How it began

Dr. Charlene Brown, a graduate of Princetown University and Harvard Medical School, knew that there was a great demand for adult caregiving agencies to find the best caregivers for their clients. After interviewing many adult caregiving agencies, Dr. Brown found that the demand for caregivers was not fully satisfied because the application process, a combination of paper and various electronic documentation, was burdensome, especially for a heavily immigrant and English as a second language caregiver population.

So Dr. Brown decided to launch Reciprocare (recently renamed to CareGiverJobsNow) — a two sided marketplace for caregivers to easily create their online application using a mobile-first design approach and caregiving agencies to find those applicants.

Business Mapping

Before starting the six week jumpstart program, Dr. Brown sat down with Zak and Alex to map out her overall strategy and also to review the past code the had been written by other developers. The need to have a fairly involved application process that detailed a caregiver’s hours of availability to what languages they knew and what health care certifications that had, was paramount. And during this business mapping discussion, Zak and Alex pointed out to Dr. Brown that focusing development on the on boarding process of these applicants should be prioritized over the agencies being able to do advanced searches for the caregivers. The point revealed during the Business Mapping process was that it was paramount to easily onboard caregivers because without caregivers, agencies would not find any value in the platform.

The insight into focusing development on one side of the market place allowed for a cleaner and more streamlined road map to jumpstart ReciproCare.

Technical Training

Charlene Brown participated in jumpstart to launch ReciproCare, a platform to help caregivers find and apply for jobs.

During the first two weeks, she worked closely with Alex to learn web development and coding fundamentals. Through a custom curriculum, her learning was highly targeted around building practical skills:

• Editing marketing pages
• Deriving insights from accessing the database
• Developing an innate understanding of the effort required to build any particular feature

Design & Development

Charlene planned out the features to build, both for the MVP and post-launch. The ReciproCare app had the unique constraint of catering to low-digital literacy caregivers, so our design team drafted each page to avoid scrolling and converted all forms to use simple yes/no answers as much as possible.

At the same time, our development team was hard at work building many of the back-end features, with daily demos for Charlene and her team.

Continued Development & Training

Our development team kept pushing forward on building the core feature of the MVP, the application form for caregivers to apply to jobs. With over 100 screens and with certain answers triggering additional follow-up questions, this was where the bulk of the remaining development efforts was focused.

Prior to signing up real caregivers, everyone tested the caregiver application and provided feedback prior to launch. On the final day, both the dupontstudios and ReciproCare teams celebrated the true team effort!

Ongoing Maintenance & Development

After the jumpstart program, Charlene continued to work with the dupontstudios team as we designed additional pages and developed more features.

Simultaneously, she also brought on freelance developers for project-based interviews, where they worked alongside the dupontstudios team. Eventually, Charlene transitioned fully to her new, in-house developer team.

While launching the ReciproCare product was a major step, Charlene’s shift in mentality throughout the program was truly transformative.

Empowered with technical knowledge and the tools provided through jumpstart, Charlene is well-positioned to take ReciproCare as far as it can go. UPDATE: Recently Charlene choose to rename Reciprocare to CareGiveJobsNow.

Check them out here.

People Involved

Technology Involved