North Carolina “Death Faire” as a vendor and was able to speak with a man in hospice care about the product. Even though he would not be able to use the product for himself, the man wanted his son to use it for his wife.
She said it made her wish she launched Melon sooner, because people clearly need the help.
“People want to help the people that they love, and that supersedes their own fear of death,”
Melon currently has a minimum viable product with a target goal of 200 funeral homes in northeastern North Carolina to test the interface. Medoff said the priority after the first year is to focus on working with funeral homes nationally.
She also said she wants to expand the platform to allow users to register for personal care items, similar to a wedding registry, that people can purchase for those grieving instead of flowers.
For those interested in Melon, Medoff said she would love to onboard any service providers in the funeral home, hospice care, product management or engineering fields.
