Every great product starts with a problem that hits close to home. For us, that problem was the daily chaos of family organization - and the realization that despite all the apps and tools available, busy families were still drowning in information.
The Breaking Point
It was a Tuesday morning in March 2025. Our son had a doctor's appointment at 3 PM, soccer practice was moved to Thursday (buried in a long email from the coach), and the school sent home a flyer about picture day that somehow never made it to our calendar.
By noon, we'd missed the appointment reminder, couldn't find the practice schedule, and realized picture day was actually tomorrow - not next week like we thought.
That's when it hit us: we weren't failing at organization. The tools were failing us.
We tried everything. Shared Google calendars that nobody updated. Family organizer apps that required manual entry of every single detail. Color-coded systems that looked great in theory but crumbled under the reality of a busy week.
The Real Problem
The issue wasn't that families didn't want to be organized. It's that modern family coordination happens through email, text messages, school portals, and app notifications - but our organization tools still expected us to manually transfer all this information into yet another system.
Meanwhile, we were getting dozens of emails every week with important family information:
- School events and schedule changes
- Medical appointments and reminders
- Sports schedules and practice updates
- Birthday party invitations and details
- Travel confirmations and itineraries
But extracting the key details - dates, times, locations - and getting them into our family calendar was a manual, time-consuming process that we often just... didn't do.
The "What If" Moment
One evening in May 2025, after spending 20 minutes trying to decode a confusing school email about an upcoming event, we asked ourselves: "What if our calendar could just read these emails for us?"
What if, instead of spending Sunday nights manually entering the week's schedule, we could simply forward important emails and watch our family calendar update automatically?
What if technology could finally work the way busy families actually operate?
Building Something Different
That's how Sense was born in June 2025. Not as another family calendar app, but as an intelligent system that meets families where they already are - in their email inboxes.
We started with a simple principle: family organization should reduce mental load, not add to it. Every feature we build, every decision we make, goes through this filter: Does this make a busy parent's life easier, or just give them one more thing to manage?
Our North Star
We believe every family deserves access to tools that actually work with their reality, not against it. That means:
- Intelligence over manual entry - Let technology do the work of extracting and organizing information
- Simplicity over features - Focus on doing essential things exceptionally well
- Accessibility over exclusivity - Powerful organization tools shouldn't be a luxury
The Journey Continues
In just a few months since launching, hundreds of families have started using Sense to automatically organize their schedules from email. Early users tell us they've reclaimed hours of their week and never miss important events anymore.
But we're just getting started. Every day, we hear from families with new challenges and ideas for how technology could better support the beautiful chaos of family life.
We're still that same family who missed the doctor's appointment and forgot about picture day. The difference is, now we have a tool that actually works with how we live, not against it.
And we're building it for every family who's ever felt overwhelmed by the simple act of staying organized.
Thank you for being part of this journey with us. Here's to less chaos and more moments that matter.
— The Sense Team