Every ICU doctor in Michigan already knew how to put in a central line. Wash your hands, clean the skin with chlorhexidine, mask and cap and gown and gloves, drape the patient, then ask every morning whether the line still needs to be in there. Five steps, published for years and free to anyone.
A Johns Hopkins guy named Peter Pronovost printed them on a card anyway and talked more than a hundred Michigan ICUs into using it. Infections fell from 7.7 per thousand catheter-days to 1.4 in eighteen months. An estimated 1,500 people who were going to die didn't. The state saved roughly $175 million.
Item four is what moved the number: the nurse in the room got authority to stop a physician mid-procedure if he skipped a step. Nobody in Michigan learned anything new about sterile technique that year. Someone standing in the room just became responsible for it happening. The information had been free for years and doing nothing.
The American funeral business has the same gap, and cremation just widened it.
Families now spend less time in the building and buy fewer goods, but somebody still has to close out an entire human life. Banks, utilities, Social Security, credit freezes, the cell plan, the Facebook page, and a dozen agencies that each want their own certified death certificate mailed somewhere different. Empathy measured that work at up to 500 hours spread over 13 months, handled by whoever is in the worst emotional shape of their life.
Six funded companies already sell funeral homes software to organize those hours. Cadence's own marketing says it "empowers families to do it themselves," which is a generous way to describe thirteen months of paperwork.
So you become the aftercare concierge. $599 for the first 30 days, $999 for 90, sold through independent funeral homes on a disclosed referral fee. Ten partner homes at 10% attachment runs about $140,000 a year. Fifty gets you near $700,000, and you'd be the only one in the category doing the work instead of handing over the checklist.
Read the full playbook here:
Cremation unbundled the American funeral, but the 500 hours of post-death paperwork stayed. Empathy, Cadence and ClearEstate sell software to organize that work. Nobody sells it completed.
From the Vault:
TikTok Shop did $11.8 billion in six months, and a buried subscription rule means affiliate commission is paid once. The refill order is where the margin actually lives.
Google shipped an embeddable Preferred Sources button on August 20, 2026. Search referrals are down 33%, 600,000 sources are already selected, and the paid tooling around it does not exist.
