(Full video here)

“What we’re building here [at Zingage] is AI for home care. High level, this is the industry where, if you have a grandparent, a parent, and they want to age in their own home as opposed to going to a hospital, this is one of the essential services that’s going to need to enable that. With about 80 million seniors above the age of 65 by the end of this decade, it’s one of the most important industries that nobody is talking about.

Today, the best way I can describe this industry is: imagine the taxi industry prior to Uber inventing ridesharing. People are still using notepads, Excel sheets, etc. So, you can imagine running Uber based off that.”

“Prior to building this company, I used to work at Ramp. My co-founder, he was a second-time founder where he was building a kind of property marketplace for contractors and property managers. Both he and I had a really strong affinity towards building something for the frontline workforce.

So, we spent about a year exploring in South Park Commons, going through a lot of different industries like restaurants, hospitality. Home care drew us to it in the end because of our own personal experiences. My co-founder’s grandmother was a career nurse at Jamaica Hospital, working there for almost 20 years, and solved all kinds of challenges when it comes to the admin side of home care. And for my grandfather, our family went through six months of navigating care for him and just realized, holy sh*t, I cannot imagine every family in this country going through this experience.

From our data, we see 10% of patients having their shifts cancelled and never restaffed. And we’re talking about seniors who are sometimes just completely alone, right?Just last month, actually, one of our earliest customers acquired a home care agency. In two weeks, they got investigated by the FBI. Nothing crazy going on, but it’s frankly just two years of paperwork that those guys completely missed out on and forgot to submit.”

“It’s kind of this winding journey where when we first started exploring this industry, we were kind of a nobody. And so, early on, we did a lot of scrappy stuff.

My co-founder and I, one of our favorite things is that we’d go down to Sheepside Bay, Brooklyn. We’d bring a box of doughnuts. So, we rented my co-founder’s girlfriend’s car and just bought a whole trunk full of like, 20 boxes of doughnuts.

We got like 50% on the spot demo rates. So, it’s one of the best ROI investments. Very early on, we did all of these free, hands-off things.

We launched our first product, which is this co-pilot for employee engagement management. Really learned the ins and outs. And that product helped us grow from zero to 400-plus home care agencies across the country.

However, we very quickly realized that people in health care, they really don't need another dashboard. They really just want to get sh*t done. And not having to look in the dashboard, they want to actually spend a lot more time with patients.

This year, we're launching what we call Zingage Operator, which is this kind of end-to-end agent that sits behind the back office and automates all of the back office logistics.

And really, the inflection point came this year, where we're like, wow. A year ago, we thought a lot of the end-to-end automation, like deadlines in the world, was impossible. We revisited that this year. And holy sh*t, voice AI has just gotten so good. We're able to now throw full AI onto a phone call. And sometimes we get calls from patients saying, holy sh*t, this is the best phone call I've ever taken. They end up sharing their entire life story with us. And we're like, wow, this is just truly, truly wonderful.”

Looking back, what have been the biggest challenges? What do you wish you had known when you started?

“I think the biggest thing for us has always been: how do we build a phenomenal team?

One of the things we always try to educate people here is zooming out to the larger vision. When you're a talented engineer in New York City or Silicon Valley, you have so many options.

What makes Zingage unique?

For us, we really put a lot of thought in terms of reframing this. Like, look, you're not here to just build another ChatGPT wrapper. You're here to really help your own grandma.

What ends up happening here is that we attracted a lot of really great people who are sometimes building for their own family.

I think for us, especially right now, capital is so abundant – great ideas, distribution, thought partners – all of that is solved with so many great technologies. I think the last battle here is: how do you win the talent war?

And for us, it's always about: how do you shape and narrate the best stories out there? You know, we're not here to just build a tool. We're here to keep your own grandmother out of the hospital.

~

As a founder, your challenge really evolves, literally every single month.

Month zero: how do we drive our customers, right? We even hired a Craigslist actor to accompany us to a conference that we went to.

It was our first conference back in 2024. At that point, we were nobody. We had, like, five private customers. And there was this big enterprise conference that's happening.

Both my co-founders were like, sh*t, we don't have the rizz to rizz up these, 56-year-old CEOs of some of the largest healthcare agencies in the country.

