Care Assistant Pro: Building a Simple SaaS for Small Home Care Agencies

My sister owns and runs her own home care agency, and for a couple of years she kept telling me how much she hated the software she was using to manage her business. It was built for large healthcare organizations, not small home care agencies, so it came with a ton of features she would never use while still being clunky and frustrating for the things she actually needed it to do. She was paying a premium for software that actually made her job harder. She kept half-joking that I should just build her something better. Eventually, I decided to actually do it. At the time, I didn't realize how much work I was signing up for or how much my skills needed to improve! That said, once I started digging into her day-to-day workflows, I realized the problem wasn't unique to her. Most small agency owners are either stuck with overpriced software that wasn't designed for them, or they're managing everything in spreadsheets and on paper because the alternatives are too complex or too expensive. I wanted to build something that was simple, affordable, and actually built around how small home care agencies operate, not how a hospital or a large franchise operates.

Direct outreach on LinkedIn completely flopped. Part of the problem, I think, is that I was looking in the wrong place. LinkedIn mostly seems to be a place where businesses that have already "made it" show off their success, and the founders on there are pretty set in the way that they do things and the tools they use. I also think that LinkedIn users, especially business owners, are numb to being pitched ideas and products in their DMs, so it's easy for them to disregard your message if they even see it at all. What has worked the best, by far, has been direct outreach and personal conversations through Facebook. There are tons of groups where my exact type of customer meets and asks for help. One post in the group saying "I need help managing my invoices" is worth a hundred cold emails or DMs on LinkedIn. I've found that it's important to be genuine when interacting with group members, and recognize that not every comment or message needs to be a sales pitch. Sometimes providing genuine advice is worthwhile to make a connection that leads somewhere down the road.

The most common frustration I hear is that everything lives in different places. Early on, agency founders are so focused on providing care (which is fair) that systems and processes tend to fall by the wayside. They often keep schedules in one spreadsheet, billing in another, care plans on paper, caregiver info in a folder somewhere. It works with one or two clients, but things start falling through the cracks fast as the agency grows. On top of all that, many founders are not highly technical, and many existing products are complex and offer far more services than a home care agency will ever need. I built my product to help home care agencies specifically by bringing all of that into one place so that completed shifts flow directly into invoices and payroll without re-entering data or jumping between tools. The user-friendly interface is a bonus that makes learning the tools easy for anyone, whether they're an owner, caregiver, or both.

People don't realize that the vast majority of the market is in small agencies. When most people think of home care, they picture large franchises or hospital-affiliated organizations with hundreds of employees. In reality, the industry is made up of thousands of small, founder-run agencies that may never grow beyond 5-10 clients and caregivers. Many of these founders are former caregivers themselves who started their agency because they believed they could provide better care on their own. They're not sitting in an office with an IT department evaluating software demos. They're doing boot-on-the-ground care work, managing their schedules in text messages and spreadsheets, and figuring out Medicaid paperwork on their own, often while working a second job. The existing software options are mostly built for the big players, which means they're expensive, complex, and full of features a small agency will never touch. These small agencies face real operational challenges, but the industry largely ignores them because individually they don't look like lucrative customers. When you add them all up though, it's a massive underserved market.

We plan to release many more features focusing on two main areas, compliance and client acquisition. On the compliance end, we want to implement Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act for Medicaid-funded care. On the client acquisition side, we plan to release a client prospecting workflow as well as tools and systems to help manage marketing campaigns and outreach. Complying with regulations and acquiring clients are two struggles that owners starting their agencies often face, so integrating those into our platform is a high priority.

We launched just over a month ago and have onboarded our first three agencies. We're extremely early, but it's exciting to see the work beginning to pay off.

I had worked for several healthcare companies, both large (United Health) and small (local non-profit, federally qualified health centers), as a business intelligence developer. My experience building out backend database solutions was very helpful when architecting the data side of things, but web development was mostly new to me. Learning about servers, clients, web architecture, and the process of the software development cycle in general was incredibly challenging, but also extremely rewarding and fun. Being able to do so while building a product to help my sister and others run their businesses more effectively added a ton of extra motivation.

I think the biggest mistake I made was building out features that people do want, but don't necessarily need in order to start using the product. I looked at competitors' products and thought "if I don't offer everything they're offering, right from the start, then why would anyone ever want to use my product?" This led to launching later than I needed to in order to start generating revenue and user feedback. Instead, what I learned is that I could have started with the most core feature (scheduling) and sold it initially as just that. Part of my problem, I believe, is that because I was a first-time founder, I had an idea in my head of what selling a B2B software product would look like, and that idea ended up not matching the reality of what I'm now experiencing. I pictured video conference calls with CEOs of established companies in suits and ties, demoing my product and giving sales pitches with a slide deck. In reality, sales for me is much more casual and on a personal level, with individuals who would have been happy to just have scheduling no longer be something they manage in their text messages and spreadsheets.