September 2026 Startup Grant Awarded to The Caregiving Concierge

We’re excited to announce the September $15,000 Startup Grant recipient. Congratulations to Kristin Frost, Founder & Elizabeth Godek, CEO of The Caregiving Concierge.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Marcia Layton Turner sat down with Kristin for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Marcia: Welcome to a chat with our September 2026 Startup Grant winner, Kristin Frost of The Caregiving Concierge. Our startup grant is for entrepreneurs who are in the early phase of developing their business or who haven’t yet hit $10,000 in total sales.

I’m Marcia Layton Turner, and I’m one member of our amazing WomensNet advisory board. Every other month, I have the great pleasure of chatting with our winners; I always learn something new from them.

Marcia: So, Kristin, could you tell everyone a little bit about your company? What do you sell? What do you offer? Where did the idea come from? And how are things going?

Kristin: The Caregiving Concierge really came from my own experience as a family caregiver. My husband has lived with type 1 diabetes for 33 years now. So, we’ve really navigated some pretty serious complications along with just the everyday management of the disease itself. And like many caregivers, I’ve dealt with a lot of that while trying to work full-time and raise a family and manage just everyday life.

What I found is that caregiving isn’t necessarily overwhelming because of one big event or one specific thing. It’s really all of the hundreds of little things that you have to remember and organize and follow up on, like doctor’s appointments, medications, insurance information, keeping everyone on the same page. And somehow all of that information for me ended up winding up across calendars and notebooks and text messaging, sticky notes. Quite honestly, a lot of it would end up living in my head, which was a really, really bad idea. There’s this hope and a prayer that I’m not going to forget something important, and I cannot tell you how many times that happened. I kept thinking there’s got to be a better way to manage all this chaos and save my sanity in the process. So, I decided to build one.

The Caregiving Concierge is a family caregiving coordination platform. It gives families one shared space to organize important information, manage medications, coordinate responsibilities, and really know what needs to happen next and, most importantly, who’s responsible for it. My goal is to help families spend less time managing all of the moving parts and pieces and hopefully allow them to spend more time being present with the people they love.

Originally, I built this because it was something that I desperately needed myself just to manage day-to-day and not forget things. But building it now and going forward, my plan is to build it for every family caregiver out there who’s ever gone to bed wondering and hoping that they haven’t forgotten something important or, sometimes like me, lying there wondering where on earth did I put this random envelope that I wrote an upcoming appointment on that I jotted down hoping not to forget. So, that’s what The Caregiving Concierge is.

Marcia: We’re hearing so much more about the mental load that people carry, especially women. So, I think the time is right, because we’re all looking for ways to make sure we don’t forget the million things that we’re juggling in our brains.

Kristin: Absolutely.

Marcia: Were there any resources that you found especially helpful as you were starting up, a book, a program, a consultant, an agency that you might recommend to people in the WomensNet community who are looking for some help?

Kristin: I think the two biggest resources for me were the use of AI technology along with the caregiving communities that I’ve been able to connect with. I work in technology, but I am absolutely not a software developer. I started this journey earlier this year, and what I started out building was a pretty fancy spreadsheet. And as my vision grew, that spreadsheet became pretty subpar, and I realized it really was not going to do what I wanted it to. I had a whole lot more determination than I did money and resources to hire somebody to build what I had in my head. So I decided to jump in with both feet and, you know, “Hey, I’ll just figure out how to become a software developer. Why not?”

AI became an incredible learning resource for me. It helped me understand how to design the front end, how to understand the back-end functionality, and then essentially how to wire it all together and actually make it work. I really became so obsessed with figuring it out. I was like, “I want to figure this out, and I want to learn.” And so it was such a great experience for me that I just kept doing more and more and more. I never really gave myself the opportunity to consider the fact that, “Hey, this might not really work,” because I would just become so obsessed with figuring things out.

The other piece to that is really the caregiving communities that I have been able to connect with, especially those that are specific to Alzheimer’s and dementia. Understanding what those families in particular have to go through on a daily basis is really amazing, and that helps continue to shape what I’m building. Honestly, I think the biggest lesson for me throughout this whole process has been that you don’t have to know everything before you start. You really just have to have a vision, and you just, kind of, have to throw caution to the wind and be like, “You know what? I’m just going to figure it out along the way.” And that was really, kind of, my whole attitude, because what I would say to anyone, “Hey, I’m going to try and do this,” they’d be like, “Well, how is that going to work?” And I’m like, “I have no idea, but I’m going to give it a try. I’m going to figure it out as I go.”

Marcia: I love that. So, now let’s talk about marketing. What’s been the best marketing strategy that you’ve used or maybe you plan to use in the future to spread the word about your company?

Kristin: Sure. This is a great question. I think one thing that I’ve discovered right off the bat is that marketing a software product might actually be harder than teaching yourself how to develop one. And that wasn’t something that I was really prepared for. But when I first started thinking about this, I thought, “Social media will be my primary marketing strategy.” I’ve put a lot of time into Pinterest. And honestly, the results, kind of, right off the bat were pretty discouraging. So, since I really didn’t have a marketing budget, I knew I was going to have to get pretty creative.

So, I started building a small collection of free caregiving resources for caregivers. Originally, the idea was you click on a Pinterest pin, and this is where they would land with this useful information. Kind of like my app, my ideas about this kept, kind of, growing and becoming bigger and larger. And that little group of resources has morphed into this huge repository of caregiving resources now that we’ve named the Caregiving Compass, which we’ve also made a part of our website. So, this has really become my foundation for my entire marketing strategy.

My goal now is to reach caregivers when they’re searching online for answers and be able to provide genuinely helpful resources at no charge. There’s checklists and all kinds of things that they can download and use. But my plan is to provide them with that resource and then introduce them to The Caregiving Concierge along the way. So, I’m building relationships with caregiving organizations and local professionals as well to help, kind of, expand that reach and connect with more families. But instead of really relying on traditional advertising, my strategy now really is about building that awareness, earning trust by helping people first with some of these resources, and then hopefully having them lean in and learn about The Caregiving Concierge app.

Marcia: Wonderful. So, last question is what’s one thing that the WomensNet community can do to show support for your business? Maybe that’s subscribing to a newsletter, writing a review, something else, but what’s one thing that you all would like to see?

Kristin: I would absolutely love for anyone who is involved with caring for a family member to give The Caregiving Concierge a try. We do offer a 14-day free trial. Honestly, the most valuable thing that anybody could give me right now is their feedback.

I built this platform based on my needs, what I needed, what I wish existed, what I didn’t have, things that would make my life easier. But really, I know that every family caregiver’s journey is vastly different. So, I’ve actually built a feedback option inside the app, and I would just love to hear what anybody thinks. What do you wish it did? What do you wish it did differently? What would you change? What would make it more helpful for your family?

I would be incredibly grateful to anybody willing to give it a try and give me their feedback and their experience using it. For anyone specifically within the WomensNet community who works with caregivers or knows of organizations that support them, I would love to connect and just explore ways in which we might be able to work together.

Marcia: Thank you for being here, sharing your stories, sharing your recommendations, and congratulations again on being our September Startup Grant winner.