GuardianCare Health · Founding Designer · August 2026Shipped Caregiver App MVP Solo After Losing Developer and Funding
As Founding Designer at GuardianCare Health, I set out to build an MVP that would bridge the communication gap between caregivers and care teams. There are 63 million unpaid caregivers in the US, and most show up to appointments and the ER with fragmented notes and half-remembered details. That leads to complicated, expensive patient intake for hospitals and insurers. My goal was to fix this without requiring clinical workflow changes or EHR integrations, so it could get into caregivers' hands fast.
Partway through the project, our developer left and we ran out of funding. Rather than stall the project, I switched from design into development myself, writing and testing the code to get the app across the finish line. The whole effort was self-funded from that point on.
I launched the MVP in August 2026 and brought on our first 30 users. Talking with them surfaced two hard truths: trust is difficult to earn when you're asking people to share health information, and caregivers have no spare time for extra tasks — logging a note had to take under 10 seconds and a single tap. I used that feedback to refine the product, cutting friction out of the core logging flow so it matched how caregivers actually live their days.