And so, we're like, sh*t, how do we get these conversations started? So, we're on Craigslist. We interviewed about 20 actresses.

We paid her $2,000. And she went around the room for three days, opened up a conversation with practically everyone in the room.

And then, you know, the conversation kept going. And the funny thing is that actually led to one of our largest contracts.

A news reporter really loved the story. I think that she didn’t know it was an actress. But she was like, wow, these guys are really young. The team looks great.

They didn’t know that the team was just, like, me, my co-founder, and an actress. They were like, ‘This team is great. Let’s write an article.’

And so, that article led to one of the biggest partnerships that we had so far.

The funny thing is, like, we tried to ask her to come to a second conference. And she saw the result from the first conference. And she’s like, ‘Alright guys, we’re actually going to charge you $20,000 this time.’

So, we went ahead and actually hired her.”

“Yeah. One of the things that we really try to emphasize at this point is creating a very strong sense of culture.

Right? I think when you look at some of the best companies out there, the early employees are just very tight with each other. I think the early employees are kind of in the trenches. You feel like you're fighting this kind of common enemy.

For us, our internal mascot is Francis Drake. I don't know if you guys play video games, but we really like Sir Francis Drake [from Uncharted] because he's the pirate with the blessing of the queen. And we try to act the same way.

And so, every new hire that we bring on board, they get a little pirate chest around what's the ‘book of Zingage.’ They get a little eye patch. And we take people out for all kinds of excursions.

My most pirate story? I mean, it's got to be when we were first launching this agentic product. Once again, we also came with complete humility.

We didn't know what we were building. And so, as a result, we literally went up to a couple of early customers and said, ‘Look, guys, you don’t have people to work for you this weekend. We'll do it for free.’

And they're like, ‘Are you guys crazy? Are you sure about it?’ And we spent the first three months literally just answering every single phone call at 5 a.m. in the morning. And you get some crazy stories. Like, we had a caregiver who locked herself in her own trunk.

So, first of all, we're like, how did that happen? And second is, holy sh*t, let's call 911 right now before she suffocates or anything.

And so just that three months of us being physically on call, answering every single phone call – I think right now we can confidently say we're the best. There’s nobody who knows home care better than we do.

We've mapped out literally every possible workflow, every single crazy edge case you can think about.

And frankly, when it comes to the team as well, we like to say we're here to establish a context-first culture.

We didn’t hire these smart engineers to make them Jira monkeys. We're here to push them as close to the concept as possible. And that starts with doing the job yourself.”

“I don't know… great question. Both my co-founder and I are absolute history nerds.

The one quirk [we have] is that we name every single company strategy or campaign after famous wars or battle campaigns. And so that's a little fun quirk that both he and I do.”

“We're big fans of Linear. Right now, like, our entire company is run on Linear, thanks to our head of product. It's phenomenal.

We use Linear for new employee onboarding. You know, every employee has a new project on Linear.

You know, they kind of sign themselves on tickets. We use Linear like our CRM as well. Each customer gets their own project.

And so, yeah, I mean, we're big Linear fans. Their product is beautiful. And we try to kind of just, like, max out, like, every use case they provide.”

“I used to work at Ramp, so I was always here. My co-founder, as well, he started his previous company here in New York City. And so, when it came to brainstorming, we just kind of continued our way here.

But, yeah, I think what we ended up realizing is that New York City attracts these really special type of builders who really care a lot about the application layer in addition to how it's being built, right? In New York City, you're seeing a lot of these healthcare companies, fintech companies, people who truly are on the more user application side. So I think New York City has been fantastic for us so far.”

“Yeah, we're hiring across the board right now. So we have a small, mighty team of 20 people. Our goal is to double that by the end of this year.

We're hiring eight engineers right now. We're hiring on the finance team. And so it's really just kind of anyone, anywhere and everyone who's that talented, we look forward to chatting with them.”

If this sounds like you or someone you know, reach out at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

Daniel Tian is the co-founder and CTO of Zingage, an AI care delivery platform transforming home-based healthcare. By automating the logistics of scheduling, staffing, and compliance alongside existing EMRs, Zingage is helping modernize the way care is delivered at home. Zingage was founded in 2023, and Daniel has been a member of NYC Founders Club since our launch last year.