Adam here, I did not set out to build a caregiving app. As an independent software developer for Apple platforms, I’ve spent more than thirty years building software to solve problems I’ve experienced firsthand. Whether it’s helping people organize email or simplifying the control of live video production, my best products have come from solving problems I needed to address myself.

For the past several years, I watched as my wife took on more and more responsibility caring for her elderly parents. Seeing firsthand the demands that caregiving placed on her gave me an appreciation for just how much coordination, communication, and organization it requires. Then, earlier this year, my father was diagnosed with lymphoma. Like many people, I suddenly found myself in the sandwich generation, helping care for an aging parent while also raising my own family.

My siblings and I began taking turns flying to San Diego. I spent a week here, three weeks there, and eventually a month living in my childhood home.

Yet I was no longer the kid my parents were raising.

I was the adult now, responsible for administering medications, driving to appointments, taking notes during doctor visits, and keeping track of symptoms, tasks, and meals.

For several months, my family relied on notes, spreadsheets, a printed binder, emails, and text message threads to keep track of my father’s care.

There is so much information to keep track of in daily care, from medications and appointments to vitals, symptoms, meals, and ordinary tasks. Most days followed a familiar pattern, but caregiving rarely stays still for long. A change in my father’s condition could throw the daily routine into disarray: new medications, updated instructions, additional appointments, and new tasks all had to be communicated among family members, and I often had to update and reprint the binder again. Each change exposed how fragile our workflow of notes, spreadsheets, emails, text messages, and printed pages really was. I know many families who have relied on similar improvised systems because the available tools did not fit the way family care actually works.

I developed C1B because I wanted to build a better way to handle this for my family’s use case. When I’m with my parents, I use the app to keep track of everything that happens throughout the day. My siblings can follow along until they relieve me, and when I’m back in the San Francisco Bay Area, I can see how they’re managing his care. If we need outside help, I can share his profile so caregivers know exactly what needs to be done today, tomorrow, and next week.

Over the course of developing C1B, I’ve met countless people with their own caregiving stories. Like many of the apps I’ve created over the years, C1B began as a solution to a problem I was trying to solve myself. My hope is that it helps make another family’s caregiving journey just a little less overwhelming.

-adam