Start here: how Tell Me works

You've signed up, you've added your mum — we'll say Mum throughout, but swap in Dad, Grandad, whoever this is for — and now you're wondering what actually happens next.

This is the guide that explains the machine, and more usefully, how to get the best out of it.

The loop, in one paragraph

Every couple of days Mum gets a question that starts with "Tell me". She replies however suits her — a voice note is ideal, typing is fine. Her answer is converted to text within a few minutes and saved straight away, but the story stays open. If she remembers something else that evening, or the next morning, she just sends another message and it joins the same story. When her next question goes out, we close that story and write it up properly — tidied into paragraphs, with nothing invented and no words put in her mouth. Her recording is kept forever, and so are her exact words.

That last bit is worth sitting with. Nothing in the archive replaces her. The written-up version is there so it reads well. The recording is there because in twenty years, the recording is the thing you'll want.

What you control, and what we handle

You decide who gets asked, what they get asked, and when. Everything else is ours: sending, converting voice notes, writing stories up, and remembering what she's already told us.

That last one matters more than it sounds. As Mum answers, a picture of her life builds up — names, places, the year she moved, the job she couldn't stand. Later questions draw on it. Six months in, her questions are noticeably more specific than the ones she got in week one. Which is the right way round, because by then she trusts the thing.

Spend ten minutes on her profile — it pays for itself

The biggest lever you have is her profile, and almost everyone rushes it.

In her settings you can add her partner, her children's names, what she called her own mother and father, where she grew up, where she lives now, what she did for a living, and a handful of life events. All of it ends up inside her questions. "Tell me about your first year in Coventry" lands differently to "Tell me about a place you lived".

There's also a box called anything we should know. Use both halves of it honestly:

Always wanted to hear how she met Dad. Her brother died in March — still very raw.

The first sentence steers questions towards what you actually want to hear. The second keeps them away from a wound. Both are worth writing down.

And under Topics, you can switch whole areas off — grief, faith, money, war, anything that doesn't suit her. Off means never asked.

Pick the channel she already uses

Choose one: WhatsApp, email, or the storyteller app. One per storyteller, deliberately — so her replies never end up split across two places.

The rule of thumb is to go where she already is. If she's on WhatsApp every day with the grandchildren, use WhatsApp. If she still prints her emails out, use email. Choose the storyteller app only if she's genuinely comfortable installing something — you send her the link and she takes it from there. It's the nicest of the three, with a big record button, her question read back to her, and photos and video built in, but it is one more thing to learn.

Nothing arrives until she says yes. On WhatsApp and email she gets a welcome message asking her to confirm, and questions start after that. In the storyteller app, signing in with her code is the yes.

Twice a week beats daily

New storytellers are set to twice weekly — Monday and Thursday — at 9am in their own timezone. You can change the days, the frequency and the time.

Resist the urge to speed it up. A question that arrives before she's finished thinking about the last one turns a pleasure into a chore, and the first thing to shrink is the length of her answers. Twice a week gives her a day or two to mull it over, record something, remember another bit, and add to it. If she's flying and asking for more, move to every other day. Daily is for the rare enthusiast.

Pick a send time that fits her day, too. Mid-morning, after the news, after lunch — whenever she's sat down with a cup of tea rather than halfway out of the door.

The list of questions is yours

Open Questions and you'll see her queue: the next question, then the one after that. We put three gentle ones in to start you off. After that nothing is added unless you add it — or unless you turn on keep the list topped up, which is off by default on purpose.

From there you can:

• swap a question for a different one
• drag the list into a different order
• take one off entirely
• write your own (it has to start with "Tell me", which is most of the trick)
• browse the question bank by topic

If a question was due and the list is empty, nothing goes out and we email you. That's better than us guessing at something she'd rather not be asked.

Your own questions are almost always the best ones in the queue. There's a whole guide on writing them — What makes a great custom question.

The best trick in the product: attach a photo

Any question in the queue can carry a photo, a voice message from you, or a short video.

Attach a photograph of her at nineteen and ask "Tell me about the day this was taken". Or record ten seconds of yourself asking the question in your own voice. It is not the same as a text message, and she will not answer it the same way.

Most hosts never find this. Try it once in the first fortnight and see what comes back.

Ring her before the first question arrives

Not a text — a phone call. Then a short text the day before the first question lands, so she recognises it when it appears.

There's a full guide on that conversation — How to tell your parent about Tell Me — including what to say and what to avoid (don't lead with legacy). It's the difference between "oh, this is the thing David mentioned" and "who is this".

