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Helping a Mental Health Startup raise money from VCs

Last year, FindHope’s founder, Tharun Sai, approached Unlock to help him increase his user base and approach Venture Capital investors to fund his Medtech startup that aims to make mental health support truly accessible by leveraging AI and community. Our team of consultants provided exceptional research and data to help him achieve his goals.

Each project at Unlock starts by breaking down the challenge into one simple problem statement –

FindHope focuses on providing mental health care with the help of artificial intelligence by having a line of support for people going through anxiety, depression, tough times and insomnia, amongst other problems. At the time, they had a user base of 3,000 users, and they needed Unlock Consultancy’s help with the following:

  • Reaching a user base of 30k, after which they will be able to approach VCs
  • Providing FindHope with a list of NGOs in India, the UK and the USA and helping them partner with various NGOs in the mentioned countries 
  • Starting their Social Media, especially supporting LinkedIn strategies

The team’s initial thoughts –

  • “As beginners, we had no idea how to break down the problem or ask specific questions in the initial week. But owing to the training provided by Unlock Consultancy, we got the chance to apply the knowledge practically”.
  • “We had no idea how the mental health domain functioned. Researching and reading about the same helped us a lot in completing this project”. 

Project Cycle

After the first few weeks, the team started laying down the foundation of their research and tying it together to form a strategy –

  • Researching and shortlisting mental health-based NGOs for collaboration in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and India
  • SWOT analysis of LinkedIn for attracting the target audience

As with any project in professional Consulting, the team is taught how to navigate challenges in their live project and sharpen their soft skills in the process. Some key challenges faced by the team were –

  • Lack of communication within the team in the beginning due to time zone differences
  • Varied levels of motivation of team members
  • “We overcame these by conducting interim checks with the team to ensure we were on the same page”

Mentorship

Each team is assigned a Mentor, an industry expert, to help guide the team through their professional and personal experience.

  • Findhope team’s Mentor was pleased with their progress and had regular checkpoints with the team to ensure they were on the right track whenever they faced roadblocks. 
  • “In the initial stages, the mentor helped condense all the information on the business profile and helped us understand the various ways we could work on the deliverables”
  • The mentor shared his experience about the industry that helped in forming the outreach strategy for NGOs

Team’s Perspectives on Mentor Feedback –

  • “The team felt our mentor was very knowledgeable and shared insightful learnings from his consulting experience, which is too vast”.

Presentation to client

In the final few weeks, the team presented their recommendations to the client to help solve his business challenge –

  • Submitted a detailed SWOT analysis of LinkedIn to expand the user base and shared content creation recommendations
  • Scouted a list of 157 NGOs after understanding their organisational model and critical impact areas that could be relevant to the client and be a potential collaboration.  Focused on 4 nations – India, the USA, the UK and Canada
  • Also prepared a list of USPs of the client and provided detailed approaches to navigate and collaborate with NGOs

Post Submission Reflections by the team –

“We were highly satisfied with the fact that we left no stone unturned in meeting our client’s expectations. We ensured maximum relevance in each of our deliverables and kept having interim checks with the client”.

Key Takeaways

  • Analysing actual data: While preparing our deliverables, we learned to read business models in detail to determine the impact areas
  • Stakeholder management: We got the opportunity to be the Point of Contact between our esteemed Mentor, our fantastic client and the hardworking team at Unlock Consultancy. Handling the expectations of each of the stakeholders involved and working together to meet the expectations is what we are incredibly grateful for.
  • Application of Frameworks and Concepts: We learnt to practically apply Pareto’s Principle – the 80/20 rule which helped us weed out the data that didn’t add value to our deliverables and eventually came up with a highly satisfactory one
  • Overall preparation for a career in consulting: It also helped us gain industry-specific knowledge like the different business models being followed, impact, and noticing different patterns in services being provided and their efficacy. The project also helped us gain a new perspective on problem-solving by learning from the clients’ experiences and the members’ perspectives

*The project was conducted as part of our Batch 6 in Dec-23. The team consisted of five consultants: 1. Nischay Hans; 2. Vanshika Arora; 3. Parul Karamta; 4. Karen He; 5. Zakariya Yiadom Boakye

Sparsh Sehgal