Business Spotlight: Quin Kline, CEO & Co-Founder of The CareHub

TODD: Well, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to today's Business Spotlight. I'm your host, Todd Rodden. I'm a certified executive and business coach. I own Aspire ActionCOACH based here in Southwest Ohio. I think you're going to love this episode — somebody who, along with their team, is a real trailblazer building at the intersection of technology, AI, healthcare, and wellness. Thrilled to have Quin Kline, CEO and co-founder of The CareHub — a platform that takes some of the noise out of wellness in our society today. If you're new to the series, we encourage you to hit subscribe. Otherwise, sit down and grab your notepad. Quin Kline of The CareHub — welcome to the Business Spotlight. Introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about The CareHub, and why healthcare and wellness.

QUIN: I started my professional journey, of all places, in Washington DC, and really fell in love with the complexities and difficulties of the healthcare system. I spent about seven or eight years in and around the beltway — did the full tour of DC: White House, Senate, House — and experienced through the eyes of constituents all of these different support services and the underpinnings of the healthcare system and how it affects everyone's daily life. I also fell in love with a boy there [laughter] — from Toledo, Ohio — so after about seven or eight years, we came back to the Buckeye State. During my tenure in the corporate space, I worked primarily in health services and health plan sectors. A little over a year ago, I reached out to a former colleague and said, “Gosh, this digital health space is so confusing, but has so many opportunities. Do you think we could bring the same rigor and intention to the digital health ecosystem that we brought to building networks for health insurance companies?” And he said, “Rock on. Absolutely. Hell yeah.” So we created The CareHub. We are an AI-powered digital health platform that curates portfolios and unifies data around wearables, wellness apps, app-enabled medical devices, and app-enabled programs and services. We take all of that frustration and guesswork out of finding the right digital health tools for your lifestyle.

TODD: Great background — government work, health networks and plans, and now launching out on your own. Go a little deeper — who would be an ideal client and how might they use your platform?

QUIN: Right now, our most enthusiastic partners are large employers using CareHub as a wellness benefit alongside their employee benefit suite. We have universities that use it as a wellness benefit for students, faculty, and staff. And national gym brands that use it as a complement to their membership — a benefit that travels with their members and allows them to enhance the wellness journey they've started inside their four walls.

TODD: Building on that, you mentioned there's a lot of noise in this space. What separates The CareHub from what else is out there?

QUIN: When we started digging into how to create a rubric for deciding whether a digital health tool is appropriate — or quite frankly good enough — to be on the CareHub platform, we looked at clinical efficacy, lifestyle implementation ability, cost, whether the company has been in business long enough that users won't fall in love with a product and then find it gone two months later, customer service, user experience — all of the things you really can't search for in an app store. The app store's job isn't to give you suggestions. It's to give you a list, and the tools at the top of that list are predominantly the ones paying the most for advertising. The tools you see on Instagram and Facebook are the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. We wanted to create a truly safe place for people to explore digital wellness — one they could trust. Our end goal is to be the most trusted source of digital health tools on the planet. And with that comes a lot of responsibility. As we review, refine, and test the resources on the platform, we've found that 70% of the tools we test we don't believe are fit for CareHub users. Our chief medical officer, Dr. Sharp, and her team continue to test, break, fix, and test again every resource we provide.

TODD: Building on that — what have been your keys to growth? I know we talked a bit about marketing strategies before we started recording.

QUIN: Our marketing has been homegrown — we're a Midwestern company, and I think that speaks to our ethos. We worked with a lot of nonprofits that we really wanted to get the platform into the hands of, and because they were overwhelmingly excited and we learned so much from them, they've been eager to introduce us to others in their industry. The four business partners also have about 70 years of combined experience in consumer products, health services, and healthcare. So we opened our rolodex and talked to the people we'd worked alongside in corporate America and said, “Hey, I know this is a pain point for you — I think we've solved it.” And then LinkedIn has been a really great way to connect with like-minded people and find new partnerships as we grow.

TODD: I love leveraging that rolodex — a lot of folks miss that, always focused on moving forward rather than reaching back. Speaking of looking back, running a business comes with its own set of challenges, but a startup has a whole other bundle of fun. Could you share a past challenge you and your partners came across, how you overcame it, and what you learned?

QUIN: Money is hard to come by as a startup — and sometimes on TV you see someone wake up and think, “I have the world's greatest cupcake idea and everyone will buy it,” and the next scene is them on their yacht. It doesn't work that way [laughter]. What really helped us feel integrated into the work and overcome those early challenges was finding partners who were willing to take a chance on us. Our development and marketing partners deferred payment until we got our first implementation fees and monthly revenue started coming in. We were really grateful we could sell the concept to like-minded partners who were excited about seeing this work launched into the world. We also pitched in our own money and talked to friends and family. And we really focused on getting customers. There's a lot of flash around investors, VC, and private equity — but what we found was that going down that path took a lot longer. By focusing on the right partners, we found people who genuinely care about our business, our growth trajectory, and the work itself. And we got our first customers through those folks.

TODD: That's great. So how did you influence those people to take that chance on you?

QUIN: We have been gifted with a couple of people who could sell ketchup popsicles to women wearing white gloves. [laughter] We talked to a lot of people. We got a lot of nos. We got a lot of “are you okay?” But I think it really comes back to your point about the people you've worked with in the past — you never know where they'll be when you have a business idea or a passion project. All four of us, I think, always took care of the people we worked for and the people we worked with. Being able to reach back and say, “Hey, I need a favor — I need some help” — we're really grateful that several of them were willing to say yes.

