Fair picking rounds for family heirlooms

The idea

Nobody fights over the money; the will covers that. Families break over the piano, the ring, and the casserole dish, because dividing belongings has no agreed process and the sibling who got there first with a van sets the terms. Estate lawyers and mediators bill hundreds per hour to referee exactly this, and most families just absorb the damage instead.

The wedge is process legitimacy, not efficiency. Everything is photographed and browsable asynchronously so nobody is pressured in a living room; the draft order is randomised with a published seed everyone watches; picks follow a snake draft everyone consented to; and the whole pick log lands in a final PDF. The product’s job is to make “it was rigged” an unsayable sentence.

Who pays

The executor sibling pays GBP 49 once per estate, and it is the easiest sell in consumer software: they are legally responsible, emotionally exhausted, and staring at a week that could cost them two sibling relationships or two thousand pounds of mediator time. Distribution: estate lawyers and probate clerks who watch these fights professionally and would happily hand clients a link, plus SEO on “how to divide belongings between siblings”, a high-intent query with weak answers.

MVP scope

• Estate gallery with photo upload, item notes, and interest marking
• Participant invites and transparent seeded draft-order randomisation
• Snake-draft engine with turn emails and auto-skip timers
• Contested-item flagging and unclaimed-item handling
• Final division report PDF, Stripe one-time checkout
• Skip for v1: monetary valuation or equalising payments, in-app chat, video items, and multi-estate accounts

Build FairShare, a web app that runs a transparent snake draft for dividing family belongings after a death or downsizing. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres + auth + storage), Stripe.

Core flow: the organiser (usually the executor) creates an estate, uploads item photos with titles and optional notes, and invites participants by email. Before drafting, everyone browses the gallery asynchronously and marks interest on items. Draft order is then randomised in front of everyone: the shuffle uses a published random seed and each participant sees the same animated result, so nobody can claim rigging. Picks proceed snake-draft style (1-2-3-3-2-1) with email notifications on your turn and a configurable per-turn time limit that auto-skips.

Pages: estate gallery (grid with photos, filter by claimed/unclaimed), item detail, participants and draft-order screen, live draft room, and the final report.

Implementation details: items nobody marked interest in are excluded from the draft and listed separately as "unclaimed — donate or sell", which typically removes 60% of items and keeps the draft short. If two or more people mark an item "strongly want", flag it as contested and surface it early in the draft rather than letting it detonate late. The final output is a division report PDF: every item, its photo, who received it, and the full pick log, suitable for attaching to estate records.

Pricing: GBP 49 one-time per estate via Stripe, unlimited items and participants. Free preview mode up to 10 items.