Forgot your password?

Netflix for mental health: Human startup makes psychological assistance accessible for everybody

Friday, July 24, 2020

According to WHO data, 300 million people suffer from depression. However, only 10% of them are trying to solve this problem consciously and systematically. It happens because of the high barrier of entry to psychotherapy.

The team of experienced managers have launched an application called Human, which makes your life easier. Evgenii Surzhanskiy, the CEO of the project, told us about the strategy for entering this market.

Startup Jedi

We talk to startups and investors, you get the value.

Briefly about the project

Human is an application with interactive stories which includes comments from psychotherapists. What is more, these stories are based on true stories.

The application works this way:

  1. The user chooses the story, which is quite similar to their life situation;

  2. The user watches the story and chooses what the hero has to do next;

  3. As the story goes, the user gets comments and pieces of advice from the psychotherapist.

Real-life situations may differ, we are talking about general topics: relations, jealousy, sex, child-rearing, self-esteem.

Human startup
Click on the image to open Human's profile on the Rocket DAO platform 

The psychology of problems is universal, and they can be solved by a popular and effective direction of psychotherapy — cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT creates the scientific basis of the product.

With Human, a person will be involved in life situations “without losses”, he or she can look at the problem from several perspectives and receive recommendations from a psychotherapist. Human helps to get out of difficult situations, to cope with problems and just to feel good.

...

Human startup

Netflix for your mind

Human is an analogue to Netflix in the area of psychotherapy.

We are making the same attractive and adaptive way of delivering content to the user.

We know that people like to pry into the lives of other people, evaluate their decisions, and try to adapt situations to their liking.

We believe that we can get the maximum user involvement with the right story format.

We think globally and strive to make psychological support available to everyone.

We see the final product as a documentary interactive series based on true stories with comments from psychologists.

Therapeutical, amusing, scientifically correct — it’s all about Human which is Netflix For your Mind.

...

Human startup

Huge market

From year to year, humanity becomes more and more unhappy, and one of the reasons is the ineptitude to deal with problems and the absence of psychological immunity.

The pandemic and its consequences are the only compound matters in the world. The mental health market has already surpassed the point of $40 billion and it constantly grows.

On average, the process between the symptoms of mental disorders become visible and the start of the therapy takes up to 11 years. At this time, people do not turn to a specialist, ignore symptoms, think that stress is the main aspect of their behaviour.

Human startup

And here we discover a huge resource for scaling up the audience.

Usually, we relieve psychological stress by communicating with relatives, with the help of books and films, going to the therapist. There are working online solutions for conscious people — for example, meditation with HeadSpace and Calm that are current market leaders. They don’t help to solve difficult situations, but reduce stress and anxiety, and improve your dreams.

We see many opportunities at this background — an accessible solution for people, who have difficulties and can’t find a way out, will be definitely in demand.

The majority of people don’t go to the psychotherapist because they can’t understand the severity of a problem, they don’t have enough money or time, or they’re just too shy to get out of the comfort zone. We have phones in our pockets 24/7. People easily share all their intimate details and worries with their phones.

We got to know this when we’ve studied all aspects of the market. We started our research from official statistics and reviews, and observed people with the help of Reddit threads, Facebook thematic communities and questions on Quora. Then we developed therapeutic hypotheses and went to talk with psychotherapists from the USA.

We tested product hypotheses with the help of custdev. We questioned two groups of people: those, who have visited therapies and those, who deal with difficulties on their own.

We got confirmation that the majority of people don’t visit psychotherapists, even when they realize that the problem exists. Many need years to make a decision to start a therapy. Even in the USA, mental health issues are still stigmatised and going to a therapist is considered embarrassing.

However, who doesn’t experience fear, difficulties and problems now? It isn’t a nightmare, it is a common thing. It is important to talk about it sincerely and consider possible solutions. With our product, we help to solve problems in the early stages without shame and fear.

With the help of AppAnnie and Sensor Tower, we managed to determine trends and solutions in the niche of mobile applications. These researches helped us to form the product’s vision: we share the people’s experience in the form of interactive stories.

...

Format, which doesn’t require medical certifications

We immediately refused to work in the following areas: diagnosis and treatment. Human also doesn’t work with severe clinical cases, where people require doctors’ supervision and medical treatment.

Our task is to help people to deal with difficulties and become psychologically stable by using entertaining methods. If Human defines that a user has a potential of mental disorder, it will recommend seeing a doctor for comprehensive diagnostics.

What is more, Human can help in time to prevent serious diseases that are not yet visible on the surface.

Until we interact with the user at this level, we don’t need any special permissions and medical certifications to operate. This fact pretty much makes things cheaper and boosts exiting the market.

...

Human startup

Dream Team

Human’s team includes 4 people. We are a complete, strong team with clearly defined roles and lined processes. We are driven by a strong motivation to create the best product in our niche and help millions of people.

Each of the team members has experience in launching products in the past. We know how to search for native specialists in the USA, build-up the content preparation process and promote complicated products.

The quality content is the basis of Human. There are no special secrets in its creation. We find the right people, build-up clear processes, assign tasks in time, and control the quality at every stage.

The team closes up all key competencies: organising business processes, product, marketing, content and development. Currently, we are at the stage of attracting investments. Human is the main focus of our interests.

At the medical part, we consulted with the leading US psychotherapists. The idea was approved by professors from Yale School of Medicine and Princeton University.

These people play an integral role in creating the content. Our stories are written based on the life experience of people, which we receive from specialists. They add their own explanations of motives and other comments in the story.

...

Human startup

Goals for the year

It is a little less than a month since we launched the project. As for now, we have an idea, which we’ve already tested, a team with solid and relevant experience, and interest from investors and leading psychotherapists.

During this year, we’re setting the goal to launch the iOS product and make it successful. We are planning to measure the success in the product’s involvement and user’s readiness to pay for it. The second goal for this year is to find robust financing for rapid and constant project development.

We start from the USA because it is a large and the most developed market with a solvent audience. People in America are potentially ready for a new high-demanded online service.

The product has to be available for the wide audience. We will offer a paid subscription to get full access and give a possibility to use the main functionalities with the native advertisement.

Currently, we are raising a Pre-seed round to launch a full-fledged iOS prototype.

Our perfect investor is a person, who himself believes in our idea, clearly understands financing goals, interacts without needless bureaucracy, shares his experience and expert contacts.

 

Stay tuned and don’t forget to follow us:

Facebook: facebook.com/StartupJedi/

Telegram: t.me/Startup_Jedi

Twitter: twitter.com/startup_jedi

Comments

More From Startup Jedi

Trying to understand the growing popularity of the EduTech sphere.
The best way to learn how a VC studio works is to observe their work from the inside.
In today’s article, we are going to talk about SaaS-market development in Ukraine and about its prospects.