Opening the Doors: Our First Early Access Cohort for InclusiCare

Last night I sat on the floor outside my daughter Catie’s room and typed a two-line note into CARLA on my phone. Something about a new stim she had picked up, and a guess at what triggered it. It took me about ninety seconds. A year ago that same observation would have lived in my head until I forgot it, or until the next IEP meeting forced me to reach back for it. That small moment — a tired parent leaving behind a useful crumb instead of losing it — is what we’re building InclusiCare for. And starting this month, we’re inviting a first group of families to live inside that experience with us.

What early access actually includes

Our first cohort opens during Autism Acceptance Month, and the timing isn’t accidental. April is when a lot of families are already re-evaluating supports, prepping for end-of-year IEPs, and thinking about summer transitions. It’s also when the conversation around acceptance tends to focus on visibility — and we wanted to contribute something operational to that conversation, not just a ribbon.

Cohort members will get access to CARLA, our conversational documentation layer. You can talk or type, from your phone, in the five-minute windows caregivers actually have. CARLA quietly builds a living profile of your child over time — triggers, routines, communication preferences, AT that works, AT that doesn’t — so the next new caregiver in their life doesn’t start from zero. For this first release we’re focusing on three things: frictionless daily logging, a shareable child profile, and an IEP upload that jump-starts CARLA with the history you’ve already documented. We’re holding back a longer feature list on purpose. A smaller surface area means we can actually listen to how families use it.

Who we’re inviting — and what we’re listening for

We’re keeping the cohort intentionally small — roughly fifty families, plus a handful of therapists and special educators who want to try it alongside them. We’re prioritizing families with at least one child receiving special education services, an active IEP or 504, and real motivation to shape the product. That last part matters more than it sounds. We’re not looking for testers who’ll smile politely at bugs. We’re looking for caregivers who will tell us when something wastes their time, when a prompt feels wrong, or when the product doesn’t reflect the reality of their kid.

We’re also deliberately including families whose experiences don’t all look like ours. Different diagnoses, different home languages, different geographies, different levels of access to therapy and AT. The caregiver experience is not monolithic, and InclusiCare won’t be worth building if it only works for the families closest to our own.

The honest answer on what we’re listening for is this: we’re listening for signs of harm as much as signs of delight. A caregiver product has to pass a specific bar — it should not add to the load. If a feature takes more energy than it saves, it shouldn’t ship. If CARLA generates a summary that misrepresents a child, we need to know immediately. If our privacy controls feel confusing, that’s on us to fix before we scale.

We’re also instrumenting the product for feedback in ways that respect cohort members’ time. Short weekly check-ins instead of long surveys. An option to voice-memo us directly from inside the app. A standing hour every week where Sydney or I will be available to talk, not to pitch. Every cohort member gets a clear, written commitment about their data: it belongs to them, they can export it any time, and they can revoke access or delete their profile with one action.

How to join

If you’re a caregiver, therapist, or educator who wants in, email me directly with a sentence or two about your situation. We’ll read every note personally. Spots are limited, but we’ll keep a waitlist open and roll additional families in as we grow.

A year from now, I hope the binder in my hallway is a little thinner, the notes in our family’s group chat are a little more organized, and a few dozen other families have had the same experience I did last night — leaving behind a useful crumb in the time it takes to walk down a hallway. That’s the quiet version of acceptance we’re building for.