diff --git a/evergreen-business-plan/Evergreen-Business-Plan.pdf b/evergreen-business-plan/Evergreen-Business-Plan.pdf new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e6743c7 Binary files /dev/null and b/evergreen-business-plan/Evergreen-Business-Plan.pdf differ diff --git a/evergreen-business-plan/index.html b/evergreen-business-plan/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b27359a --- /dev/null +++ b/evergreen-business-plan/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,666 @@ + + + + + + +Evergreen — business plan + + + + + + + + +
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A nucleus + Fibernetics portfolio company · business plan
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Built · live in prototype today
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The question this company exists to answer
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Your mother goes days
without a real conversation.
Who's checking in?
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Friday
Margaret's last real conversation — a neighbour, at the mailbox.
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Saturday
Nothing.
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Sunday
Nothing.
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Monday
Her daughter calls, guilty, from three cities away. "I'm fine," Margaret says.
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57% of Canadians over 50 feel lonely — and the products on the shelf either wait for a fall or wait to be opened.
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Evergreen is a warm voice that calls every morning, on the phone she already owns — so the silence never runs that long. It is built, and you can call it today.
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Confidential · v3 · August 2026
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Evergreen
Executive summary
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The whole plan, on one page
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A voice that calls every morning —
with a safety net a family can trust.

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Evergreen turns an aging parent's own phone into a daily companion that also screens scam calls and reaches a licensed human in an emergency. The daily call is why she answers; the safety net is why the family pays. It's built and live today.
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The problem
Days of silence

57% of Canadians 50+ are lonely and their children live cities away. Pendants wait for a fall; free apps wait to be opened.

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The product
One warm voice, her own phone

Iris: a morning call, scam screening in the network, a licensed safety net, and a family dashboard that fills itself.

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Where we are
Built & live today

The voice, safety backstop, consent and dashboard all run in a prototype. Pre-revenue; monitoring partner not yet signed.

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Why us
Trust is the category

Carrier-native call control an app can't copy, and six months of knowing what "a good morning" sounds like for her.

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The model
~81% gross margin

Basic $100 · Full $200 · Unlimited (BYO key) $125 per month — at the real, AI-inclusive cost to serve.

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The ask
Two weeks of lawyers, then ship

A legal-architecture sprint + a signed monitoring partner, then a small team to reach the first Canadian families.

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+ The one line +

Everyone sells one slice — a device, a robot, or a spam blocker. Evergreen makes companionship, fraud protection and emergency response one thing, on the phone she already owns.

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2 / 15
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Evergreen
Why now
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The opportunity — in our own market
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Canadian seniors are lonely, and their
children are three cities away.

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We are a Canadian carrier, so here is the Canadian case — and it is stronger than the American one. Loneliness is the thing that erodes an aging parent every day, and the thing no free app or pendant actually touches.
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57%
of Canadians 50+ report feeling lonely — and it hasn't improved since 2022.
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1.1M
older Canadians live with loneliness — nearly 1 in 5 seniors.
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8.1M
Canadians are 65+ today; ~28% of them live alone.
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+ The honest market — sized in Canada, not the US +

TAM 8.1M seniors · SAM ~1.1M lonely or living alone · SOM at just 1% ≈ $97M ARR — on our own network, in our own regulatory home.

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We are not sizing this on the US 65+ population — we don't own a network there and the moat wouldn't travel. And the fraud problem is real money: CA$137.9M in Canadian 60+ scam losses in 2024 (40% of all reported losses). The global "AI in elderly care" market is ~US$39B (2025) → ~US$90B by 2031 (≈15% CAGR).

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Sources: NIA Ageing in Canada Survey (57% of 50+ report loneliness) · Statistics Canada (~1.1M lonely; 8.1M seniors, ~28% live alone), 2025 · CAFC (2024 60+ fraud losses) · Mordor Intelligence (AI-in-elderly-care market). SOM/ARR illustrative at $100 Basic × 1% of 8.1M seniors.
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3 / 15
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Assumption · Canada-first · figures illustrative
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Evergreen
The product
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Four things · one warm voice · her own phone
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A voice she talks to every morning.
A dashboard that tells you how it went.

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Nothing to install. Nothing to learn. She keeps her phone and her number — even a flip phone. Iris does the rest, and everything she notices lands in one place for the family.
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☀
The Morning Call

Iris says good morning, every day — the ritual she comes to love. It's the whole reason she picks up, and if she doesn't, somebody hears about it.

