How I Built A Life Saving App For People Who Live Alone

Rob van den Akker

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Published: February 20th, 2023

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Rob van den Akker

Founder, TheLifeSigns

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TheLifeSigns

thelifesigns.com

from Diemen

started June 2020

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Hi, I am Rob van den Akker, the creator, and owner of TheLifeSigns service, based in the Amsterdam area in the Netherlands. After working for many years at Abbott Healthcare Products (I am a pharmacist), I decided to do something very different.

I was looking for a project that could solve an existing challenge in society. Reading a newspaper article about the growing number of singles being found in their homes days or weeks after something happened to them, inspired me to look for a solution to this issue.

The resulting product, ‘TheLifeSigns,’ is a simple email-based service that automatically notifies friends when a solo living individual becomes incapacitated. TheLifeSigns service was introduced in the Netherlands a couple of years ago, with very positive feedback. We are now expanding to the rest of the world.

About 800 users and buddies are currently in the system. The lifesigns button has been pressed about 90.000 times since the launch of the service.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Although I am a pharmacist, my true passion has been coding. During my work as a project manager in the pharmaceutical industry, I often used scripts to ‘automate the boring stuff’. When I became financially independent, I decided to leave the industry. I wanted to start a project that would benefit society and be commercially viable.

I heard many stories about single living persons who died because something happened to them and they could not call for help. A local newspaper reported that annually in Amsterdam, 34 fatalities are detected after 14 days. It is likely that If aid had arrived sooner, several of these fatalities may have been avoided. Dying alone turns out to be a global and growing phenomenon. In Japan, they even have a special word for it: Kodokushi (孤独死), or lonely death.

I decided to work on a possible solution for this issue. I have the luxury can do all the coding myself and the costs for a server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) are low. This makes my financial runway quite long, and I can offer the service for free. In parallel, I work on developing paid services. The first introduction in the Netherlands validated the idea that there is a need for a service like this.

It took me more than a year to write a working application. I don’t think this would have been possible without the enormous amount of help available on the internet.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

When I started this project, I did not master the tools needed. Many years ago I programmed in archaic languages Fortran, dBase, and Clipper. During my work as a project manager, I wrote scripts in AutoHotKey (AHK) to automate some repetitive tasks.

For the TheLifeSigns project, I decided to use the well-known Python language. As a side note, Python language development started at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), about a mile from where I live today. I studied at the same time at the UvA as the Python inventor Guido van Rossum, but I unfortunately never met him.

Learning a new programming language nowadays is much easier than in the past. Free Internet courses and YouTube helps a lot. Building a web application from scratch with Python alone is beyond my capabilities. Luckily there are many web frameworks based on the Python language. I was thinking about using either Flask or Django.

I decided to go for Django because it had more built-in features and excellent documentation. It took me more than a year to write a working application. I don’t think this would have been possible without the enormous amount of help available on the internet.

Stack Overflow was perhaps the most useful source for finding answers to the many issues I encountered. It was good to see that I was not the only one having the same coding hurdles. I am very grateful to all those who took the time to write all the possible solutions on Stack Overflow.

Having an application that works on your PC is not enough. You have to use an array of tools to share it with the rest of the world. The easiest way is probably going for a managed hosting solution like Heroku. However, I wanted to have more control and lower operational costs. The solution that I chose was Amazon Web Services (AWS). First, I tried EC2 instances but finally decided to go for a Lightsail Ubuntu Linux instance. For those familiar with DigitalOcean products, Lightsail is Amazon’s equivalent to DigitalOceans droplets.

This Ubuntu instance runs the Django application in Docker containers. The server furthermore runs a PostgreSQL database and Nginx.

It took me about two years to learn the tools, build the application and open it up to the outside world. I must say it was fun becoming a full-stack developer. If you have the time, I would certainly recommend the journey.

TheLifeSigns users receive an email with a button every day. I wanted the mail to be appealing and interesting. I found an article describing an email template Amazon had accidentally sent out. This article states

“... The Image Attracts. A reader’s focus will initially gravitate to the photo at the top of the email. The image should be noticeable and attention-grabbing with bright and attractive colors. A 600 x 200 image is the perfect size for attracting without overwhelming.”

I decided to use this advice and created a large collection of 600 x 200 pictures with mainly nature scenes. To make the daily mail even more interesting, I created a database with uplifting quotes. Every day a random image and quotes are selected. Although the button is the same daily, the image and quote give every email a different feel.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Launching and getting traction is very different from building a product. The first users were solo-living friends and family. After a couple of months of getting feedback and correcting bugs, I felt it was time to go for a broader user base.

Being a bootstrapped startup, I did not have a marketing budget. What does help is that the product is currently free, and editors tend to feel sympathy for a product that aims at saving people’s lives.

Although TheLifeSigns is for solo living persons in all age groups, the majority are aged. Even though older people nowadays have internet access, they are probably less active on the web than younger people. I, therefore, decided to first focus on traditional printed media like door-to-door papers and magazines.

There are hundreds of locally and nationally oriented door-to-door papers and magazines in the Netherlands. Finding the addresses of the editors and journalists of these papers was a challenge.

Luckily I found a list from an organization called ‘media info group’ containing all printed publications in the Netherlands. Visiting the websites of hundreds of publishers and extracting email addresses would be too much work. For this task, I wrote Python scripts.

Using the publication list as input, an automated search was done for URLs of publisher contact pages. Web scraping was done on these URLs to extract email addresses. (Using Regular Expressions (regex) for those interested.) All these email addresses were collected in a mailing list with more than 2000 entries.

