They Solve Problems of the Traditional British Care System

Helpr connects care workers directly with people looking for their services. The providers earn up to 66% more than in the traditional British care system, while the clients pay up to 20% less for their services. The project is run as a social enterprise and prioritizes quality of service over profit. Peter and Steve told us how they business has been going.

Bartek Ciszewski: How did you come up with an idea for Helpr?

Peter John: We didn't have any background in social care market. We made our careers in technology and financial sector. These were our private experiences that showed us the system should be changed. We saw the lack of quality care available in the UK. Both Steve and I had problems finding such service for our families.

We noticed that the system is not efficient, and we could apply technology to make it better. Currently, care workers in the UK are underpaid, and labour turnover is a huge problem. Private individuals are charged a lot of money for care services, and the profit goes to agent and local authorities, while care workers are on minimum wages.

Bartek: How does Helpr change it?

Peter: In Helpr, care workers are our partners. We put them at the very center of our platform. Well paid and well trained people are naturally much more motivated. Only this way we can increase the supply of the care services and balance the market.

The first step was to take out the agents, who profit the most from the system. As a result, our care partners earn up to 66% more than they would otherwise. Private self-paying customers are also charged up to 20% less for social care services.

Additionally, care workers get flexible working hours, since they plan their own schedule. We provide training, and workers may claim travel fees, uniform cost, and more. Work hour flexibility proved to be crucial to engage more people in social care, such as retired social care workers, newcomers, or young mothers.

We provide the training online. In the UK there's a official Care Certificate that guarantees worker's skills. We have partnered with the only company in the country credited to give Care Certificate courses online. We provide this service to all our care partners as a perk for joining our platform.

Bartek: What were the main challenges when building such a platform?

Peter: Social service is a complex market, and not having a background in it, meant having to learn a lot. Each local council works differently, while the agencies sell the services to private sector in their own way. The biggest challenge was keeping tabs on multitude of care partners in various locations.

Additionally we needed to provide transparency for the service purchasers (often son and daughters of the people being taken care of). They need access to the care plans and diaries.

Bartek: How does your app work in practice?

Peter: A care partner starts his or her commute in the morning. Gets to the car, and the app is already working measuring the distance, so they can claim the costs back. Helpr provides the information when a care partner walks into the client's house. The whole process is very transparent. This is something that is very needed in the social care market.

When a care partner writes a note in an exercise book, we store it online, and it's accessible for everyone involved. The app also provides a system of alerts. If a partner can't get into the house, normally they have to phone the agency, until they connect with the right person. Helpr app sends real-time automatic alerts to all interested parties.

Finally, the payments are handled through our systems. As you can see, there were quite a few technical challenges in this project.

Bartek: How did you choose Netguru for your development team?

Steve Dailey: We've got long history in tech project and program managing, and we know the market very well. We thought UK based companies were going to be too expensive. I have quite a long experience working with remote teams, and worked with complete offshore (i.e. companies from India) and nearshore (i.e. Spain and Poland), so I knew what to look for.

We reduced a list of 20 companies down to 4. There was one from the UK (a front for an Indian outfit), a Romanian company who wanted to bring the development team to London, one from Lithuania, who made a good impression but their culture and language skills were problematic, and finally Netguru. We did a scoping exercise. I liked the team's language skills, they seemed to be easy with which to work and partner.

Netguru had pretty good references which underlined reliability and precise budget delivery. Transparency was a big issue for us and we liked that about Netguru. You were open to inviting us to your office, and we were very keen to visit. We liked your openness, because we wanted to be hands on the project.