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✓
Scam Shield

We screen unknown callers before her phone rings — in the network, not an app. Family and doctors pass straight through.

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The safety net

No answer, no interaction — Iris calls. Still nothing, and it escalates to a licensed monitoring partner who can send real help. Alongside a medical alert, never instead.

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◷
CareCircle

The family dashboard that fills itself. Every signal above feeds it live, so nobody has to update anything.

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+ Basic is the daily call and the safety net around it. + StoryLine, Good News and games are the Full tier; the formatted keepsake book is a one-time order ($100 for ~80k words, +$10 per extra 50k). Companionship is why she answers the phone; the safety net is why the family trusts it. +
Basic $100 · Full $200 · Unlimited (bring-your-own-AI-key) $125 — per month.
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4 / 15
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Assumption · inactivity detection + monitoring partner
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Evergreen
Where we are
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Not a concept — a working product
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We didn't pitch this and wait.
We built it — and it's live today.

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Everything on the last page is running right now: a real voice you can call, a safety net that texts the family on its own, and a dashboard that fills itself. Here is exactly what's built.
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Live
Iris, the morning voiceA real, spoken phone-style call in the browser — speech to text, Claude, and a warm synthesized voice — with natural interruption and memory that carries from one morning to the next.
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Live
The safety backstopEvery call is screened for crisis, scam and emergency language and the family is texted independently of the AI. A second filter checks Iris's own words before Margaret hears them.
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Live
Consent, on the first callIris introduces herself as an automated voice and asks Margaret's permission — recorded, and revocable any time.
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Live
CareCircleThe family dashboard, filling itself from real check-ins, blocked scams and alerts — nobody updates anything.
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Live
The daily rhythmPlan-aware call limits, a gentle wind-down as time runs low, and a graceful "that's all for today" that still reaches the family if she's lonely and keeps calling.
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Live
Built to be trustedSigned sign-in links, encrypted keys, hardened access — the unglamorous parts a family's trust actually depends on.
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Next
The licensed 24/7 monitoring partnerThe regulated desk that can dispatch real help is fully designed and specified — signing it is the first gate on the final page, before we put this in front of families.
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+ The honest status +

You can call Iris today — what's left before launch is the licensed safety desk and the legal wrapper, not the product.

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Live in a working prototype, with a public overview site. No paying customers yet, and the monitoring partner isn't contracted — everything the family experiences is real and running.

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5 / 15
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Evergreen
Competitive analysis
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Everyone owns one slice
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Three categories, and nobody has combined them.

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The market splits into medical-alert pendants, AI companions, and scam blockers. No competitor bundles a daily companion, in-network scam screening, a family dashboard and a licensed emergency path — on the phone she already owns.
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CapabilityEvergreenTELUS LivingWellElliQAlexa Together †Scam apps
Daily AI companionship, with memory●—●partial—
Scam screening before the phone rings●———app only
Licensed 24/7 emergency dispatch●●—●—
Family dashboard that fills itself●app●●—
No device to buy or charge — her own phone●pendantrobotspeaker●
Canada-first, carrier distribution●●——~
Price / month$100–200~$35–55~$249 + sub$19.99 (shut 2023)~$5–10
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† Amazon Alexa Together discontinued 2023. Evergreen's emergency dispatch runs through a licensed monitoring partner (designed; signing is the first gate). Competitor facts from public sources; TELUS figures are promotional (existing-customer, 1-yr term). ElliQ is a US countertop robot; Papa (not shown) is human-companion, sold via US health plans.
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6 / 15
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Evergreen
The graveyard
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The question you're about to ask
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If this is such a good idea,
why is the field full of corpses?

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Fair question. Here are the bodies — and what actually killed each one.
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Alexa Together
$19.99/mo · 2021 → 2025
Amazon had 500M devices, Prime's billing rails, and real EMS dispatch — at a fifth of our price. It died without an obituary, then relaunched the emergency button alone at $5.99, sold to the senior, not the child.
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Best Buy Health
$800M in · $475M written off
They didn't have to find customers — they bought 900,000 already-paying subscribers — and still impaired over half of it. They also owned Geek Squad and 1,000 stores full of the exact buyer.
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Papa
$1.4B → 36 payers lost
Human companions. 1,200+ complaints, allegations of assault and theft — and Humana, Aetna, Cigna and ~36 others gone in a single renewal cycle after one Bloomberg story.
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ElliQ
$85M raised · ~900 units
The best-funded AI companion in the category. Its flagship deployment was bought by a state agency. Harvard wrote the case study; its central question is "should we go back to consumers?"
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+ So why us +

Amazon sold a device she had to adopt. Papa sold a stranger she had to let in. We sell a phone call she only has to answer.

