PORTALS
April 15 reminds us of one of life's two certainties. Todd Krim is putting his money on the other.
The bleached-blond 30-year-old is the founder of FinalThoughts.com, a Web site that emails your last wishes to friends and family after you've gone to the great chat room in the sky.
"The goal of our Web site is to make planning for the inevitable less scary," says Krim, who's been nicknamed the Krim Reaper. The appropriately angel-funded Web site launched last September and quickly attracted 7,500 registered users. In February, the Los Angeles-based business raised a second round of venture funding. Krim, who holds a law degree and a master's in public health, is now pushing to convert the site into a full-service death portal, a leader in a vertical market that's six feet down.
Besides hosting email messages from the grave (a designated "guardian angel" alerts the site to your demise), FinalThoughts.com has added services that let registered members store online files explaining anything, from who gets the dog to where they'd like their ashes scattered. Members - or their survivors - can also browse the site's resource centers for a casket, a hospice, genealogy links, or a good lawyer. Krim is monetizing the glassy eyeballs through ecommerce, referral fees, strategic partnerships, and banner ads (which are tastefully omitted from the final emails).
The death industry, a relative latecomer to the emarket, has become downright lively. "Urns and caskets online - the public is eating it up," says Lisa Carlson, executive director of industry watchdog Funeral Consumers Alliance.
The to-the-death competition includes Plan4ever (www.plan4ever.com), which matches bereaved consumers to everything from florists to morticians, and Caskets Online (www.casketsonline.com), offering next-day delivery. HeavenlyDoor.com, which hosts funeral-home sites and online obituaries, went public in February and is launching a $5.5 million advertising campaign; it's trying to line up Tom Bosley (Happy Days' Mr. Cunningham) as a spokesperson.
Like any Web entrepreneur, Krim hopes to turn his site into a leader - and plans to take FinalThoughts.com public soon. "This business is my lifetime commitment," Krim says, sounding very much like the funeral director he's become. "Everyone working on this intends to keep it alive."
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