Opening Our Second Wave, Ahead of Fall IEP Season

Back in June I wrote that we’d open a second wave of early access toward the end of summer, timed ahead of fall IEP season, because that’s when handoffs spike and the cost of starting over runs highest. It’s September now, my daughter Catie started a new school year twelve days ago, and I’ve already fielded three separate requests from her team to walk them through routines that used to live only in my head. So the timing wasn’t theoretical. This week we’re opening that second wave, roughly seventy-five more families, therapists, and educators, on top of the fifty who’ve been with us since April.

Why we waited this long to grow

We could have opened wider back in June. A few investors asked why we didn’t. The honest answer is that I’d rather get the handoff right for fifty families than half-right for five hundred, and that hasn’t changed, but there’s a second reason that only came into focus over the summer, and it’s about trust rather than product polish.

AARP’s most recent caregiver survey found that 55 percent of family caregivers over 50 now use at least one digital tool to coordinate care, and AI use among that group nearly doubled from 18 percent in 2024 to 30 percent in 2025. Adoption is real and it’s moving fast. But the same research found data privacy concerns are the top barrier to adoption, cited by 25 percent of caregivers, and uncertainty about whether a tool is actually worth using jumped to 20 percent, up from just 12 percent the year before. Caregivers are trying these tools and a fifth of them still aren’t sure the tool earns its place. That gap between adoption and trust is exactly where a product like ours either becomes indispensable or becomes one more app a tired parent deletes.

So this summer, instead of chasing growth, we spent it closing that gap for the families we already had. Every cohort member now gets a plain-language data ledger inside their profile, a running list of exactly who has viewed or edited their child’s record and when, because “your data belongs to you” is a promise that means nothing without a way to verify it. We also rebuilt the export flow so a family can pull their entire record, IEP history included, in under a minute and take it with them if they ever leave. Nobody in the first cohort has left. But the point was never to make leaving hard. It was to make leaving unnecessary because staying earns its keep every day.

What’s different for wave two

Wave two families get everything cohort one has now, which is a meaningfully different product than what we shipped in April. The handoff view leads with what a new caregiver needs in the first hour, not a reverse-chronological log nobody has time to read. CARLA captures why a strategy worked or didn’t, not just what it was. And the data ledger and one-minute export ship on day one instead of arriving six weeks in as an apology for not having them sooner.

We’re again prioritizing families with an active IEP or 504, and again looking for people who’ll tell us when something wastes their time rather than smiling politely at bugs. I’m especially hoping to reach families outside the Southwest this round. Our first cohort skews heavily toward Arizona and neighboring states, partly because that’s where Sydney and I have the deepest relationships, and the caregiver experience is not the same in every district, every state, every language spoken at home.

A year ago the binder in my hallway was the only record of who my daughter is when I’m not in the room. This week seventy-five more families start building the same kind of record, on their own terms, with a receipt for every hand it passes through. If you’re a caregiver, therapist, or educator who wants in, email me directly with a sentence or two about your situation. I read every note myself, same as I did in April, and I intend to keep doing that for as long as it still tells me something the dashboards can’t.