Need help finding direction/next steps
Hi everyone! This is my first post so please keep that in mind. I posted this to the Pigeon Hack slack team just now... reposting here so that's why it looks weird.
The issues here involve marketing, building a 2-sided marketplace, mental health care, and being a solo founder.
We launched April 15 (airapycare.com). We have 4 (5 this week) paying customers. Our customers are therapists but the end users are patients. 2 things happened after we launched the MVP and validated the core business concept (therapy in public places) #1- We quickly got freaked out by how difficult it would be to build up both sides of the marketplace (how do we compete with 20+ years of SEO that the Psychology Today directory has) and #2- got a lot of customer research done that told us that there are a lot of barriers therapists have trouble overcoming to start their private practice with us (insurance, consent forms, headshots, and needing a sense of community, etc..) so we decided to start offering those other features to help onboard them. We are having consent form drafted now that we'll hand off to them.
But I have gotten some feedback recently that continuing to pursue therapists and offer them these features is confusing (it's hard to explain the business of therapy in pitches to a general audience) and not exciting to investors (only around 500k therapists in the whole country)-- some dependable people have been suggesting we work on getting a list of patient "referrals" (people looking for a new therapist) and use this list to onboard therapists. I was really excited about the idea of establishing ourselves in the market by appealing to therapists, and then further down the road become more of a marketplace once people know more about us and we have money for advertising, but the original concept was a marketplace for more accessible and more affordable therapy.. and I guess the data we got from therapists about needing/wanting more features is still untested-- we don't know whether offering them these services will actually get them over the hurdles and into private practice.
So i'm feeling very confused and stuck. I don't have a co-founder so I don't have anyone to help decide what to do.
I have some customers, and some patients, but how in the HELL would we ever establish a marketplace? Someone recently told me to just give up because it would be so hard. (Don't worry, I'm not giving up)
I am also toying with the idea of setting up an office suite here in Philly for any therapists to pay by the hour for private office space for therapy. So I'm definitely trying too many things at once.
I just started doing paid Instagram promotions, and google ad words ($6/day)-- I have about $8k in seed funding so really nothing to work with.
OH I ALMOST FORGOT! The reason I backed away from the marketplace thing was because I don't have $100k for building it. There's nothing out of the box we can use -- I have even hired a tech team (teamscal.com) to do a survey and they concluded the same thing. All the available WP directories need major customization-- so much so that we might as well start from scratch.
Love to hear your thoughts or advice or questions! Please!
(Background) I've built a 2 sided marketplace in the Netherlands from 0 to 3M ARR in 3 years.
(Advice) Therapists, therapists, therapists.
Good luck :P
Don't be scared by the big boys. The market is huge. Be different and you will grow. Don't think about investors. Don't think about "only 500k therapists". Stupid distractions.
Choose a niche within the therapist field. I bet you 100 bucks there are lots and lots of therapists that have room to take on more clients. Don't subsidize them too much. They should subsidize you.
Focus on 1 geographical area first. A city of 1M - 2M people. But choose proximity (to you) over size. Take on different therapists. See what type of therapists get booked the fastest. Expand that type in more cities.
Call the therapists yourself. Visit them. Talk about their business. They will come on board.
Rinse and repeat with the first 100 therapists.
Come back for round 2 if you reached 100 therapists ;-)
Edit: To clarify why geo = important. I don't think a lot of people are ready for virtual consultations (yet). Let alone giving therapy to someone who lives on the east coast to someone who lives on the west coast. I think people prefer getting (and giving!) therapy to people who live closer to each other.
(the url in your post start is broken)
Oddly enough, I am in Philly, the business is in Philly, we are focused here, I live here. Philly is about 1.5M pepople ;)
Here's the issue. Marketing. You wrote: See what type of therapists get booked the fastest.
But only 10 people are visiting the site per day, so we don't have this data and I don't see how we would collect it.
Sometimes people just pick therapists based on their photos. There's not always a logical or business case for these decisions. It's often emotional.
Ok, so you need more traffic.
That means you need cashflow. How is your business model now? Who pays what to who?
It's $25/mo subscription rate for the therapists. Right now we let them do 3 months for $1/mo to start with-- which makes invoicing confusing (using Paypal). But a few people have suggested that I just give the first 50 therapists a year free subscription to populate the site and start promoting more to patients.
OK. Change your pricing, now :) Your current setup is great if you have 10M in the bank. Not when you have 8k in the bank.
You can't grow like this. Every new customer (for your therapists) costs you 100x what they bring you. So you have a big cashflow problem.
Charge them for a new client. Charge them a percentage of the hourly fee. But don't charge per month (yet). It's unsustainable when you don't have money to fuel your growth.