TODD: Great. So money never stops being a challenge, but as you look forward into this new year — what's a challenge on the horizon you're trying to figure out?

QUIN: Employees — growth in that regard. Right now we have our four core partners, and everything else that supports The CareHub is outsourced: marketing, legal, finance, development, sales — all contractor-based. And I think this is a pivotal question for so many small businesses. What is the cost of outsourcing all of that work compared to the cost of bringing it in-house? And how do you continue to treat new employees with the same respect and connection as the four partners who started it? How do we know when it's time to bring someone in as opposed to continuing to hire more vendors as part of our CareHub family? And especially since we've got four very passionate partners who all have skin in the game — how can new folks match that energy, or continue it?

TODD: What's your long-term dream for this business — five, ten years from now?

QUIN: In the next three to five years, we would love to be able to say we support people in every state in the country. Because that's a goal, we've invested very heavily in our three-layer AI programming — and we've found through a lot of time, energy, and some eye-opening invoices that it's a lot more expensive to curate a truly responsible, intentional AI infrastructure. When we first started The CareHub, we wanted to make sure that regardless of the language you speak, your ability or disability, your intellectual comprehension level, or your socioeconomic status, you could come to The CareHub and find tools that could make you feel a little bit better today than you did yesterday. We started our AI development journey with a pivotal question: if someone comes to The CareHub and types into our AI assistant Kate, “I am sad,” what happens? They receive emergency contact numbers. They receive apps, devices, programs, services, and wearables that could support what they may or may not be experiencing — whether that's depression, sleep, nutrition, financial anxiety, social wellness, parenting challenges, or caring for elderly parents. We wanted to make sure that regardless of your ability to name the thing, The CareHub could provide resources to help you feel better about the thing.

TODD: I appreciate those specific examples of care needs and options. As you look back, what have been your keys to success so far — a year in and already coming a long way?

QUIN: When I'm on the yacht, maybe I'll have better advice. [laughter] I think the most important thing is to fail fantastically a couple of times and have the grit to get back up. We've learned so much more about our customers through the moments where they said, “Absolutely not — this is not at all what I thought we were building together.” We were able to pivot. We're a small company, a startup, super nimble. But we failed fantastically a couple of times, and we celebrate those failures — breakfasts, cocktail hours, all of it. They are the most vulnerable, but also the most important experiences you can have and learn from.

TODD: Would you share an example of one of those fantastic failures and how it led to a significant change or pivot?

QUIN: So we thought we were super brilliant and got on Facebook when we first needed users to test things before populating the platform. Our clinical innovations team is headed by our chief medical officer Dr. Sharp, and she has a network of physicians and care professionals who research all of these tools — everything from bed-wetting to anxiety, financial wellness to wound care, all across the universe. So Dr. Sharp and I are both moms, and we went on Facebook and recruited all of our mom friends to test these tools — apps, wearables, programs. We build this whole infrastructure. We go to one of our first customers — who is still a customer, and was so great about building with us — and we're saying, “We have all of these great tools, here's the demo.” And they said, “Quin — we work with young people and adolescents under the age of 27.” And I was like... oh. [laughter] They were all adult-based tools. Parenting content, but nothing teens, pre-teens, or young adults could actually use. They said, “This is not at all what we're looking for.” And I was like, “Yeah, no, that makes sense now.” I was really excited — I'm a mom, these felt like kids to me — but anyway. We pivoted. We said, okay, we'll give you a discount on your environment build. Can we use your members to tell you and us exactly what they want to see on your platform? And it actually turned out so much more valuable to them. Now we've become a partner they can come to and say, “Hey Quin, I'm looking for an app or device or program that does this — can you go find it?” And in one case, when we couldn't find it, we built it with them — because now they trusted us. We said, “yeah, our bad” [laughter] — and then you work together, and it becomes their research and investment too.

TODD: A beautiful example. Thank you for being open and sharing that. Our time goes quickly in these conversations. What are the best ways for folks to learn more and connect with The CareHub?

QUIN: Our website is thecarehub.com. Connect with us on LinkedIn — connect with me on LinkedIn. Shoot us a message. We get messages all the time and we can't wait to find new friends to bring into The CareHub family.

TODD: Encourage everyone to check that out — all the information will be in the show notes. You've shared several key points from your journey and your lessons learned. Quin, what are you inspired by today?

QUIN: Something a little whackadoodle that has been inspiring me the last month or so is the Chinese New Year. I learned about six weeks ago that 2025 in the Chinese New Year was the year of the wooden snake — a year of toil and shedding and leaving behind what no longer serves us, in a painful and difficult sort of way, so that we could take our new skin into 2026. And 2026 is the year of the fire horse — a year of passion, innovation, and building. There is no way we could really have all that success in 2026 if we didn't take all the learnings from 2025 into this new chapter. That's what's inspiring me — the hope, the agility, the passion of 2026.

TODD: What a great symbolic way to think about flipping the calendar and moving from one phase to the next. A fire horse — that just sounds inspired. I'm in. [laughter]

QUIN: Me too. [laughter]

TODD: Quin Kline, The CareHub — thank you for joining us today, sharing your story, your journey, and more about The CareHub.

QUIN: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

TODD: And to our listeners — check out more about The CareHub through the show notes. If you haven't already, hit subscribe so you receive future messages, and hit the like button on this episode to help share it with even more entrepreneurs. Thank you all and have a terrific day.