What a good answer actually looks like

Long, rambling, and spoken.

The stories you'll treasure are the ones where she loses her thread, laughs at herself, and finds it again. Where she says "I haven't thought about this in fifty years". You can't get that from typing, which is why Why a voice note is worth a hundred typed messages is a guide of its own.

Tell her, in your own words:

Just talk like you're telling me over a cup of tea. It doesn't need to be neat. Ramble away.

And tell her the practical bits:

• she can take days to answer — nothing expires
• she can send several messages and they'll all join the same story
• she can skip any question she doesn't fancy, and nobody chases her
• she can send photos and video too, whichever way she's replying
• in the storyteller app, one recording can run up to ten minutes, and she can start another straight after

When she answers two questions at once

Worth knowing before it happens, because it catches people out.

Storytellers save up. Monday's question arrives, she means to get to it, Thursday's question arrives, and on Friday she sits down and answers both in one go. That's completely normal — often a good sign. But a WhatsApp message doesn't arrive with a label saying which question it's answering, so a plain reply gets filed under the most recent one. Monday's answer ends up sitting underneath Thursday's question, and you've got two unrelated stories sharing a prompt.

Three things worth knowing:

• On WhatsApp she can aim her answer. Long-press (or swipe) the question in WhatsApp and hit reply, and her answer is pinned to that question however old it is. Show her once — it takes ten seconds and fixes the problem at source.
• On email it's already handled. As long as she hits reply on the question email itself, rather than starting a fresh one, her answer files under the right question on its own.
• In the storyteller app it can't really happen. She's answering the question on the screen in front of her.

We'll usually spot it anyway

When an answer looks like it belongs somewhere else, a note appears on the story:

This sounds like an answer to Tell me about your first job

with Move it there and No, it's right here underneath. Nothing is ever moved automatically — a wrong guess acted on quietly would rewrite your family's archive without anyone asking, so it stays your call. Wave it away and we won't raise that answer again.

You can also move any answer yourself, whether or not we've flagged it: open the story, use the move control on the message, and choose the question it actually belongs to. Both stories are rewritten to match afterwards.

The one thing we can't fix for you

If she records a single voice note answering both questions in one breath, it can't be split in two. It's one recording, and we won't chop her words up to tidy the filing.

That's no disaster — the story just covers two things at once. But if she turns out to be a saver-upper, one sentence sorts it for good:

If a couple of questions have stacked up, do them as separate voice notes — one each.

React to her stories. This is the one that matters.

When you — or any family member you've invited — leave a heart and a line of comment on a story, she hears about it. It arrives on a day when no question is due, so it never competes with one:

Sarah loved the story you told about the bakery.

That single line is the fuel. She's talked for ten minutes into what feels like thin air, and this is what tells her somebody was actually listening. Storytellers who get reactions keep telling stories. Storytellers who don't, quietly drift.

If a story leaves you wanting more, use Ask a follow-up on the story itself. It jumps to the front of the queue, so it's the next thing she's asked, and it arrives framed as a follow-up — she'll know it came from something she said.

What to do with the stories

Each story sits in the archive with her recording, her exact words, and the written-up version. From there you can:

• Tag stories, so you can find every one about her mother in ten years' time
• Edit the written-up version if a name came out mangled — her original words are never touched
• Share a single story with a link, or as a small quote card for the family group chat
• Invite family as viewers (read-only) or editors (who can add questions too) — more people reading means more reactions, which means more stories. See Bringing the rest of the family in
• Export everything as a zip — a folder per story with her audio, her original words, the finished story and any photos. Keep a copy somewhere safe

When life gets in the way

If she's away, in hospital, or having a hard month, add a pause in her settings with a start and end date. Nothing arrives, nothing piles up, and it picks up where it left off.

If three questions in a row go unanswered, we stop sending on our own and let you know. Don't read that as a verdict — people go quiet for entirely ordinary reasons. What to do when they stop replying explains why chasing backfires. The short version: don't chase, don't bring it up on Sunday, and offer to slow things down rather than asking why she hasn't replied.

The five habits that make the difference

If you take nothing else from this:

1. Fill in her profile properly, including the sore subjects.
2. Write one question of your own in the first fortnight — something only you would know to ask.
3. Attach a photo to a question and see what it does.
4. React to every story, even if it's only a heart. Especially early on.
5. Leave the rhythm alone. Twice a week, no chasing. It compounds.

Do those five and in a year you'll have something that didn't exist before — in her voice, in her words, kept for good.