With its Twin Cities launch, founders of a Twin Cities tech company, Joshin, hope to make it easy for families with children who have special needs and disabilities to book a caregiver the way you might hail a ride or hire a dog-walker.
Twin sisters Melissa Danielsen and Melanie Fountaine grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota with their older brother, Josh, who had a developmental disability. While their parents worked, they helped with his care. Knowing him, his needs and the challenges facing families like theirs who want assistance, they launched a shared career serving people with special needs.
First, they founded Josh’s Place, providing group homes and other services for adults with disabilities in four Minnesota communities, including one in the Twin Cities. Then, two years ago, they started working on Joshin because they saw technology put on-demand services in people’s hands, and they wanted to extend that to the 1 in 5 families in the state who have at least one child with a special health need.
“We put ourselves in place of those families today. Thinking about those families, what are they doing today in the age of Uber, in the age of Grubhub,” Danielsen said. “There wasn’t natural support available or on-demand care. … We really looked at technology as a way to bring that relief.”
Joshin customers use an app to create a “care plan” that introduces their child or loved one, including their needs, goals, likes, dislikes, diet, and any other pertinent details to a trained caregiver (Joshin calls them “joymakers” and has more than 20 in the Twin Cities so far). The care plan helps them ensure continuity when a family schedules a care date with someone new. Caregivers and families are vetted carefully, the founders said. And they’re matched based on the caregiver’s experience and the needs or disabilities the family lists in their plan.
“Every family’s need is different,” Danielsen said.
They’re also looking at customers’ needs to determine what kind of additional training they should provide their contracted caregivers. For example, 70 percent of Joshin’s customers are looking for care for someone with Autism.
“We’re going to really focus on that – build skills, have some tools at their fingertips,” Fountaine said.
Joshin launched in the Twin Cities area at the end of February after a four months-long beta phase, when they had a small pool of customers using the app and weighing in on its features. Danielson and Fountaine are focusing the business on their home state right now but they’ve also already heard from people in other states like California, New York, and others.
“Twelve percent the U.S. population has a disability,” Danielsen said. “So we’re not surprised.”
