Connecting therapists with the people who need them most
How thoughtbot identified and validated a market for a therapy mobile application to secure funding.
In a potentially massive market, how does a new startup identify where and how to start?
The Challenge
Patients present physical symptoms for neurological problems. How can we help them while they wait to be matched with a therapist?
Dr. Adrienne Allen, a skilled Primary Care Physician, had an initial concept to create a safer version of Instagram populated with verified mental health content. Her goal was to ease the suffering of patients who could not get matched with a suitable Mental Healthcare Provider due to costs or limited supply.
With such a vast and important mission, but with relatively little experience of how to start a technology business, Adrienne recognized that she didn’t know where to begin. She turned to thoughtbot's experience validating new markets.
thoughtbot has seen the startup with vast market opportunity challenge countless times before, so our job was to identify and prioritize the best market to launch in and provide Adrienne with the strategy required to get funding and build her company.
The market validation process
The thoughtbot team ran user interviews with over 50 people from a range of sectors and personas including patients, mental healthcare providers, primary care physicians, social workers and HR buyers to identify the best customer group and business model. We created lean canvases and matrixes for each along with additional research and customer discovery work to validate our theories.
Based on the results of the user interviews, we created Lean Canvases for various business models and sectors to compare and contrast the pros and cons of each.
We also built a low fidelity prototype towards the end of the process. We were able to conduct user testing with this prototype to further validate our approach.
The Result
"We shifted the team's focus from content creation to a tool for Mental Healthcare Providers. Adrienne's team learned much more by talking to real people than they had learned in the planning process, and they got to see real results quickly.”
- Vendela Colavecchio, Design Director, thoughtbot
thoughtbot's research showed that creating a sustainable business model using the original Instagram approach would be very hard. We pivoted to an application that allows therapists to find, curate and share relevant and trustworthy content with specific patients.
By shifting our focus to create something useful for therapists, we had a more defined target buyer and we could ensure that the platform would be populated with content and used by patients.
We left Adrienne and her team with a comprehensive folder of all the resources we created along with a next steps strategy plan and an investor funding deck. We know they now have the strategy, direction and tools required to make this startup succeed.
“This project was about more than simply building an app. We drilled into the details and taught Adrienne and her team how to validate their business strategies in future. We got the team investor ready,” says Ferdia Kenny, Senior Designer, thoughtbot