The problem from the inside
Kent Iglehart spent years working inside multi-location optometry businesses, long enough to understand exactly where the margin goes. Not to rent, not to payroll, but to the slow accumulation of small errors — a wrong insurance code here, a missed authorization there, a lens order that gets processed with an out-of-range measurement nobody caught. Individually, each mistake is survivable. Together, across dozens of locations and thousands of transactions a month, they add up to a significant and entirely preventable loss.
What made it worse was that the tools already existed to catch most of these errors. Practice management software captured the relevant data. The rules for what counted as an error were known to every experienced technician. The gap wasn't information — it was enforcement. There was no system that looked at a field value in real time and said, "this doesn't look right, stop and check."
"You can train staff on every rule in the book, and they'll still miss things under pressure. The answer isn't better training — it's better systems."
Building the conviction to start
For Kent, the decision to start CoApp came from a specific kind of frustration — not with the people in the business, but with the tools. He'd watched smart, experienced staff make the same avoidable mistakes repeatedly, not because they didn't know better, but because nothing in their workflow was designed to stop them. The software they used was built to record information, not to validate it.
The insight that became CoApp was simple: you don't need to replace the practice management system. You don't need to rebuild the workflow. You just need something that watches the existing workflow and catches the things that fall through the cracks. A layer that runs alongside what people are already doing, invisible until it needs to say something.
That product vision — operational guardrails that live inside any browser-based system — shaped every design decision from the beginning. Kent's background meant the initial rule set wasn't built from market research. It was built from memory: the specific billing codes that trip denials, the optical measurements that are physiologically impossible but sometimes get entered anyway, the downstream breakdowns that happen when a step gets skipped early in the process.
What Kent brings to the table
Running a startup requires a different skill set than running a location within a large chain, but Kent's years in operations gave him something that's hard to manufacture: deep confidence in the problem. A lot of B2B SaaS founders spend their early years trying to convince themselves and their investors that their target market really has the pain they think it does. Kent came in already certain, because he'd lived the problem himself and watched others live it too.
That certainty shapes how CoApp approaches product decisions. Features that look interesting but don't prevent a real error — the kind that shows up as a billing denial or a return — don't make the cut. The product is ruthlessly focused on operational impact because that's what Kent learned to care about: not what looks impressive in a demo, but what actually reduces the cost of running a multi-location business.
He also brings the credibility to sit across from practice owners and operations managers and speak their language. When Kent describes a billing problem or a lens order mistake, he's not reading from a sales script — he's describing something he watched happen. That authenticity shapes every customer conversation and every enterprise evaluation.
The view from here
CoApp is still early. The market for browser-native operational guardrails in multi-location healthcare adjacent businesses is not yet a named category. Kent's job is partly to build the product and partly to define the space — to help potential customers understand that what they've been accepting as the cost of doing business is actually preventable, and that the mechanism for preventing it doesn't require ripping out their existing software stack.
That's a longer sales cycle than selling a point solution into a known category. But it's also a more durable position — once a business has integrated CoApp into their operational workflow and started catching errors they didn't even know they were making, switching costs are real and retention is strong. The businesses that adopt early get the most configuration depth and the longest head start on their rule libraries. Kent is focused on getting the right early customers to that point.