For anyone who was kind enough to care, we are so sorry for leaving you in the dark for so long! You see, just over 1 year ago, we (“we” being co-founders Danny Pier and Brennan Gilbert) set out to create a powerful, playful & easy app for families to share their locations with loved ones. We founded a company named Kindred, Ltd., and created that app, which was also called Kindred. We created a brand, designed and built the app, and launched it out into the world. We had a group of early users who helped us learn a LOT in a short amount of time.
Our biggest takeaway? We hadn’t yet identified our most basic benefit for our users.
Family-based location-sharing is a HUGE market. We struggled with finding a way to explain our differentiating factors up against the likes of Google and Apple. So, we honed in. We met with friends, family, advisors, mentors, colleagues and our users. Through these meetings, we were able to zoom in, all the while, not being too communicative about why we’d gone radio silent — will you accept our apology? We sure hope so, and if not, well… we applaud your grudge holding gusto.
In any case, our newly refocused in vision led us to targeting the caregiver industry. One of the most frequent questions we received when pitching Kindred was “can I use this with my caregiver?” (think nannies, elder care, babysitters, etc.). We started to explore that avenue and learned a whole bunch:
- While the caregiver industry if quite large, there aren’t many apps out there focused on making the life of a caregiver easier and their very important work better
- We quickly found that we needed a new parent brand: “Kindred” is a real word with a lot of legal nuances and is used somewhat frequently in this new industry.
- We see a pathway where we could bring together what we learned about family location sharing with Kindred and unite it with our refined market focus
Introducing Kaylo
We’re here today to proudly announce our new company, Kaylo, and our new caregiver-focused iOS app, Kaylo Care. The name Kaylo, brainchild of our co-founder Danny Pier, came from playing with the word “locate”: Locate… LoKate… Lo-Kayte… Flip it and Reverse It… Kaylo. The name itself has a bunch of benefits for us:
- It’s a made-up word, so no legal issues around ownership
- It’s 2 syllables, so easier to remember
- It starts with a “K”, which even though our previous name “Kindred” wasn’t working, we liked the “K” icon from our branding, and wanted to maintain that
And the app? It’s available today
The first release of Kaylo Care provides location-based time tracking for caregivers. Users will be able to set their schedules to automate their time tracking. For example, Jean could say “I want to start my day when I arrive at The Jones’s and end when I leave the Jones’s”. With Kaylo Care, caregivers don’t need to remember to manually start tracking time, think back to when they left, total up their week, etc.
So, go ahead and get Kaylo Care in the App Store
This is our first step in making the work of a caregiver more efficient, enabling them to focus on the care they provide. That’s it! No bells and whistles to start because that’s what we want: to START! We want to understand the needs of the caregivers who choose Kaylo as we work our way towards creating an invaluable toolset for caregivers and the families they provide care for.
Questions? Comments? Want to hear a joke? You can reach us on our Twitter at yourkaylo.
