I wish you good luck in helping people. This is a tough space — I spent a while at Ginger.io where we flip flopped between employers and consumer. Getting into that EAP money is great if you land it, but it’s a super crowded space where when you squint all the offerings (to an HR rep) look the same. And many have been at this for years.
Personally I don’t find a chatbot a convincing way to go. It’s very inflexible, but gives the illusion that you could say anything. If you go the woebot model of having fixed prompts, it becomes unclear why it’s in this UX when you could have something more compelling. It also is difficult to do fully automated AND get real benefit for the people who need it. It’s very rare for an app only approach to suffice in mental health. I know you said you wanted sub clinical, but even at that range you’ll have a very long tail of needs when it comes to someone interested in spending real time on their mental health. This isn’t just your average person we’re talking about here.
A major issue I have is both the oversimplification of CBT combined with every app trying to do only that. CBT can be effective for certain people in certain situations… but it’s billed as a panacea. This isn’t a one sized fits all situation where you’re trying to find a universal solution. And as you have mentioned here, even CBT doesn’t work for over half of people.
I encourage you to really survey the space and your competition. Nothing you’ve stated sounds particularly different from many others. Maybe there is something, but if so, you’re not selling it well to me at least. Good luck! I hope you experiment, learn fast, and innovate.
Some good points! I've been thinking about the chatbot model a lot and I echo your thoughts. I've been working with a therapist and a fiction author to combine interactive storytelling with self-reflection tools based on a variety of psychological approaches. Our main challenge has been to build a conversational engine that allows for the user's need for autonomy, agency, personalization and relatedness. This has required a lot of scripting, meaningful fixed choices and enough open-ended prompts so the users feel they are co-creating the world and having an actual conversation that goes deeper than the schematic chatbot interactions we see out there.
I'd love to talk to you about your experience at Ginger, if you're open to a chat? If so, I'm at ez.skinner89[at]gmail[dot]com.
Thanks and some great points here. As you say competition and differentiation are potentially really tricky in this sector. Really interesting to hear about your experience at ginger.io .
We're certainly not wedded to the chatbot idea, but it's just the best UX/UI we've implemented so far. The key we feel is to avoid becoming a boring, skippable content board, and maybe a chatbot isn't the final iteration of that concept, but it's the approach that has worked the best for us so far.
I agree that the key in this space will be to learn quickly and iterate to find a solution compelling to the user and payer. It's early stage for us, until the point we got into YC we had taken no funding, so I think there's a lot of scope for how we can expand and adapt our offering to the marketplace and we've already learned a tremendous amount.
We have ultimate long term aim of building apps which are certified Software as a Medical Device and get device-like reimbursement through healthcare systems. We certainly feel that's a place which is less competitive and more differentiated, there are a few companies in this space such as Pear Therapeutics, but unlike them, we feel it's important to start at the b2b and b2c end of the spectrum to build a product that people love before going through the lengthy and costly process of adapting that product becoming a fully certified medical device.
Personally I don’t find a chatbot a convincing way to go. It’s very inflexible, but gives the illusion that you could say anything. If you go the woebot model of having fixed prompts, it becomes unclear why it’s in this UX when you could have something more compelling. It also is difficult to do fully automated AND get real benefit for the people who need it. It’s very rare for an app only approach to suffice in mental health. I know you said you wanted sub clinical, but even at that range you’ll have a very long tail of needs when it comes to someone interested in spending real time on their mental health. This isn’t just your average person we’re talking about here.
A major issue I have is both the oversimplification of CBT combined with every app trying to do only that. CBT can be effective for certain people in certain situations… but it’s billed as a panacea. This isn’t a one sized fits all situation where you’re trying to find a universal solution. And as you have mentioned here, even CBT doesn’t work for over half of people.
I encourage you to really survey the space and your competition. Nothing you’ve stated sounds particularly different from many others. Maybe there is something, but if so, you’re not selling it well to me at least. Good luck! I hope you experiment, learn fast, and innovate.