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Papa proved health plans will pay for this — and that you cannot deliver it with gig workers. Iris costs cents a call and cannot assault anyone. That is why this works now and didn't in 2023.

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7 / 15
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Evergreen
The moat
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What competitors actually can't copy
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The moat isn't the network.
It's the relationship.

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Let's be honest: owning the fibre saves about $2 a month per subscriber. That's not a moat — it's a rounding error a well-funded rival erases on day one. Here is what actually compounds:
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The family's escalation contractWho we call, in what order, at 3 a.m., and what they're allowed to do. Nobody re-enrols their whole family to save ten dollars.
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Six months of knowing "normal"Her cadence, her word-finding, her mood. The value isn't that Iris talks — it's that Iris knows what a good morning sounds like for Margaret, and this one wasn't.
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Carrier-native call controlWe screen the scam call in the signalling path, before the phone rings. An app fundamentally cannot do this. This is what owning a telecom is worth.
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Trust — which is the entire categoryPapa was worth $1.4B and lost the category in one news cycle. Trust is expensive to build, instant to destroy: a moat if you're careful, a cliff if you're not.
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+ The one-liner +

We own the family's escalation contract and six months of knowing what your mother sounds like when she's fine. Both compound. Neither can be bought.

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8 / 15
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Evergreen
Safety architecture
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The slide that decides whether we can ship at all
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Every escalation reaches a licensed human.

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An AI that detects an emergency and has nowhere to send it is not a safer product. So a licensed, insured monitoring partner sits in the path — and we get the parent's consent to be there.
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Iris noticesNo answer, no motion, slurred speech, a fall mentioned, the safe word.
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Iris calls back, and stays on the lineCalm, patient, keeping her talking.
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A licensed monitoring partner picks up — 24/7A trained agent at a regulated PERS centre, white-labelled as Evergreen, who decides — and can dispatch help under their own licence and insurance.
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The family chain fires in parallelEvergreen never dials 911 — the licensed partner does. The family always gets the alert too, but they are never the only path.
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+ And she says yes, out loud +

On her very first call, Iris introduces herself, explains what she does — and asks Margaret's permission. Recorded. Revocable. Hers. This is already live in the product.

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The daughter buys it; the mother consents to it. Under the TCPA an AI voice is an "artificial voice," and consent must come from the person being called. Twenty seconds of product; the whole legal foundation.

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9 / 15
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Assumption · licensed monitoring partner
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Evergreen
Go-to-market
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A clear buyer · a warm channel · a consent that's also the moat
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The daughter buys it. The mother
consents to it. The carrier delivers it.

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A buyer who feels the problem every day, a distribution channel no AI competitor has, and an enrolment step that doubles as the legal foundation.
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Who pays — the adult childThree cities away and carrying the worry. She buys peace of mind; Mom keeps her own phone and number, with nothing to install or learn.
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Canada-first, through the carrierWarm distribution into an existing telecom base (Fibernetics / Fongo) that no US AI player has — and that the device incumbent (TELUS) can't match on companionship.
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Consent that's also the moatIris asks the senior's permission on the first call — the enrolment step and the TCPA / CASL legal foundation at once.
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Land, then expandStart on Basic (daily call + safety net); grow into Full (StoryLine, Good News, games) and the keepsake memoir. Later, a B2B / white-label tier for health plans.
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+ Why the channel wins +

Warm carrier distribution plus a buyer who feels the problem daily is a customer-acquisition path the pure-software companions simply can't buy.

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10 / 15
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Evergreen
The economics
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Told straight
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The AI costs more
than the phone call.

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Any deck that calls this an 80% gross-margin business is counting the minutes and ignoring the model. Here is the real number — and it's a number we now control, because we tune the AI ourselves.
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Cost to serve · one parent · / month
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Telephony (our network)~$0.50
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AI inference & voice$12–18
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Monitoring desk (shared)~$3
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Support, infra, alerts~$2
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Total COGS~$19
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What that means
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Price · Evergreen Basic$100/mo
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Gross margin, today~81%
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Gross margin, at scale88%+
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Payback on CAC< 6 mo
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+ The margin isn't the fibre. +

Inference gets cheaper every quarter; the live product already cascades routine turns to a small model, caches hard, and caps the tail — with daily limits built in. Owning the network is worth about $2 a month — worth having, not the business. The business is charging a real price for real safety, while free AI companions race to zero and can never answer the 3 a.m. question.

