Why I built Dear You

Hi — I'm Liz. I'm a writer and a mom of three in Los Angeles, and Dear You exists because I failed at every other way of doing this. Twice, specifically.

With my first daughter, I bought the baby book. I opened it exactly three times: her first food (avocado), her first word (mama), and her first steps (thirteen months, on the dot). That was it. I was postpartum and overwhelmed, and at the end of those days I didn't have the energy to pull a book off a shelf and write details or long stories, especially by hand!

With my second, we got more ambitious. I'd read about Meghan Markle writing emails to her kids to read when they're older, and my husband and I loved the idea. We set up an email address for the girls and… that's about as far as it got. Every time I sat down to write, it felt so heavy. If they were going to read this someday — maybe even after I was gone — shouldn't it be profound? The pressure to write something important is exactly what made me write nothing at all.

Then, pregnant with my third, I finally understood what I'd been getting wrong. After the Palisades fire, we'd temporarily relocated from Santa Monica to Newport Beach, and my daughters and I suddenly had these long, unhurried afternoons — Uno at the beach, watermelon in the backyard. Nothing "important" happened on those days. No milestones. Nothing a baby book would ask about. And I realized those were the days I wanted to keep forever. The first steps were cool. But these days — the ordinary, beautiful, nothing-happened days — were the actual childhood.

So I built the thing I needed: one line and one photo a day, written to each of my kids. Small enough that I'd actually do it. No pressure to be profound — the profound part turns out to take care of itself.

Words are literally my job — I'm a screenwriter and novelist — and I still couldn't sustain a baby book or a weekly email. That's how I know the problem was never effort. It was the size of the ask.

One more thing you should know about how Dear You is built: the AI never writes your entries. There's a wave of memory apps now where you upload photos and AI generates your child's "story." I think that misses the entire point. Your kid doesn't want a story about them written by a model — they want you. Dear You's AI does one job: when you're stuck, it asks you a question. Every word of the answer is yours.

Dear You is independent and bootstrapped. There's no growth team A/B-testing ways to keep you in the app longer — the whole point is that you leave in under a minute. Your kids' childhoods are not content, not ad-targeting data, and not for sale.

If Dear You helps you hold onto even one ordinary Tuesday, it's doing its job.

— Liz