Founder's letter
The lifeline that hollarhype cast for my family.
February 6, 2022 — originally published as a letter to the company's investors and advisors.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely already familiar with the genesis story of hollarhype, which spun out of my personal life experiences over the past decade. When I talk about the problem we are solving—social disconnection amidst the moments that matter most—I’ve never felt a lack of conviction behind the magnitude of it. Yet, over the past two weeks, I have been reminded of just how much it can sting.
My grandmother with dementia was hospitalized after a sudden fall, alone for two weeks without the strength to use the phone, or the clearance to have more than a couple of visitors. The situation was heartbreaking and it was impossible for my family to accept this severed state of connection.
With the help of an ally I sought out at South Shore Hospital, my grandmother’s nurse activated hollarhype for her. As you all know from being familiar with the mechanics of our app, this means that the nurse can turn it on for her, sending up that bat signal to the rest of us that it's a good time to send "hypes." Without my grandmother needing to accept or respond to any messages in order for her to experience the real-time, authentic support.
Although the circumstances of her health have since become terminal, my extended family reports feeling a little bit better knowing that she can hear their voices telling her that they love her, possibly one last time each time her app goes "live."
I was granted an in-person visit yesterday, and in my grandmother’s soft, abbreviated speech, she described our app to me as “the great invention.” She’s not equipped to understand how it works, or why it works, but the experience makes her smile. My own appreciation of the experience heightened through this context, too. Even though I got to see her in person yesterday, it was still relieving to have an opportunity to send her a message later on at night after her status was set to active by the nurse—according to hollarhype, she was watching the Olympics. I got to remind her right away how much l loved watching the 1998 olympic figure skating events with her every night over ice cream as a kid, debating whether Tara Lipinski or Michelle Kwan really deserved the gold medal.
Over the last week she has heard 63 reminders of love, care and memories from her tight-knit family circle of ten. (Despite my family feeling REALLY shy around "technical" things.) It turns out that her full care team witnessed hollarhype delivering our voices seemingly "out of thin air," and they are now exploring ways to make the experience possible for more patients and their families. (A step in the right direction, considering there are nearly one million staffed hospital beds in the US at any given time, and millions of more people feeling a disabled state of support in relation.)
You might have been in-the-loop during the market adoption sprint I was running to in 2020 to implement hollarhype in hospitals for this reason (and the tangle of red tape I wound up in.) What become clear to me from this recent scenario is that:
A) when it comes to your own family, you don’t take no for an answer. (Which, is a motivation I will be carrying with me for others. Friends, colleagues, customers, partners.)
B) when people witness the value of hollarhype, they naturally want to enable it for more people.
It's possible that hollarhype is in a "feel it to believe it" company stage, but that's not going to stop us from plowing forward. In fact, it's the reassuring variable that will undoubtably drive our meaningful network effects once we flush out critical market experiments supported from this raise. Product leaders talk about "magic moments" as a buzz-phrase around engagement—the people who use our product choose those actual words to describe their experiences with it.
Making more magical power-ups possible for everyone in an uphill challenge remains the mission. We chip away at that with each activation—informal, or formal, large or small—each of them driving real value. A billion of them, we believe, can inspire more optimism for humanity.
Emily Zaccardi
CEO + Co-founder