Looking back: why we built Banyan at Hari Raya 2025

Hari Raya 2025. My mum's house in Shah Alam. Forty-something people in a living room built for twelve, and at least a third of them I've never knowingly spoken to. The kid in the Power Rangers shirt is somebody's nephew. The auntie pouring teh tarik is somebody's auntie. The uncle confidently telling everyone about durian futures is, plausibly, mine.

My mum can tell you exactly how each one is related. She does it on demand, every year, in three languages, between rounds of ketupat. She is, in the way that every family has one or two of, the family registrar— the keeper of the map. The person who knows that the lady you keep calling Aunty Salmah is actually your father's cousin's wife's sister, and that the reason you don't remember her is because she lives in Penang and only flies down for Raya and weddings.

Every gathering, she rebuilds that map out loud. Every gathering, by next year, half of us have forgotten it again. And when she's gone — and one day she will be — the map goes with her.

The tool we actually needed

We didn't need another genealogy app. There are already serious tools for archives, certificates, and long research projects. What we needed was something a family registrar could pull out at a gathering, on her phone, and use to share the map she already keeps in her head — fast enough to keep up with thirty cousins walking past the durian.

So the design constraint was specific: build a tree that two tech-savvy family members can extend in five-second bursts while standing next to the food, while the other thirty-eight relatives do nothing but show up.

Three decisions that fell out of that

Placeholder profiles by default. You add Aunty Salmah as a private profile inside an invited family tree without asking her to stop, find her phone, and create an account in the middle of the gathering. That placeholder is not public, searchable, or an identity claim outside the tree. If she ever signs in with a matching invite, she can claim or correct the profile; elders can also remove or merge it. The registrar does not have time to herd thirty-eight relatives through OAuth.

Share-a-link, not invite-by-email. A QR code on the TV. A WhatsApp link in the family group. Anybody who has the link can join. The novel security thing is the elderrole — a small number of trusted relatives who can rotate the invite, approve role changes, and edit anyone. Everyone else can add placeholders and edit themselves. It's the same trust model your family already runs on; we just write it down.

“How am I related to this person?” as a first-class feature. Pick any two people on the tree. Banyan walks the shortest path and tells you in plain language: Hakim → father → brother → wife = Aunty Salmah. That sentence is the whole product. Everything else is in service of being able to say it.

Built for Southeast Asia, useful anywhere

Banyan is unapologetically coded for the kind of family I grew up in — big, multilingual, geographically scattered, and reunited two or three times a year by Hari Raya, CNY, Deepavali, or a wedding. But the underlying problem — too many people, too many relationships, the same forty faces every year that you can never quite place — is universal. We tested with a Vietnamese family of 60. A Punjabi family of 90. A Chinese-Indonesian family with cousins in five countries. The pattern holds.

If you've ever stood in a room of relatives and quietly wished somebody had drawn a map, this is the map. Start a tree. Share the link at the next gathering. Let the registrars in your family — the people who already do this work in their heads — write it down somewhere everyone can see.

Where we go from here

v1 ships with the registrar story — placeholders, share-a-link, How Am I Related, divorce/widowhood, deceased members, tree linking across families. Soon: gentle export to PDF posters you can print and pass around at the gathering. A year-in-review email that surfaces who you added, who joined, what you remember. Eventually: federation, so the cousins-from-Penang side of the tree can join up with the cousins-from-Singapore side without merging into a single household-of-everyone.

The tree we're building is the tree the banyan itself grows — aerial roots, new trunks, all connected, all one family. We hope it helps yours remember who you are.