Fuck Cancer Founder Creating Ideal Caregiver App

"No one needs a fucking casserole; you've got 14 bouquets of flowers that are dying and nobody has walked the dog."

Yael Cohen is the founder, CEO and "chief cancer fucker" at the nonprofit Fuck Cancer. She founded the organization following her mother's diagnosis of breast cancer in 2009.

After acting as her mother's primary caregiver, Cohen has learned a thing or two about what is a helpful contribution from friends and family when someone has cancer, and what is a either a waste of time or resources, or just plain stress-inducing.

The App

According to a recent profile in Fast Company, she's put her experience, and her considerable skills in both marketing and communication into a care management app called StandWith.

StandWith is designed for caregivers. They will use it to create a social circle of people who want to help. Using email, Facebook or Google Plus, it will allow the user to assign tasks to willing participants. The user can create three groups of people: family, friends, and acquaintances.

From there, tasks are posted and the app sends push notices to the circle (or to a specific group). The request stays red until someone accepts the task, when it turns yellow. Green means it has been done.

Different from Other Caregiver Apps

StandWith may not be the first caregiver app, not by any stretch. But what sets it apart is that it isn't about disease management. It's about all the practical things that need attention, that had been given plenty of attention before but that can fall by the wayside while dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

StandWith's Simplicity

StandWith was designed so that even those with only a rudimentary knowledge of apps can use it.

"From ideation to execution, we stripped away so many functionalities and screens," Cohen told Fast Company. "We really thought about how can we make it clean and beautiful."

Cohen is a shrewd businesswoman so she is working with strategic partners to make task completion even easier. Friends or family who don't live nearby for example can arrange through (unspecified) companies for tasks like grocery shopping to be done locally.

The app will be free for users too, although it's likely that the companies that Cohen partners with will be allowed to send offers or deals by way of the app or through emails, since they will be paying for the partnership.

The app is not available to the public yet, but Cohen believes it will be available in the fall.

Source: Fast Company