Notes from Our First Month of Early Access

A mother in our first cohort sent me a screenshot last Thursday at 11:47 p.m. It was a six-second voice note she had just left in CARLA: a half-asleep description of how her son had finally fallen asleep that night, including the specific weighted blanket position that finally worked. “I never could have remembered this in the morning,” she wrote. “Thank you for making this dumb easy.”

That message is the entire reason InclusiCare exists. It is also the yardstick I keep returning to as we close out the first month of our early access cohort.

When we opened the doors on April 18, we invited a small group of families, therapists, and educators to live inside InclusiCare with us. We told them we wanted to learn, not to demo. A month later, I want to share what they have taught us — and what is changing in the product because of it.

What surprised us

The single biggest pattern across the cohort has been when people capture. We assumed most logging would happen during structured caregiving moments — therapy sessions, after-school routines, doctor visits. The data says otherwise. The majority of entries are landing in two unexpected windows: late evenings after the kids are in bed, and in the parking lot after an appointment. People are using InclusiCare to download a tired brain before it forgets.

That changes our design priorities. Capture has to work when someone is exhausted and one-handed, not when they are calm and seated at a desk. We have been quietly rebuilding the voice-note flow this week so it is the literal first action you can take after opening the app — no taps, no menus, just speak. We are also testing a shorter, gentler nudge that fires at the times the data already shows people want to write. No streaks, no guilt.

The second surprise was about sharing. We had expected families to want polished, formatted summaries to send to teachers and therapists. What they have actually asked for is closer to the opposite: raw, dated entries with a single line of context. One of our therapist users said it best — “I would rather read three messy notes from this week than a beautiful PDF from last month.” We are reworking the share view to reflect that.

What we said no to

Two requests came up that we have decided not to build, at least not yet. The first was symptom-tracker style mood charts with numeric scoring. We have written before about our hesitation to turn children into dashboards, and the cohort feedback actually reinforced that instinct — every family who asked for it framed it as “I think I should want this,” not “I would actually use this.” So we are leaving it on the shelf.

The second was a direct integration with a specific electronic health record. The request was real and the use case was real, but the trust and security work it would require this early would slow everything else down for months. We told the family who asked, in plain language, what the trade-off was. They agreed it was the right call. That conversation, more than any feature, is what early access is actually for.

What is next

The next month is about depth, not breadth. We are doubling the cohort, but only along the same family profile — children with complex communication and behavioral needs, with at least two non-parent caregivers in the picture. We are also bringing on our first formal partner site: a small special education program here in Arizona that has agreed to use InclusiCare as the shared notebook between classroom staff and home for the rest of the school year. More on that when the paperwork is signed.

If you have been on the waitlist and have not heard from us yet, you will. We are moving deliberately because the families already in the product deserve our full attention. Thank you to every member of the first cohort for trusting us with something this personal. You are quite literally writing the product with us, one tired late-night note at a time.