Erica and Ian.
UniquelyND was started by a father and daughter. Erica because she had lived the problem. Ian because he had shipped systems that solved problems before.
Building Communication Accessibility
A short introduction to why UniquelyND exists, and what we are building.
Vision meets engineering
A father and daughter who each came to this for different reasons, and who each bring something the other doesn't have.
Erica Hayes
Cofounder & Chief Designer
Erica leads design. She is the reason LINA exists and the reader it is built for. Her lived experience with Response Anxiety, and the years she spent working around it, shape every decision about how the tool speaks to a person.
As someone diagnosed with AuDHD as an adult, she knows what it is like to spend years developing workarounds for problems that should not exist. That perspective shapes everything she designs.
You do not need a diagnosis for that experience to sound familiar, and you do not need one to use LINA. It is built for anyone who has ever reread a message five times trying to figure out what someone really meant.
“I'm not designing for a persona. I'm designing for the version of me who needed this and didn't have it.”
Erica Hayes, Cofounder & Chief Designer
Ian Hayes
Cofounder & CEO
Ian leads the company. He was a product and platform executive before starting UniquelyND. He handles architecture, operations, and the parts of the business that need to work quietly so the rest of it can be about the mission.
With over 20 years of software development experience, he watched his daughter navigate a world that did not accommodate the way she thinks. That gap between what exists and what is needed is not abstract to him. It is personal.
“The idea is Erica’s. Proving it works is something we are doing together.”
Ian Hayes, Cofounder & CEO
Designed from the inside out
Everything we have built so far starts with the same question: what would have made this moment easier? Erica lived through these problems. Now she is designing the tools that address them.
LINA is operational: coaching for individuals, VOICE scoring for organizations. Its predictive model is not yet validated. The assessments we run are how we gather the evidence to validate it.
Learn about LINAWhat we stand for
Real support for people who think differently, and better measurement for the organizations they rely on.
What we believe
We do not think neurodivergent people should have to work harder to be understood. We do not think the fix is to change neurodivergent people. The fix is to change the communications that were built without them in mind.
What we build for the person who processes differently tends to be better for everyone. That is the curb ramp. We name the reader we build for. The rest is a consequence.
How we approach it
We started by helping readers decode what was already there. We learned that the better fix is to change the messages themselves: to build instruments that help writers understand what their communications are doing to the people who receive them.
We do not have every answer yet. That is why we are asking for help as founding partners.
Built by people who've been there.
Join the founding cohort, or get a free VOICE Score of your public communications.