We build planning tools that work when infrastructure doesn't.
MAD Gear is a small, veteran-owned company based in Austin, Texas. We make emergency planning tools for families and organizations who want a real, written plan before they need one.
Sam Amyett
Founder & CEO
Sam served as a Mission Commander aboard the E-6B Mercury, the aircraft the U.S. Navy operates when all ground-based nuclear command and communications infrastructure has been destroyed or compromised. His career was built around a single premise: the plan has to exist before the failure, it has to live in multiple places, and it has to be executable by people who are under stress and working with limited information.
MAD Gear is a direct application of that experience. The tools we build are not theoretical. They are designed around the same planning discipline Sam applied professionally, translated into something practical for everyday families and organizations.
A real gap, not a theory.
In late February 2024, an AT&T outage took down 911 service and basic communications across large parts of the country for most of a day. Messages weren't getting through. People couldn't reach family members. For a brief window, the kind of coordination that everyone takes for granted stopped working.
We had plenty of organization at home. Checklists, plans, shared notes. What we didn't have was a structured system for what happens when communications become unreliable and decisions need to happen fast. We sat down in early March 2024 and built a simple framework for exactly that. It was built around coordination, redundancy, and getting back in contact. That became the first Contingency Planner.
Since then, we've sold over 12,000 physical planners, launched ReadyPlan, and built a community of people who take planning seriously without taking themselves too seriously about it.
The planner is the master copy. The phone is the operational copy.
Physical
Contingency Planner
Paper still works when batteries die, networks fail, or stress makes people forget the details. The physical planner is the full reference record. It doesn't depend on a signal, a login, or an app update. It goes on the shelf and it's there when you need it.
Digital
ReadyPlan
Most people always have their phone. ReadyPlan is the operational copy of your plan. It's accessible, easy to update, shareable with the people who need it, and it works offline. The planner and ReadyPlan are designed to work together, and they're better as a system than either is alone.
Communications comes first because a plan is only as good as your ability to coordinate it.
Most preparedness products focus on gear, food, and equipment. Those things matter, but they're downstream of coordination. If the people in your household don't know the plan, the gear doesn't help. If your communications fall apart, nothing else holds together.
We take a practical, low-drama approach. We're not in the business of fear. We'd rather people put that energy into a written plan that reduces stress and increases clarity when something actually goes wrong.
AI helps people start. That's it.
The barrier to emergency planning isn't that people don't care. It's that staring at a blank page and trying to think through every scenario is genuinely hard, and most people put it off indefinitely. ReadyPlan uses AI to generate a structured first draft based on your location, household size, and the scenarios that are actually relevant to where you live.
From there, you review it, fill in the specifics, and share it with your family. The AI does the heavy lifting on the starting point. The thinking and the decisions are still yours. We're not building a tool that replaces judgment during an emergency. We're building a tool that makes sure the plan exists before you ever need to use it.
Equip families and organizations with a planning system that supports a coordinated response when it matters.
We're lowering the barrier to entry by making planning approachable, practical, and shareable. Over time, we're building MAD Gear and ReadyPlan to serve larger groups that need coordinated planning access, including churches, schools, neighborhoods, and community organizations.
Start with a plan.
If you're a family, ReadyPlan is the fastest path to a real written plan. If you lead a group or organization, get in touch.