In 2020, Emily Cisek launched The Postage, a digital estate-planning and after-death-messaging platform that faced a crucial first hurdle: ensuring that customers and partners could trust it with personal and confidential information.
Cisek’s platform would combine end-of-life financial planning with a service that offered video and audio messages from loved ones after their passing—missives regarding financial details as well as intimate video and audio notes. The resulting site was an easy way for people to organize their financial affairs and manage all the details surrounding death. The Postage could even help democratize estate planning by making a difficult and expensive process simple and affordable for all families.
It was a novel idea that was dependent on a cloud-first strategy. It was also highly sensitive, both because of the subject itself as well as the data involved. In addition to legally valid wills, The Postage would store banking details like account numbers and passwords, so if a husband or wife who managed the couple’s finances passed away, their spouse could obtain that info easily and securely.
“When I first learned about the idea, I thought: Wow, this will be a really great tool,” says Ken Myers, the company’s Chief Technology Officer. “But it’s also exactly the kind of information every hacker wants to know.”
Early in the development process, Cisek and Myers chose Microsoft Azure as their cloud partner, in part because of that security concern. Myers had years of experience working with Azure technologies like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, and Azure Storage. He knew they could use the platform to launch quickly, efficiently, and with the flexibility to iterate. The Postage also knew that partnering with Microsoft Azure would provide needed credibility to help ease concerns from potential customers about data management and governance, and to help the startup grow rapidly.
“It’s a little over 24 months since the company launched,” says Cisek, who in addition to founding The Postage also serves as its CEO. “We’ve released a sophisticated web app and a mobile app, added partners, and now have legally valid wills in 49 states and D.C.—and we did it all with just $1.5 million in funding. Azure helped us accomplish that.”
Turning a Cloud-First Concept into a Business Reality
Cisek’s journey to The Postage began with tragedy in her own life.
Five years ago, within a span of six weeks, she lost three family members, including both of her grandmothers. It was a difficult time made even more challenging by an often overlooked aspect of death: paperwork.
“One grandmother had everything well organized, while another had complicated pensions,” she recalls. “It was a scavenger hunt pulling together all the paperwork, which is when I realized there had to be a better way.”
After the experience, Cisek set about creating a full-service interactive platform that relied on the power—and ease-of-use—of cloud computing. The site would help customers set up legally binding wills and avoid lingering paperwork headaches, while also offering resources to guide them through difficult conversations with a spouse or family members. Cisek also wanted to include a more personal feature, one that would allow people to record messages for loved ones, which would then be sent after their death at prearranged times for events like wedding anniversaries and college graduations.
To achieve all this, The Postage would have to rely heavily on data—managing it easily, storing it safely, and doing it all efficiently, with the ability to scale as needed to keep costs under control. The development team, including Myers, was just four people, so they had to be savvy about every dollar spent. They also had to operate knowing that the data they were working with was financially critical, highly personal, and emotionally charged.
“Out of the gate, we needed to make sure we were doing everything we could to protect people’s information,” says Myers. “With Azure, we knew that there was a lot of built-in security we could leverage. This included protection with firewalls, the ability to restrict access by IP, and API management that would allow us to control throttling of connections, plus all kinds of other things to help detect if something is happening.”
Leveraging Enterprise-Grade Technologies as a Startup
Cisek quickly realized that to help customers set up a will digitally, she needed a user-friendly web and mobile app.
For most startups, building a mobile app alongside a web experience and secure data-management platform is a challenge in itself, stretching the limits of a small team. But The Postage was able to use Microsoft cloud technologies like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure App Service, Xamarin, and Blazor to streamline the process and quickly scale.
“Azure Cosmos DB made it really easy for us to manage and scale customer data with high performance, integrated security and reliability,” Myers says. “That gives us a competitive advantage.”
The Postage team also used Azure to develop other aspects of the platform, like setting up an email provider and data governance—a critical concern in regulated industries like financial services. Essentially, every time the team needed to troubleshoot some aspect of The Postage’s platform, they were able to use Azure’s on-demand technologies, creating a custom tech stack for exactly what they needed.
“Everything about Azure made our lives easier and allowed us to keep the number of resources to a minimum, which is critical for a startup,” says Myers.
Adding Partners and Growing for the Future
Soon after it launched, The Postage was approached by some surprising potential partners: community banks hoping to expand their offerings and innovate in the heavily regulated financial services industry.
Historically, community banks have struggled with cloud computing and SaaS upgrades, in part because of data governance challenges. But The Postage inspired confidence, because it was already using a data platform trusted by the biggest players in the industry: Microsoft Azure.
“We knew we would have partners in adjacent industries at some point, but we didn't know they would be banks,” says Myers. “But just like we can isolate data for consumers, we can do the same for financial institutions.”
The Postage had another advantage with Azure: on-demand support. When the startup’s app was rejected from an online store, for instance, the Azure team stepped in to find a solution. “Microsoft had probably three different teams dig into the issue for us,” says Myers. “In the end, it was one of our packages that was causing the problem. And even though it had nothing to do with them, Microsoft stuck with us all the way through until we had a solution.”
In just 24 months and with about $1.5 million, The Postage’s small team was able to build and launch an online platform and app, and gain a number of partners in banking, wealth management, and enterprise-level insurance. Already, the company has proven the value of Cisek’s initial concept—along with the power of Azure’s managed services.
“To be able to make my vision come to life in such a short period has been really amazing,” says Cisek. “I started this for families, and it’s at a point now where I know I’m in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, even though sometimes startup life can feel like a rollercoaster.”
This article was produced by WIRED Brand Lab on behalf of Microsoft Azure.
