Case study / Personal venture
FamJet: packing lists that know how old your kids are.
Most packing lists online treat a six-month-old and a six-year-old as the same traveler, even though they need very different things. FamJet is a free service that builds a family's packing list from the destination, the trip, and the ages of the people going. My wife and I come up with the ideas and make product decisions together. I do most of the development, using AI tools, and she owns the packing lists and marketing.
- Role
- Founder. I do most of the development; my wife owns the packing lists and marketing. Product decisions are shared.
- Status
- Live and free to use
- Entity
- FamJet LLC, Washington State, 2025
- Live at
- famjet.com
01The problem
Packing for a family takes more planning than it looks like. The information is out there, but it's spread across generic checklists written for an average traveler. If you get it wrong, you find out at the destination, paying full price at a pharmacy with tired kids.
The problem came out of our own experience packing for family trips. Once we'd named it, we talked it through with friends and other parents, and they all said they'd want something like this. These are the problems we kept coming back to:
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The core gap
Age-specific needs
Generic lists don't separate an infant from a toddler or a grade-schooler, and a child's age changes what a family packs more than anything else. FamJet is built around this.
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Time cost
Information overload
Parents put lists together by hand from blog posts and generic checklists. Even so, people forget an average of two essential items every time they pack.
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Emotional cost
Decision anxiety
Parents worry about forgetting the thing that matters most, like a comfort toy, a medication, or enough diapers. In one survey, 84.5% of people said they worry about forgetting things when packing.
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Distribution
Unequal mental load
The packing often falls to one parent, and most of it lives in that parent's head. A shared list puts it where everyone in the household can see it.
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Unaddressed
Buy-there vs. bring-it
Packing lists rarely say what you can just buy when you get there, so people either overpack to be safe or underpack and pay more for it later.
Supporting figures: 84.5% of people worry about forgetting things when packing, forget an average of two essential items per trip, and spend an average of $53 replacing what they forgot (Radical Storage, 1,511 Americans, September 2024). 85% of US parents are very likely to travel with their children in the next twelve months (NYU Tisch Center of Hospitality and Family Travel Association, 2022). Figures are from published third-party research, not from FamJet's own users.
02What it does
You describe the trip, FamJet makes a list, and you check things off as you pack.
- The list changes with each child's age, from infants up to teenagers.
- It also changes with the destination, so a beach trip and a mountain trip get different lists.
- You can check items off as you pack, on whatever device you have with you.
- You can save a trip and start from it the next time.
- It includes tasks to take care of before you leave, along with what goes in the bag.
- International trips get extra items for documents and border logistics.
03Try it
This takes about thirty seconds. There's one trip and ten items. Pack for the traveler shown, then change their age and see how much of the answer changes.
TripBeach · 5 days · warm
Pick what an 8-month-old needs for five days at the beach.
This is a small game written for this page. It doesn't use FamJet's engine, which looks at much more than age. It's here to show that age alone changes the answer.
04How I built it
I do most of FamJet's development, using AI tools, and it runs as a web app on Vercel. AI shows up in two places: in how I built it, and in the product.
AI coding tools let me write it much faster than I could have by hand. That's also what I work on at Amazon: finding the places where AI changes how engineers work.
In the product, AI generates the lists. A good list depends on the destination, the length of the trip, the season, the kind of trip, and who's going, and those combine in a lot of ways. The result has to be good enough that a parent will trust it at 11pm the night before a flight.
It's free to use.
05Why it's here
My résumé shows that I can manage a team that ships a control plane. FamJet shows that I can take a problem we had at home and, with my wife, turn it into a company and a live product, outside my day job. I think that's worth knowing about someone who wants to lead engineers.
It also keeps me writing code. I have opinions about developer experience and AI tools, and they're easier to trust when I use those tools myself.