Why We Started Peopleoo

Peopleoo didn’t start as a business idea. It started as a feeling built on years of experience, frustration, and a deep desire to make the care sector better.

Our journey into care began years ago, with our own family experience of poor care for a loved one in a care home. It was painful, personal, and left us thinking there has to be a better way. In the middle of all that, someone in the family joked, "Let’s just build a better care home for Grandma." That joke turned into ambition, and eventually, that ambition became our family business.

For more years than we can count now, we’ve been providers in the health and social care space. We've seen the landscape shift from the days of the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI), through to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), with countless changes in policies, practices, and politics along the way.

We’ve worked through fee uplifts that didn’t match the reality on the ground, the Transforming Care agenda, NHS reviews, energy price surges, the cost of living crisis, and the emotional and practical toll of the Covid-19 pandemic. We’ve seen the system creak under pressure from all sides, government changes, economic crises, wars abroad that ripple into daily life at home, and endless conversations about "dementia tax" and social care funding.

And through all of that, we kept going.

We had great regulatory inspections. And some that were tough to hear.
We won awards. And dealt with our fair share of bad PR.
We made a difference. And yes, sometimes we got it wrong.

But we always tried to do our best. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.
We listened. We learned. And we grew.

Peopleoo was born later, not from a joke, but from that experience. From everything we’d lived through. From our understanding of the sector, our love for the people in it, and our growing belief that something needed to change. We didn’t know exactly how yetbut we knew we had to start.

What we learned through those years in care is this:
Even in a sector built on kindness, it doesn’t always feel kind.

We saw it in the way services were judged, always measured and rarely celebrated.
We saw it in the toll on our team, good people giving everything they had, yet constantly made to feel like it wasn’t enough.
We felt it ourselves, burnout, self-doubt, the constant pressure to be perfect in an imperfect world.

So we did something small: a “Special Mention” scheme. Slips of paper for anyone, families, staff, inspectors, visitors, to write something positive. A thank you. A moment of kindness. A name remembered. A job well done. It was simple, human, and heartfelt.

But even that was hard to keep going. Because in a sea of complaints, investigations, inspections, and demands, who has time for slips of paper?

And that’s when the idea for Peopleoo was born.

We wanted to build a place where care providers, staff, families and the millions of unpaid carers out there, could come together to share what’s going right. Peopleoo isn’t just for professionals; it’s for the everyday heroes too. The sons, daughters, neighbours, friends, and community members who show up, who care, and who often go unseen.

Because the truth is: caring people are nearly everyone you know. They’re everywhere, quietly holding it all together.

Peopleoo is a space to celebrate them. A platform that uplifts rather than inspects. Encourages rather than criticises. Connects rather than isolates.

It’s not just a platform. It’s a movement.
Let’s remind each other why we started. Let’s rebuild the kindness.
Let’s make caring visible again.