I disagree. Therapists barely make any money as-is. This has to be affordable for them. If you start gouging them on services charges and stuff then they'll leave or take the appointments off the platform as soon as they get patients.
Why?
They make 100. You charge 15. Do they pay money? Or do they make money?
Do you think they'd rather not make the 85?
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[1] @yannickveys had good advice on targeting therapists and a specific geography.
I see you're in Philadelphia so that's an obvious choice.
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[2] Therapists:
I wouldn't charge therapists to start with. Instead charge for any bookings that you make through the app (easier to onboard them).
You will need payments in your mvp to do this. I think this is a must-have.
You can offer them additional services, but those should be paid offerings and should cost extra. Some of this could be done for free -- i.e. airbnb taking photos of apartments for their hosts to begin with.
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[3] Think about what your main value proposition to users is
As a user:
I don't necessarily want to look through 30 different therapists. A curated solution would work better.
I also want someone who is located near me. So a map view would work.
I want a service + therapist I can trust, that means:
social proof, ratings, guarantees/authority(certificates, degrees, etc)
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[4] Marketing
Users might not want to share that they're seeing a therapist (though it's more common now). So how do you get the word out there?
Some channels to test:
Content marketing is significant, so I would start writing content now. Specific to your geography. Maybe write content about your therapists (interviews?) and have them share that with their friends + followers to build some awareness in your local community.
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[5] MVP
I can picture your MVP as more of a airbnb clone:
As a user,
I see a map with a list available therapists.
I can click on a therapist or a marker on the map to get more info about a therapist
I can filter therapists by the type of problems they help with
I can filter therapists by their rate
I can filter therapists by a day/time
I can request an appointment with a therapist at one of their available times (this means you don't need to worry about calendaring for the therapists)
The therapist gets the appointment request and accepts or sends some times that they are available.
Payment is made through the app.
A simple database would work to track therapists to start with. For each therapist all you need is:
Is that feasible for $8k -- yes, if you have a technical co-founder or someone to help you with outsourcing. So I would say your next step is to find a technical co-founder.
You would need to have enough of a solution/use case that a technical founder would be interested in joining you.
That probably means finding therapists to join the network ahead of time. So you probably have an even smaller MVP, which might be creating a community for therapists in the Philadelphia area? Maybe running a meetup for therapists would be a plausible idea, or even a facebook group.
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re: your ideas about market size + feasibility, I don't think that's an issue. Marketplaces for services are a great target -- more on that here: https://andrewchen.co/how-marketplaces-will-reinvent-the-service-economy/
Thank you! So the downside of having all the payments process through the site is that therapists might take appointments off the app (to save on service charges) once they establish an ongoing relationship with the patient... they won't need the app anymore. That's why I felt comfortable with the subscription rate to be listed in the marketplace. What are your thoughts?
Also looks like you think having a technical co-founder is essential. Some say it's unnecessary. Did you see my update about this template I can buy (sacwellness.com)? It wouldn't have payment processing.. the therapists would be able to edit their own profiles, but there would be a separate login/site for appointments and calendar. But it does have the search and filters...and I would need to spend a little $$$ to clean up the design.
I corrected the URL, so sorry I wrote that wrong. So common and embarrassing!
I want to add something... I found this guy in Sacramento who started his own therapy directory, and he has about 200 therapists on there, but he doesn't charge them. I have talked with him about buying his modified WP template but I'm afraid to start digging a hole with WP that I can't get out of. BUT this is the closest thing to an available platform I could have right now.. assuming I can successfully negotiate a price with him: https://sacwellness.com/
Thank you both!! Will listen tomorrow. What about the development issues? Should I try to keep going with a basic squarespace site and no marketplace (no search or filters) for now? Also I wrote the URL down wrong I just fixed it. It’s airapycare.com...
We built our mvp with 5k so that shouldn’t be the problem. That’s the one thing I think you need to invest in besides acquiring customers once the amount of therapists has surpassed 10-20.
The only question you have to ask yourself is: when do I start investing in the platform. You don’t have a lot of cash to burn so I would suggest working with the free platform first and learn what people want before you start investing.
We already launched the MVP for basically free in April via squarespace. That's what I'm trying to do. Perhaps 5 people just isn't enough to collect relevant data yet.
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The issue is what am I offering? If I don't have patients, then what is the product? I have 5 customers now but I'm not totally sure I understand what the value is on their side. Also, I only charge them $1/mo for the first 3 months...then it jumps to $25. Perhaps the $1 promo deal is affecting the value proposition.
Someone recommended I offer a deal where the first 50 therapists who sign up get a year's membership for free. I think that could work-- if I had the search/filter marketplace ready to go-- then I could focus on the patient side.
And yes, we are only in Philly right now, where I live.
I will listen to that today, thanks for the recommendation!
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