Contract work, remote, part-time
Some people are very good at listening. We’re looking for them.
We record people’s life stories so their families keep them — most storytellers are older adults, though not all. That takes a person on the other end of the phone who knows how to ask a question and then be quiet.
What the work is
You call someone, and you ask about their life.
That is genuinely the whole job. Everything else — the questions, the recording, the transcription, the family — is handled around you.
Recorded phone conversations about someone’s life — childhood, work, love, hardship, and what they want the people after them to know. Most storytellers are in their seventies, eighties, and nineties; some are parents of small children, and some are facing a diagnosis at any age.
About 75 minutes a session, scheduled in advance, from anywhere. You take the sessions that fit your week and decline the ones that don’t.
Our app places and records the call. You mark each question off as you go, so you are never taking notes while someone is telling you something difficult.
We provide the questions and the training. Each family’s questions are built from an intake beforehand, including the ones the family has never managed to ask themselves.
The same interviewer stays with a family through all of their sessions. By the third call it stops being an interview and starts being a standing appointment with someone they look forward to.
Who tends to be good at this
Usually someone who has already spent a career listening.
The single hardest part is silence.
Ask an eighty-year-old about the day their father died and they will pause for eight seconds before answering. A nervous interviewer fills that gap — with a follow-up, with reassurance, with anything — and the answer is gone. It does not come back.
The best interviewers ask, and then get out of the way. If you already know that about yourself, this is work you will be good at.
What it pays
Plainly, and with the math shown.
Paid as a contractor, per completed piece of work. No minimum hours and no obligation to take a session you don’t want.
| Completed audio session | $90 |
|---|---|
| Filmed session | $120 |
| Packages you bring us | 10% |
| Editing a family’s memoir | $600 |
| Recruiting an interviewer who completes five sessions | $500 |
What that adds up to
Ninety dollars a session undersells the work, because the sessions are only part of it. One Legacy Edition family, brought in by you and carried through:
- 10% of a $4,995 package you brought us $499.50
- Six recorded sessions at $90 $540.00
- Editing their memoir $600.00
One family, start to finish $1,639.50
Roughly twenty hours of work, spread across about three months.
Nothing here is tied to ratings
Your pay is not affected by customer ratings or satisfaction scores, and it never will be. Paying on family sentiment would push interviewers away from the hard questions — which is the opposite of the job. We review ratings for quality and coaching. They are never an input to what you are paid.
Requirements
Four things, and they are not negotiable.
Families are trusting us with the most personal hour of their year. These exist because of that.
A background check before your first session. No exceptions, and we cover the cost.
A quiet room and a wired headset. No speakerphone, no background noise, no dog. The recording is the product, and it has to be clean.
Reliable internet. The calling app runs in a browser, so a connection that drops mid-session is a real problem.
Fluency in the language you would be interviewing in. We do not use translation software during sessions. If you are fluent in more than one, say so — it is genuinely useful to us.
How to apply
Tell us about a conversation.
The form is short and the last question is the one that matters. We read that answer before anything else on the page — before the résumé line, before the background, before where you live.
If it takes you a while to write, that is usually a good sign.