An email was sent to these addresses explaining the TheLifeSigns concept and asking for attention to the publication.

The risk of sending out so many cold emails is getting classified as spam and having your email address blocked. Surprisingly few recipients flagged me as a spammer. This probably has to do with the fact that I was not trying to sell anything and the aim of the product is to help solo people. Moreover, the recipients were editors or journalists who often are looking for new stuff and perhaps less prone to flag it as spam. Although the focus on printed media for a web-based product is probably a bit weird, it resulted in many publications and many users.

After approaching a paper-based publication, my attention shifted to finding websites for the elderly. All these activities were focussed on the Netherlands only. The hundreds of Dutch users helped me find bugs and optimize the system.

The launch of the product made it clear to me that getting traction is challenging and hard work.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Very few people stop using TheLifeSigns when they start using it. Nearly all people who subscribed to the service about two years ago are still pressing the button every day for 365 days a year. Retaining users is, therefore, not a problem.

Getting new customers is a completely different story. In periods when I only do development work and no promotion, the user base grows only very slowly. When you have a product that can save lives, you more or less expect that it will grow without much promotion. But, of course, that is nonsense.

I take comfort in the knowledge that even well-known brands have to do a lot of promotion.

Did you, e.g. know that Coca-Cola spends an average of 4 billion dollars a year on advertising worldwide? With this in mind, I take comfort that my product needs promotion, and without a promotion budget, growth will be slow. Based on recent experience, promotion is mainly needed for growth and not so much for keeping users because when a user is ‘on board,’ the chance of him leaving is relatively low.

Although getting articles in paper publications worked, I noticed that online publications drew many more new users.

The reason is probably that people visiting online publications are more inclined to use online services. Moreover, pressing a link from an online page has a lower threshold than retyping a link from a paper publication. One example of an online publication that resulted in about 40 new users was a publication on Seniorweb, focused on older web users in the Netherlands.

I prefer organic growth generated from internal operations over inorganic growth derived from outside, even if it means growth will be much slower

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today I am pleased to have hundreds of users and low churn. As the development and test period in the Netherlands has been completed, I want to focus on expanding the user base to the rest of the world.

Experience in the Netherlands shows that editors of papers and online publications sympathize with the product and are willing to pay attention to it. My promotion targets will be social media, blogs, and sites focused on solo living and the elderly.

As the English-speaking population is much larger than the Dutch, I expect growth to be faster, but looking back, I know it will need a lot of effort.

I intend to keep the email service free. There is no urgent need to make money with this product. I intend to monetize new features. I plan to add new paid communication channels like WhatsApp or Telegram.

My users are solo living persons. I think that reaching this specific audience can be interesting for some companies. I, therefore, consider adding sponsor advertisements to the daily emails.

There is still a lot of work to do to grow and monetize the service. One way to grow the business faster would be to attract funds and spend that on marketing. This, however, would change the dynamics of the project, as getting funding would add external pressure and timelines. I prefer organic growth generated from internal operations over inorganic growth derived from outside, even if it means growth will be much slower.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

As mentioned above, when I started this project, I did not have the coding skills required. I started reading a lot of books and watching YouTube instruction videos. In hindsight, I read too much and watched too many videos. I concluded that you can only really learn to code by doing it. If I started again, I would start coding much earlier. However, I sometimes cringe when looking at the code I wrote early in the project. But it works, and perhaps I will refactor it later.

I was very hesitant to launch the product. Perhaps this has to do with my pharmaceutical industrial background. In the pharmaceutical industry, you need to be 100% sure your products work and are safe.

TheLifeSigns is in a way comparable with pharmaceutical products as both products try to keep users safe and healthy. But keeping the same standards as in the pharmaceutical industry is not realistic. I, therefore, added the following disclaimer:

‘TheLifeSigns does not give any warranty that the Site will be error-free or that access thereto will be continuous or uninterrupted. E.g. we cannot guarantee that email schedules will be executed as planned. This could result in follow-up requests not being sent. Your use of the Site is at your discretion and risk.’

Nevertheless, I wanted my MVP (minimal viable product) to be highly reliable and feature-rich. But where do you draw a line? It was my son who urged me to stop developing and make the product available to the public. (My son has a computer science degree and works as an IT specialist at booking.com.) After he and a circle of friends and acquaintances tested it, I felt more confident to offer the service to users I did not know. Looking back, I still think the development phase took too long. I should have resisted the urge to make things perfect.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Most of the code I wrote was in Python within the Django web framework. For older developers like myself, it is still surprising to see nowadays, nearly all tools are free.

Starting with my preferred editor vs-code to full-fledged SQL databases like PostgreSQL, none of these cutting-edge applications cost anything. There are however services you need to pay for like domain registration (Godaddy) and the Ubuntu linux server on AWS (Amazon Web Services). For an overview of the applications I use you can visit Stackshare.io.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Getting new users is the most challenging part of running a startup. To get some inspiration, I read (and liked) “Traction” from Gabriel Weinberg founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, and previously the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. I plan to try some of the suggested nineteen traction channels.

For inspiration, I listen to podcasts about startups like Indie Hackers, Acquired, and Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. I also enjoy listening to podcasts related to the tools I use, like Django and Python Bytes.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

I enjoy my current journey, building a product and making it grow because I like the technology and feel good about helping people live safer life.

My advice would be to try to find a product you think has added value to society, and get excited about all the free tools and the wonderful communities around them. If you love your product and enjoy the technologies, the rest will follow.