Never Forget the Moments That Matter
There are two kinds of friends.
The one who texts you "happy birthday" three days late, apologetic, slightly embarrassed. And the one who shows up that morning with something specific — a memory, a song, a "hey, I remembered."
Both of them love you. One of them just has a system.
You know the feeling. You find out about an engagement through Instagram. You realize your best friend's wedding anniversary passed when she posts a photo. You run into someone whose dad just died and have to apologize for not knowing.
It's not that you don't care. You care a lot. You just can't hold all of it in your head — not the birthdays, not the anniversaries, not the small things like "Tunde is running his first marathon this weekend" or "Phoebe just started a new job and is probably nervous about Monday."
That's why YourPond has Reminders.
What YourPond Reminders Actually Do
YourPond is a personal CRM — a tool that helps you organize and remember the people in your life. The Reminders system has three parts.
Reminders
Set a reminder for any contact and any occasion. Some are obvious:
- Birthdays (auto-generated when you add a birthday to a contact)
- Anniversaries (auto-generated when you add an anniversary)
Others are the ones that actually matter:
- "Wish Tunde luck on his marathon" — Saturday
- "Check in on Maya — first week at the new job" — Monday
- "Send Grace a thank-you note" — by Friday
You can mark them complete, dismiss them, or let them sit on your homepage like a quiet to-do list for being a good friend.
Anniversaries
Anniversaries are different from birthdays — they connect two people, and they carry meaning. YourPond understands this. When you add a wedding anniversary, it links the two people as spouses automatically. An engagement date marks a relationship. A friendship anniversary marks the day you met.
You can even add memorials — the day you lost someone. YourPond will remember that day every year, so you don't have to brace for it alone.
Partial dates are fine. You don't always know the exact year. "March, sometime in 2019" is enough.
Types of anniversaries you can track:
- Wedding
- Engagement
- Dating
- Friendship
- Memorial (in memory of someone you've lost)
- The day you met
- Custom (anything else)
iOS Push Notifications
If you have the YourPond iOS app, every reminder you've set gets pushed to your phone the morning of. A real notification, on your lock screen, before your day starts.
No more discovering you missed something three days later.
If you're on the web, you'll see your active reminders on your homepage dashboard. Either way, the moment doesn't pass without you knowing.
Why Most People Forget
It's not because they don't care. It's because the human brain wasn't built to track 150 birthdays, 30 anniversaries, and the dozens of small life events happening to the people in your life every year.
Instagram and Facebook used to do this for us — kind of. You'd see a birthday banner and think "oh, I should text them." But algorithms have eroded that. You might not see your friend's post at all. And even when you do, you're getting it alongside an ad for a mattress and a video of a stranger making pasta.
YourPond gives you the reminders without the feed.
That's the whole point.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Imagine getting a notification on a Tuesday morning: "Wish Brianna luck on her marathon today." You added the reminder a month earlier when she mentioned she was training. You text her at 6am — "thinking of you today, you've worked so hard" — and she sends back a heart and a "this means so much."
A 30-second interaction. It mattered.
That's the bet YourPond is making: that you have hundreds of these moments in your life every year, and most of them are slipping past you. Not because you don't love your people. Because the systems we use to remember things are broken.
How to Set It Up
If you're already a YourPond user:
- Open any contact
- Scroll to the Reminders section
- Tap Add reminder — pick a date and write a note
- Birthdays and anniversaries auto-generate reminders when you add them
For anniversaries:
- Open any contact
- Scroll to the Anniversaries section (between Reminders and Relationships)
- Pick a type (wedding, engagement, dating, friendship, memorial, met, custom)
- Add a date — full or partial
If you're new to YourPond:
- Download YourPond on the App Store or sign up at yourpond.io
- Add your first contact (or use Describe Your People to add ten in 30 seconds)
- Add a birthday — your first reminder is now set
- Enable notifications in the iOS app to get push reminders
YourPond is free for up to 25 contacts. Pro is $15/month or $120/year and unlocks unlimited contacts, Lists, Analytics, Connections, and the full NLP parser.
The Details
A few things worth knowing:
Reminders are free. Reminders, anniversaries, and push notifications are available to all users, free and Pro. This isn't a paywalled feature — it's core to the product.
Anniversary side-effects are smart. Adding a wedding anniversary automatically creates a spouse relationship between the two contacts. Adding a death anniversary marks the contact as deceased. These aren't just calendar entries — they update your relationship graph.
Your text stays private. Reminder content is stored in your YourPond account and encrypted at rest. Sensitive fields use per-user field-level encryption via AWS KMS. Your data is never sold or used for advertising.
It works on iOS and web. The iOS app sends push notifications. The web app shows active reminders on your dashboard. Both let you create, complete, and dismiss reminders.
The people you love are doing meaningful things every week. Marathons. New jobs. Anniversaries. Hard days. Good days.
You don't have to remember all of it.
You just have to set up the system that does — and show up when it tells you to.
Emily Hyeamang is the founder of YourPond and LilyPadLabs, based in Chicago.