Lauren Longo was ready to launch the hardware component of her software startup Talli, a company that reduces the mental burden of caregiving by logging health events and data.
But as we know, Covid-19 had other plans.
In April, Longo and her team decided to delay the launch of Talli's Kickstarter campaign and think of a different problem to focus on, she said. They came up with a symptom tracker for Covid-19 and launched the tech three weeks later. Within a month, the app had more than 3,000 downloads with no previous marketing, Longo said.
"It actually occurred to us after a couple of days that this was a great opportunity to prove the concept," she said. "The app is easily configured to track other events."
While the first iteration of Talli tracks baby health data, such as feedings, diapers, naps and more with the press of a button or hands-free with Alexa, the concept was designed to apply to other markets, Longo said. Talli's universal tracking is what made the Covid-19 symptom tracker possible.
"The platform has always been intended to be flexible enough to track everything," she said.
Not only can the tracker keep a log of symptoms, but the account owner can keep track of everyone's health data for their household. One of Longo's favorite pieces of feedback from users has been how helpful the tracker is for the caregiver, she said.
"It made us feel like we were contributing to this challenging situation," Longo said.
The idea for Talli came when Longo and her husband were caring for her second child in 2017. Her daughter, who was a smaller infant, required constant monitoring for growth to report back to pediatricians, she said.
"We weren’t sleeping," she said. "We were sleeping like 30-minute chunks throughout the day. It felt like chaos. We had an older child. We both were working full-time essentially... I really didn’t feel like I had a handle on the information that we needed to be sharing with a pediatrician. It made me feel like an inferior parent. I didn’t feel confident that I had the right answers for her."
The Longos first tried documenting their daughter's health on pen and paper, then numerous apps, to no avail.
"The apps that are great, they analyze the data for you, but they are also kind of a pain for recording. It’s a minimum of five steps to log even the simplest events," she said.
Longo said she knew there had to be an easier way to feel like she had some control over the chaos that was happening. It was an Amazon Dash button she had for diapers that made Longo realize how easy it would be to track her child's health with the click of a button.
"This ray of light from heaven shown down on this Dash button," she said. "That was really the origin story of the whole thing. We’ve just evolved from there."
Customer feedback on Talli has brought up conversations of expanding the platform to numerous markets, all the way to horse care, Longo said.
"Eldercare and pet care have consistently been additional markets we plan to expand into," she said.
The Talli Symptom Tracker is available for free on iOS and Android.
