It almost sounds made up: A DI technology platform borne from a real life DI story.

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My mom's back was out of whack. It was beyond the chiropractor's pay grade.

 

She finally got an MRI and they found a tumor the size and shape of an heirloom tomato.

 

Turns out that mass, while benign, was eroding her spine.

 

If left unchecked, this mass would have eaten completely through her vertebrae and into her spinal cord, rendering her paralyzed or worse.

 

So they took it out.

 

The funny thing about the human body is that everything is squished up inside us.

 

So that mid-to-low spinal chord area is pretty darn close to your lungs.

 

Turns out that mass was also slowly killing her lungs and lo and behold her breathing continued to get worse.

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Fast forward a year and my mom is down to about 25% lung capacity.

 

So let's try something fun.

 

Take a deep breath. Then take half of that breath. Then take half of *that* breath.

 

And that's the deepest you can breathe for the rest of your life.

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Not sustainable.

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So my mom was put on a lung transplant list. 

 

​She stayed on the wait list for a while. Oxygen machines were upgraded.

 

Life changed a lot for my mom and dad during that time.

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Work was indefinitely put on hold.

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Fewer visits with the grandbabies. Forget travel.

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She eventually moved her way up to #12 on the list.

 

She was not going to make it much longer.

 

It was not looking good.

 

Then came a respiratory pandemic. (Remember that fun time?)

 

That's when she finally got the call.

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And it worked.

 

But she's still considerably limited.

 

Immunosuppressants.

 

Covid could kill her in no time.

 

In fact the flu or even a bad cold would do it.

 

She has been vigilant and resourceful and strong as all hell.

 

But what used to kill us now results in chronic illness.

 

And we need to prepare for these things.

 

Fortunately my mom practiced what we preach.

 

She had her own set of DI policies that paid until age 65.

 

Why was this DI policy important? Well for starters, it meant that my parents could stay on track for retirement.

 

(Not to make this about me, but that is also good news for a first-born son who carries an unhealthy weight of familial obligation!)

 

Secondly--oh by the way, this is probably a good time to introduce the fact that my mom worked with me at our family business.

 

She was our key underwriter and case manager. That means she was responsible for ensuring that disability insurance applications were in good order.

 

Her DI policy meant that the business did not have to try to find a way to pay her.

 

We effectively outsourced her salary to an insurance company.

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No clandestine revenue reallocation.

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No squeezing the business revenue to pay a former employee.

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She was taken care of. By DI.

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But that didn't plug the gap on her duties.

 

Her role was super important to our mom and pop general agency.

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In the inevitable chance that there was a missing question, a missing signature, or missing pages, she was tasked with following up and securing that requirement from brokers and applicants.

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So when she went out (with a disability!) guess who that fell on...me.

 

Listen, I love what we do. But I am a creative. I love people. I enjoy spending time with advisors and brokers and customers. I do not love spending details and tedium and minutiae like application processing.

 

Therefore, our business suffered. Not 'financial suffering' but 'client experience suffering.' And that suffering led to action.

 

I learned to code and a Dingo was born.

 

Online forms are a dime a dozen today but that was not the case back in 2016/2017.

 

Dingo started as a simple digital dropticket system that mimicked an application verbatim.

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Once we teamed up with a competent developer (co-founder and CTO, Keaton Modleski) we dreamed up a system that could deliver a smooth customer experience from start to finish.

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We hope you'll give it a try!

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-Max (Founder/CEO)