# Kickoff Call — Transcript (auto-generated) **Project (working name):** "Pillar" (not final) **Date:** May 28, 2026 **Call type:** Video call, ~35 min **Participants:** Mark Delgado (founder / client), Vincent (product designer) **Note:** Auto-transcribed, lightly cleaned. Timestamps approximate, some filler kept. --- [00:02] **Mark:** Okay, can you hear me alright? Cool. So, first off, thanks for making the time. I want to say upfront, I'm not a tech person at all, like at all, so if I say something that makes no sense just stop me, okay? [00:19] **Vincent:** Sounds good. Why don't you start with the story. What made you want to build this? [00:25] **Mark:** Yeah. So it's my mom. She's 79, she lives in Phoenix, and I'm up in Seattle. About a year and a half ago she had a stroke, a small one thankfully, but then while she was in the hospital they figured out she's also got an irregular heartbeat. So now she's on, I think it's nine medications? Some twice a day, one of them she's supposed to take on an empty stomach, and one's a blood thinner, which is the one that scares me, because if she doubles up on that it's actually dangerous. And the thing is it keeps changing. Every time she sees the cardiologist they tweak something, they swap a pill, the dose goes up for a couple weeks then back down. It's a moving target, you know? [01:20] **Mark:** And I'm fourteen hundred miles away. So my whole life turned into these phone calls. "Mom, did you take your pills?" "Yes." "Are you sure?" "...I think so." And I genuinely can't tell. One evening she took her night pills twice because she forgot she'd already done it. And the scary part is I had no clue, I'm in Seattle, I can't see a thing. I only found out about two weeks later, when the pharmacy called me, because I'm on her account, asking why she was already due for a refill so early. And I had to sit there and do the math and realize, oh no, she's been doubling up. That's how blind I am to the whole thing. That one really shook me. That was the moment I thought, there has got to be something better than me calling her three times a day like some crazy person. [02:05] **Vincent:** That makes total sense. So in your head, what does the app actually do? [02:11] **Mark:** Okay so the dream is, my mom barely has to do anything. Like she opens her phone, it's huge and obvious, it tells her "take these two now," she taps one big button, done. And on my end, I get peace of mind. I can just glance and see, okay she took everything today, I don't have to call. And if she misses something important, especially the blood thinner, I get pinged. That's really the heart of it. Her staying independent, me not losing my mind. [02:48] **Mark:** Because right now the alternative is what, I move her in with me? She doesn't want that, she's proud, she wants her own place. So this is kind of about letting her keep that. Dignity, I guess. [03:10] **Vincent:** Got it. So two sides really, her side and your side. [03:14] **Mark:** Exactly. She's the patient, dead simple, almost nothing to do. And I'm the, what do you call it, the caregiver, I'm the one actually setting it up and keeping an eye on things. My sister's involved too, she's in Denver, she'd want to see it as well, but let's not overcomplicate, mainly it's me. [03:38] **Vincent:** Have you looked at what's already out there? [03:42] **Mark:** Oh yeah, I went down the rabbit hole. So there's Medisafe, which honestly is the closest to what I want, it's got this "Medfriend" thing where a family member gets alerted if a dose is missed, which is basically my whole idea. But, two things. One, it's gotten so cluttered, there's so much going on, my mom would be lost in three seconds. And two, and this actually made me mad, they just switched to paid back in January, and the free version only lets you track two medications. Two! My mom's on nine. So that's useless for us unless you pay, and it felt like a bait and switch. [04:30] **Mark:** Then there's MyTherapy, which is clean, and it's free, credit where it's due, but it's built like a health diary, you know, track your mood, track your blood pressure, all that. It's not really built around me watching over my mom. It's built for the patient logging their own stuff, which my mom is never going to do. [05:00] **Mark:** And there's Hero, but that's the countertop robot thing, the dispenser, it's like a few hundred bucks of hardware plus a subscription. My mom does not need a machine humming on her kitchen counter. I want software, just an app. Oh, and Apple has that medications thing built into the Health app now, but it's buried, it's an afterthought, she'd never in a million years find it. [05:35] **Vincent:** That's really helpful. Okay, a practical one. How do the medications and the schedule actually get into the app in the first place? [05:44] **Mark:** Hm. Yeah. I mean, I figured the doctor could just put them in? Or I could do it, or my sister. However it's easiest. That part I haven't fully thought through, honestly. The doctor knows the exact list and the doses, so in a perfect world it just comes from them and turns into a schedule automatically. But I don't know how that works. You're the expert, you tell me. [06:15] **Vincent:** We'll come back to that, it's an important one. What about when the treatment changes, like you said the cardiologist adjusts things? [06:23] **Mark:** Right, yeah, that has to update somehow. I don't know. Someone changes it and her schedule changes. That can't be hard, can it? [06:35] **Vincent:** We'll dig into it. What does "simple" mean for your mom, concretely? [06:40] **Mark:** Big text. Big buttons. No menus, no settings, no logging in every time. She's not good with phones, like she calls every app "the Facebook." So basically she should be able to use it without ever being taught. If she has to learn anything, we've failed. [07:05] **Vincent:** And on your side, what would you want to see or do? [07:09] **Mark:** So I'd want the daily view, did she take everything. History, like has she been consistent this week. Alerts if she misses the important ones. Refill reminders would be amazing, because twice now she's run completely out of a pill over a weekend, total panic. Oh, and it'd be great to log side effects, like if she says she's dizzy, so I can bring it up with her doctor. And actually, you know what'd be great, if her doctor could just see a summary of whether she's actually taking everything, because at the appointments my mom always says "oh yes I'm very good about it" and that's, that's not always true. So the doctor seeing the real picture would help them adjust properly. [08:00] **Vincent:** Earlier you said the doctor doesn't really need to be involved, though. [08:04] **Mark:** Yeah, no, I mean, the doctor's not the main user, I don't want to build some hospital system, it should feel warm, human, like a family thing, not clinical. But if the doctor could just receive a little report, that'd be a bonus. Doesn't have to be fancy. [08:25] **Vincent:** Okay. And platform, are we talking iPhone, Android, both? [08:30] **Mark:** My mom has an iPhone, I got her one because I have one, so we can help each other. So iPhone first for sure. But I mean, long term everyone should be able to use it, my sister's on Android, lots of people are. So eventually both, but let's start with the iPhone since that's mom and me. [09:00] **Vincent:** Last thing, have you thought about how this makes money, or is that later? [09:05] **Mark:** That's later, honestly. I haven't figured it out. Maybe it's free and we figure it out, maybe there's a small monthly thing like a few dollars, I don't know. I really just want it to exist and to work, the money part I'm putting off. I do know I don't want to nickel-and-dime people the way Medisafe did, that left a bad taste. [09:35] **Mark:** So yeah. That's the whole thing in my head. Keep it stupid simple for her, give me peace of mind, and don't make it feel like a medical device. Where do we go from here? [09:50] **Vincent:** Leave that with me. I'm going to pull all this together and come back to you with a clear picture plus the questions we still need to answer. [09:58] **Mark:** Perfect. Yeah. Thank you, really. This has been keeping me up at night. [End of transcript]