Aura is a safe, simple online solution that helps people deal with end-of-life confidently. It allows you to record and share key information on how you'd like to go, leave important practical information to loved ones and celebrate your life story.
Hi, my name is Ben and I lead on the product side of the business. It’s been an awesome journey working with Paul, Dave and our web developers in Serbia - Eton Digital, building a product to help with a taboo topic that people can find difficult to talk about.
Aura is built for people who are anxious about death and want to manage the practicalities and to celebrate the life they’ve had. It’s split up into 4 key features:
- Life Story - Build a visual and descriptive celebration of your life with your friends and family.
- Practical Information and Wishes - Record, store and share life's useful information. Plan your end of life preferences and celebrations.
- Messages - Say the things that matter most, to life's most important people. You can schedule time capsule messages to be sent up to 25 years in the future.
- Communities and content - Safe, inclusive spaces for people to ask questions & support each other. Insight, opinions and stories as well as comprehensive guides & resources.
We have been extremely proactive in gaining feedback from users of the platform through focus groups, surveys, phone call interviews, analytics as well as immersing ourselves in the end of life community (which is one of the most caring, thoughtful and supportive communities I have ever come across). This feedback has been invaluable in guiding our product development going forwards into the future.
Please let me know if you have any questions to do with the Aura platform or anything else to do with Aura.
Thanks!
@hannah_pisani Thanks Hannah!
We have identified 2 target audiences who we classify psychographically as Death Anxious and Recently Bereaved.
These are very broad target segments based on life stage - the reality is that you can be any age, gender or life stage when you confront death. We would like to make sure Aura is accessible for a wide range of people.
Looking specifically at the demographics of who is using Aura so far we see that 90% of users are over age 45 and the majority are based in the UK as that is where we are currently located.
Hi, I'm Paul - the founder of Aura Life. I was diagnosed with MND in 2017 (or ALS if you’re from the States) which is an illness that’s left me trapped in a body that I'm losing control of.
This, along with a near-death experience I suffered in 2018 - led me to realize that when I died I’d leave a mess of complications behind me for my family. I also felt my social media profiles would not reflect the digital legacy that I wanted to leave. Finally - I regretted all the things that I hadn’t said to my loved ones.
This is why with my son David and colleague Ben, we created Aura. We’re aiming to take down the stigma around dying - it’s going to happen to us all, yet we struggle to talk about it, let alone prepare for it in a healthy way.
Please feel free to ask any questions about what it’s like living with a terminal illness, how tech is assisting me to live a more normal life, and of course - anything to do with Aura. Many thanks for taking the time to be here.
P.S here’s a link to my Lifestory on the Aura platform - https://www.aura.life/life-story...
Hey I’m Dave, Paul’s son and the co-founder of Aura, specialising more on the marketing and sales side of things. It’s been amazing working on this project with him and Ben - it’s all a manifestation of my dad’s struggles and I guess our struggles as a family, we’ve been determined to create something positive out of his illness.
I just wanted to draw some attention to our future plans and our fundraise too which is going on at the moment - we’re on the absolute final stretch at the moment and we’re 94% of the way there! We’re raising to build ‘Aura 2.0’ which will incorporate a lot of the feedback and learnings we’ve got so far, we want to start generating revenue and build out our team.
Our Crowdfund - https://www.crowdcube.com/compan...
As I say, we’re pretty close - so if you were able to help us on the next stage of this awesome journey we’re on then we’d really appreciate it if you could get in touch or share our fundraising link to anyone that might be interested in investing. (If you’re from the US or Canada I'm not sure you can invest through Crowdcube but do get in touch directly if not.)
Thanks so much for taking the time to check out our journey - hope you like it and have a lovely weekend one and all 😊.
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