The Best Mental Health Startups That Don't Exist Yet?
Free ideas for founders In waiting.
Good morning everybody! Who's ready to found a company, and try to raise money in an extremely tight market? Well, at least when it comes to the following businesses that don't exist but should, it's not me. On that off chance, dear readers, that it is you…
There are care companies that don't exist but definitely, definitely, definitely should. Market validation is an important thing to start with, and it's always easier to start a company when there's already a company that looks pretty much like that thing because then nobody has to do a lot of thinking.
NOCD is an awesome company.1 It exists, and just raised $33M in their Series B. NOCD is a Telehealth company that provides on-model Exposure and Response Prevention Psychotherapy for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Unlike most of the other "let's make CBT app companies” — they didn't try to make CBT an app.
They took psychotherapy which requires training and supervision to do well. They found the condition for which it is extremely helpful, but not broadly accessible. And, in a stroke of genius, they trained therapists to do it well and then provided that therapy to patients who needed it. With…humans! And supervision! No robots were harmed in the making of this training or business model!
And then they got their patients to advocate for contracting with payers.
Brilliant. Healthcare done well— in a systematic fashion—as a company. It's not an endless technology-matching platform marketplace, it's great care with relentless product market fit based on decades of evidence.
I am so into this company.
However, the success of this company makes a bunch of other companies completely obvious to me, but I don't have the time to build all of them, so you can if you want. Somebody should, and I'll go condition by condition.