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11 / 15
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Illustrative · pending a measured COGS model
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Evergreen
Financial outlook
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Illustrative — planning scenario, not a forecast
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A high-margin subscription
with a short payback.

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Real pricing, a cost to serve we now control, and a Canada-first ramp toward the SOM. The figures below are illustrative planning assumptions — to be replaced with a measured model.
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The model, at a glance
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ARPU (Basic → Full)$100–200/mo
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Gross margin (today → scale)~81% → 88%+
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CAC payback< 6 mo
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North-star SOM (1% of seniors)≈ $97M ARR
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The ramp · illustrative
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Phase 1 · Pilotfirst families
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Phase 2 · Scale on-netcarrier base
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Phase 3 · Expand tiers + B2Bmemoir · white-label
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Path to$97M run-rate
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+ Use of funds +

The near-term spend is small and specific: the two-week legal-architecture sprint, integrating and signing the licensed monitoring partner, and a small build + go-to-market team to run the first-families pilot. The product itself is already built.

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12 / 15
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Illustrative · figures are planning assumptions
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Evergreen
Roadmap
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Milestones
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From a working prototype
to families, in three moves.

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The hard part — the product — is done. What's left is the legal wrapper, the licensed partner, and a careful launch.
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Done · now
Built
  • Iris voice pipeline
  • Safety backstop + reply guardrail
  • Consent on first call
  • CareCircle dashboard
  • Daily limits + hardened auth
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Next · ~2 weeks
Legal + partner
  • Consent / escalation legal sprint
  • Litigator pass on all copy
  • Sign the licensed monitoring partner
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Then
Pilot
  • First Canadian families
  • Prove retention + the safety desk
  • Tune support & onboarding
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Scale
Grow on-net
  • Roll out across the carrier base
  • Full-tier features + keepsake memoir
  • Explore B2B / white-label
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13 / 15
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Evergreen
Risks & operations
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What could go wrong — and how we've built against it
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The risks are real. So are the guardrails.

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Risks → mitigations
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Regulatory (TCPA · CASL · FTC)Consent-first onboarding, litigator-reviewed copy, breach-notification readiness.
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Liability of a safety promiseA licensed, insured partner sits in the path; Evergreen never dials 911 itself.
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The AI says the wrong thingAn independent keyword backstop + a reply guardrail + human escalation — already live.
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Trust — one bad incident (see Papa)Careful, consented launch; transparency; no gig strangers in the home.
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Inference cost driftSmall-model cascade, caching and daily caps — already shipped.
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Team & operating model
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Runs on our own stackBuilt on the AI-receptionist platform we already operate, on our own network.
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Emergencies are outsourced to expertsA regulated, white-labelled monitoring desk handles dispatch — we don't reinvent PERS.
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Lean to launchA small build + go-to-market team runs the first-families pilot; the product is built.
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Leadership & advisorsTo be added for the board copy — names, roles, and the selected monitoring partner.
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14 / 15
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Evergreen
The ask
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What we want
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Basic is built. Now make it real.

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Before a family is enrolled — the gate
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A two-week legal-architecture sprint plus a signed monitoring partner: the consent flow, the escalation ladder, the licensed-partner crisis protocol, and a full pass over our marketing copy with a litigator holding the pen. In this category your promise is your liability — Life Alert lost seven figures on its advertising, not its protocol. Cheap now, ruinous to retrofit onto 100,000 subscribers later.

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+ Then — the greenlight +

A small team to take the working Basic product — the Morning Call, Scam Shield, the safety net and CareCircle, all already running on our stack — to the first Canadian families.

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+ What we've actually built +

The relationship is the product — with a safety net under it, and it's already on the line.

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The daily call is why she picks up; six months of Iris knowing what "a good morning" sounds like for Margaret is the thing a free app can never copy. The scam screening and the licensed-partner safety net are what a family pays for — loneliness is the need, and the relationship is the moat.

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Evergreen
So you're not the only one checking in.
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15 / 15
+ + + + diff --git a/index.html b/index.html index b5f2adf..4bac652 100644 --- a/index.html +++ b/index.html @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ + Business Plans & Pitches — Zoe Cross