We’re now Touco 🎉
It’s Carers Week, and the theme, Making Care Visible, has never been more important.
As a startup focused on helping carers and those they care for, we wanted to kick off Carers Week with some of our own news. Although we might have seemed quiet the last few months, we’ve been busy.
We’ve been growing the team and building the next version of our app. We’ve been featured in Forbes, Which? and The Independent. We completed Techstars. We’ve been doing what we can to support caregivers and those they care for during this Coronavirus crisis.
And yes, as of this week, we’ve updated our name. Toucan has flown the nest. We’re now Touco.
What Touco stands for
We might have a new name, but we’re still on the same mission.
We’re here to help carers and family members support the people they care for, particularly when it comes to protecting them from financial harm.
Why? Because there’s nothing more important than the people we love. And so when those people start to need our help, we all want to do our best to support them.
But as carers and families we don’t have the right tools to help our loved ones. We’re left with piles of admin to do, just to help with the simplest tasks. Or we need to use risky workarounds to help out, like using their passwords or pretending to be them on the phone.
We care about caregiving
Carer (noun): If someone relies on you to do something important for them in their everyday life, then you’re a carer.
It’s hard to be a carer. It’s exhausting. It’s emotionally draining. And yet, according to Carers UK, there are over 8 million people in the UK alone who do it for free.
For those being cared for, it’s difficult too. It’s hard to ask for help in the first place. It feels degrading. None of us want to feel like a burden, and it’s hard to give up our independence as we need more and more help.
Touco is here to solve this problem. We want carers to feel less like dictators, more like facilitators. We want those who are cared for to feel both supported and dignified, never like a burden.
To do that we’re building a platform on which anyone will be able to safely delegate access to their financial lives to their family or carers. If you want help from your partner to keep on top of the bills while you’re in hospital, you’ll be able to use Touco. If you want to make sure Mum isn’t falling victim to scams, you’ll be able to use Touco. And if you need to pay for groceries on behalf of someone else because you’re shopping for them, you’ll be able to use Touco.
We’re releasing a brand new app
It’s almost a year since we released the first version of Touco, an app that our CTO Evelina built in just three months. It’s time for an update.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who’s helped us over the last year, especially those who have been using the app and telling us how they’d like us to develop it.
As of this week we’ve taken down the previous Toucan app, having let everyone who was using it know that it’s being replaced.
The new Touco app is coming very soon, but it’ll be different. Whereas our old app was built around the needs of someone who wants help with their finances, the new app is built for their carer or family member.
We’ve built the new app for carers because of feedback we explored in our research report, as well as from speaking to carers over the last few months.
While the new version of Touco won’t include the money alerts we built and tested last year, they are on our roadmap. We’re really proud of the feedback we’ve had from people who use the alerts, so we will want to bring this feature back in the future.
But to bring back alerts in a smarter way, with more context, we’ve had to build a transaction feed first.
The new app will be available very soon. Request an invite on our website.
But why Touco?
You might be left wondering, ‘but why have the team gone from Toucan to Touco?’.
The short answer is that Toucan was meant to be a placeholder, and we never trademarked it. I’m planning to write a longer blog post about our renaming soon, if you’re interested.
Over the last month we came up with lots of great potential name ideas, but we kept coming back to Toucan. There was something we loved about it. ‘Tou’ fits us so well, like ‘two’ or ‘too’, referring to the collaboration we see between carers and those they care for.
So then we thought about what’s at the heart of our product. Collaboration, coordination, cooperation, compromise, conversation. And we stole the ‘Co’ from there.
So farewell Toucan, you’ve done us proud. But we love our new name so much better.
We’re gearing up to launch our new app very soon. Sign up on our website to hear when it’s live.
