TextMyPill
WhatsApp medicine reminders, no app needed
Sharing something more technical than the usual founder story posts, since I think the actual engineering tradeoffs here might be useful to others building similar reminder or scheduling systems.
TextMyPill sends WhatsApp medicine reminders, and the part that turned out to be far more complex than expected wasn't the sending, it was everything around managing the state of a reminder across its lifecycle.
A single reminder isn't just "send message at time X."It needs to track whether it was delivered, whether the person replied, how long to wait before a follow-up if they didn't, whether a caregiver should be notified on a missed dose, and whether that missed dose should affect future scheduling logic, like adjusting reminder timing if someone consistently responds 20 minutes late.
Then multiply that by managing multiple people under one account, a caregiver managing reminders for two or three family members, each on different medicines, different schedules, some overlapping. Each person's reminder state machine needs to be independent but the caregiver dashboard needs a unified view across all of them in real time.
The trickiest part was designing the escalation logic without making it annoying. If someone misses a dose, how long before a follow-up reminder goes out. How many follow-ups before notifying the caregiver. How do you avoid notification fatigue while still catching genuinely missed doses versus someone just being 10 minutes late because they were in the shower.
Ended up building a tiered system, immediate reminder, soft follow-up after 30 minutes, caregiver alert only after a second miss, with the thresholds being configurable per person since an 80 year old on heart medication needs tighter tolerances than someone on daily vitamins.
Curious if anyone else has dealt with similar escalation or state management logic, notification systems, task reminders, anything with a similar "did this actually get done" tracking problem. What patterns worked for you?
I'm a solo founder building TextMyPill, WhatsApp medicine reminders for people managing daily medication, for themselves or elderly parents.
I built it after watching a family member struggle with remembering multiple medicines at different times. Every existing solution meant downloading yet another app that never got opened past day two. So I built the reminders into WhatsApp instead, since that's something people already check without thinking. Snap a prescription photo, it reads the medicines automatically, sends a reminder at the right time, and you reply once it's done.
A few weeks back I shared the story on Reddit, not expecting much. It ended up hitting 36,000 views and peaked at 866 concurrent users on the site at once.
What surprised me most wasn't the traffic itself, it was where it came from. Roughly a quarter from the US, a good chunk from India, the rest scattered globally. I built this thinking mainly about Indian families managing parents remotely, but the worry apparently isn't unique to one country at all.
The real lesson though, the product had been built and working for weeks before any of this happened. Nothing about the product itself changed. What changed was that people finally knew it existed.
Still solo, still bootstrapped, no funding. Still learning distribution one honest post at a time.
Happy to answer anything—the WhatsApp API integration, the AI prescription parsing, or just the distribution side of things.
-
1
Wow that's really cool. I think it's awesome that you were able to find something that so many people are wanting right now. That demand was proven fast. I'd love to ask a few questions about when to ship a product. I'm currently working on a Meal Prep App.
1 Comment
I like that you discovered the hard part wasn't sending reminders—it was modeling real human behavior.
Tracking whether a task happened is straightforward. Designing escalation that distinguishes "slightly late" from "actually missed" is where the product becomes genuinely useful rather than just another notification app.