We built the thing we needed.

"I kept a running list in my head of things I knew about people. Whose mother was sick. Who was job hunting and didn't want it known. I was proud of that list right up until I started losing pieces of it."

The pieces don't go all at once. You forget a name first, then which of two brothers it belonged to, then the year, and eventually you are asking someone a question you already know the answer to and watching them notice.

I tried the obvious fixes. A notes app, which turned into a graveyard of half sentences with no way to find anything. A spreadsheet, which lasted three weeks. The contacts app on my phone, which has a field for a fax number and nowhere to write that a friend's daughter is applying to conservatory this spring.

What none of them did was ask. They were all storage, waiting for me to be organized. The thing I actually needed was something that would take a minute of me talking and do the filing itself, then tap me on the shoulder in March.

Nicholas Chrapliwy, co-founder

Kith replaces your address book. It holds the same phone numbers, and then it holds everything the address book had nowhere to put: how you met, who they are related to, where they have lived, what they care about, the specific thing they told you that you would be embarrassed to forget.

We call that enrichment, and the whole product turns on making it cost nothing. You tap a microphone and describe someone the way you would describe them to a good friend, in whatever order it comes out. Kith transcribes that, pulls out the names and dates and places, shows you exactly what it kept, and files it. No forms, no required fields, no order to get right.

Then it does the part you cannot do yourself. It watches the dates and the silences, and it tells you who to reach out to today, with the detail that makes the message worth receiving. Not a notification that says "Dorothy's birthday." One that reminds you she keeps every card she has ever been sent, so this is a letter and not a text.

That is the entire idea. Everything else on the roadmap is in service of it.

Kith is on iPhone and on the web. They are not identical, and we would rather say so here than let you find out.

Three things, in this order. Voice capture on the web, so the assistant is not a phone-only feature. A closed loop between reminders and history, so that reaching out to someone becomes part of what Kith knows about them without you writing it down twice. And Android, natively.

We are deliberately not naming dates. Two people ship slowly and honestly, or quickly and badly, and we have picked one.