Nobody budgets for a grandmother's stories

In Riyadh, plenty of families will tell you they wish someone had recorded their grandfather's stories before it was too late. The need is real. Raise it at a long dinner table and someone always goes quiet.

Now try to sell that service.

A person who sets up to sit with elderly relatives, record their memories and bind them into a book is answering a genuine need. But there is no aisle for it. No household has a line in its spending called this. Nobody's sister did it last year, so nobody feels behind for not doing it. There is no rival to compare against, no going rate, no habit of picking up the phone to ask.

That is the gap between a need and a market. In a market, buying is already normal. People know roughly what it costs, who sells it, and what buying it says about them. Weddings have that. Graduations have that. A grandmother's memories, mostly, do not.

Being first can be thrilling. It is also slow in a way that surprises almost everyone who tries it, because the work is not only making the thing. It is persuading people that this is something one pays for at all, and giving them a reason to do it now rather than someday.

It can be done. Driving lessons and life insurance were once strange things to spend money on. But it is a different job from selling into a market that already exists.

The people who make it through tend to be the ones who knew, from the first day, which of the two jobs they had taken on.