Startup idea: Guided Living Will Before the Crisis
A father landed in the ICU with respiratory failure and no living will, leaving his son to make medical decisions without knowing what he'd want.
Get the PRD prompt, $9.99 Market: $6.1M in 3 years
r/CaregiverSupport · Sep 14, 2026 – Oct 14, 2026 · 41 upvotes
Dad went into respiratory distress without a…
Read the thread · 19 comments
Guided Living Will Before the Crisis is a startup idea for adult children and seniors. A father landed in the ICU with respiratory failure and no living will, leaving his son to make medical decisions without knowing what he'd want. A thread in r/CaregiverSupport drew 41 upvotes and 19 comments between Sep 14, 2026 – Oct 14, 2026. People get by with Five Wishes, LegalZoom, and Hospital forms, and that still leaves this job open. Hotness is 2.90, Simmering. Strong pain. Some willingness to pay. The thread drew 41 upvotes and 19 comments. Crowded with decent tools. A few weeks of work. A first version is a moderate amount of work, about 3–4 weeks, priced between $10 and $49 a month and charged as a one-time purchase. The pain, the source, the alternatives, the scope notes, and the questions on this page are free to read and free to build from. The agent starter prompt is the paid part. The first slice is on the page. One credit unlocks the rest, to paste into a coding agent, download as Markdown, or send as a private link.
Who has it
Adult children and seniors.
- Adult children
- Seniors
- B2C
- United States
- r/CaregiverSupport
What people use now
3 options, and the gap between them.
Five Wishes
LegalZoom
Hospital forms
Crowded with decent tools.
Guided Living Will Before the Crisis is built for the part these leave undone.
A way through
Gently guide families through a legally sound advance directive before a crisis, using plain questions instead of legal jargon, with storage and emergency access.
MVP scope
The first version, in 3 weeks.
- 00 Goal
The one job
Plain-language questions that produce a legally valid advance directive, stored for instant emergency access.
- 01 Week 1
The core
Guide families through a legally sound advance directive with plain questions, not legal jargon.
- 02 Week 2
The follow-through
Store the finished directive with emergency access.
- 03 Week 3
How it ships
As a web app that opens in any browser, with nothing to install. AI helps, but the core job works without it.
- — Not in v1
Left out on purpose
Replacing Five Wishes. Version one does the one job above and stops there.
How it could charge
The business model, at a glance.
- Model
- One-time purchase
- Price
- $10–49 a month
- Buyer
- PeopleAn individual or household pays
- Region
- United States
Hotness
Why it scores 2.90.
Strong pain. Some willingness to pay. The thread drew 41 upvotes and 19 comments. Crowded with decent tools. A few weeks of work.
41 upvotes 19 comments r/CaregiverSupport Sep 14, 2026 – Oct 14, 2026 verified Oct 14, 2026 Thread ↗
Weights: pain 25%, willingness to pay 20%, demand 20%, gap 15%, ease 10%, recency 10%. Recency is recomputed every build. The source report’s 1–10 score is not shown.
Market size · estimate
How big this could get
A bottom-up estimate for Guided Living Will Before the Crisis: real customer counts × a realistic price. Not a forecast.
$3.1B
31M buyers · 50% of US residents aged 65+
$614M
6.2M buyers · bought by seniors or adult children online
$6.1M
62,000 buyers · 1% of the reachable segment in three years
What that means
62,000 buyers at $99 = $6.1M in sales
Medium confidenceHow we estimated this
- Base: 61,200,000 US residents aged 65+.
- Has the problem: 50% (assume half have no advance directive yet).
- Revenue per buyer: $99 one-time ($99 one-time).
- Reachable: 20% (bought by seniors or adult children online).
- Three-year capture: 1% of the reachable segment.
TAM = customers with the problem × revenue per customer. SAM = the part an early product can reach. SOM = a conservative three-year share of SAM. Bars use a log scale. Shares marked “assume” are our judgment, not measured.
Take it to a build
Build Guided Living Will Before the Crisis with an agent, or with us.
Agent starter prompt
$9.99 / 1 credit
A full PRD written for a coding agent: scope, data model, screens, edge cases, and the first week of tasks for this idea.
- Copy it straight into Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex.
- Download it as a .md file you keep.
- Send your bot a private link that refreshes every seven days.
# Agent starter prompt: Guided Living Will Before the Crisis You are a senior product engineer. Build only the product described in this document. If a detail is missing, choose the smallest option and write it down in the README. Do not invent a second product, a marketplace of marketplaces, or a growth hack. ## Product Name: Guided Living Will Before the Crisis One line: Plain-language questions that produce a legally valid advance directive, stored for instant emergency access. Shape: Web app AI stance: AI-assisted Region for v1: United States Hotness (context only, not a requirement): 2.90 (simmering). Strong pain; some willingness to pay; thread engagement 41▲/19💬 (demand 1/5); crowded with decent tools; a few weeks of work. ## Problem A father landed in the ICU with respiratory failure and no living will, leaving his son to make medical decisions without knowing what he'd want. Who feels it: Adult children and seniors.
The first slice is above. The rest unlocks for 1 credit and is never in this page’s HTML.
Credits work on both sites. On Business Ideas to Build the same credit unlocks the business plan and growth playbook for Guided Living Will Before the Crisis.
Or we build it
Your first version, shipped by our team.
A working product in your repo, built from this PRD. You own the code.
$1,000 scoping fee, credited toward the build.
Equity instead of cash is an application, not a checkout →Questions
Is this idea already taken?
People already use Five Wishes, LegalZoom, Hospital forms. Those options do not do the job in the solution above. The idea is free to build. Nothing here is an exclusive claim.
How hard is a first version?
Moderate. A tight MVP is about 3 weeks (3–4 weeks), assuming the regulated or partner-gated parts are stubbed. The paid prompt turns that into tasks.
Who would pay, and how?
The audience is adult children and seniors. Charge a one-time purchase, and test a price between $10 and $49 a month. Willingness to pay is one input to Hotness, not a promise that someone will buy.
Can I use the evidence?
Yes. Build the product. The thread title is a short excerpt with a link, not a quote we are putting in someone's mouth. Exact post dates and verbatim lines are added only after a manual check. Ideas are suggestions, not medical, legal, or financial advice.
The sister site keeps a business plan and a growth playbook for the same pain. Draft the business plan