Online Therapy Marketplace
I co-founded TalkTwo, a marketplace designed to broaden the availability of mental health professionals and enhance access to their services.
When the pandemic struck, people were in a bad place and seeking professional help. The catch— everything had to be done remotely. Seizing the opportunity presented by the temporary pause on government telehealth guidelines, I poured my passion and expertise into creating a truly exceptional digital experience that met the needs of both consumers and service providers alike.
Our brand centered around professionals cutting the cost of their offices and working from home.
Discovery
Market Research
To build a business, we needed to provide a service people wanted to pay for, my co-founder and I interviewed 50 participants ages 20 - 64 to understand what in-person services they paid for before the pandemic. Market research was done remotely through phone interviews, Discord focus groups and Zoom calls.
I created a protocol, conducted interviews and analyzed data. With this information I created a report on user types, services used and compiled payment information.
Testing the market
At first we went broad to try and capture the biggest audience. We decided to create a marketplace for all 1:1 service providers like personal trainers, coaches, therapists and lawyers. But it was hard to build a brand and garner trust without being more focused.
Our focus was across disciplines, we just wanted to get hosts on the platform.
Finding our niche
After more customer research it was clear that therapy was both expensive and highly sought after
Therapists tended to be older and less tech savvy while patients were younger and more comfortable seeking treatment through technology, this created UX design challenges when designing across generations.
We needed to design two connected products, a marketplace for patients and remote work productivity tool for therapists
We began tackling the patient experience first. Trying competitors and bringing our design opinions from Google and IDEO to create a simple and elegant booking platform.
Focusing on wellness professionals was a great way to hone in on an audience.
Designing the patient experience
Finding a therapist
The user has multiple ways to find a therapist through searching indexed content in the description, therapist names, tags, or certifications and availability.
Filtering results
After results are populated therapists can be sorted by cost, and rating or soonest available.
Provider "pages"
The goal with the provider page was to replace a website and provide all the functionality of a video platform. By cutting the cost of conferencing software and reducing the technical knowledge needed to make a website, for free, we believed we could win over therapists in troves while providing patients with a familiar Airbnb-esque view.
Booking and communications
Patients could select a duration and see the cost of the sessions change based on that duration. Durations would be set by the Provider during onboarding. After booking a session the provider and patient would have access to a chat where they could communicate if things changed or need to reschedule.
The page allows patients to learn a little more about their provider.
A booking breakdown helps them understand the cost of provider services.
Designing the provider experience
A comprehensive suite of tools
To woo providers to TalkTwo I wanted to provide them with one tool that would cover their digital front door, patient scheduling, communications, payment processing and sales pipeline. By providing this free of charge it should have been easy to garner a variety of hosts and then in turn that would provide a rich provider ecosystem for patients.
Unfortunately, that's not what happened.
Making money through payment processing
To keep our tool "free" we needed to find a creative way to make money without charging for services upfront. The solution, a pay-to-play algorithm that would take a percentage of the overall cost to cover Stripe's processing fee and our platform fee.
The percentage was based on the total cost amount. The issue was that because it differed due to session length and the overall provider cost, people were skeptical and providers felt like we were always taking too much because it came out of their pool rather than in addition to it.
Creating a listing
To keep our tool "free" we needed to find a creative way to make money without charging for services upfront. The solution, a pay-to-play algorithm that would take a percentage of the overall cost to cover Stripe's processing fee and our platform fee.
The percentage was based on the total cost amount. The issue was that because it differed due to session length and the overall provider cost, people were skeptical and providers felt like we were always taking too much because it came out of their pool rather than in addition to it.
Step 1: Create your listing
Step 2: Setting your hourly rate
Step 3: Choosing available session lenghts
Step 4: Adding a profile picture
Step 5: Setting your availability
Going from 0 to 1
Next came outbound sales— they were brutal
To try and win a first customer it required grit, tons of outbound sales calls and emails, and putting together a small team of sales people who were willing to work for equity.
Creating a sales pipeline
We hired an intern to crawl the web and create a database of 5,000 therapists that we could sell to and captured their location, age, practice size and if they currently offered online services.
Designing sales collateral
I created sales scripts, competitor analysis and process diagrams to help our team do consistent outreach.
When recruiting therapists I made these diagrams to help me and our sales team sell TalkTwo's technology.
A competitor feature matrix
Learning from real users was surprising
Sitting with therapists changed everything
Contrary to my hypothesis, most of our early adopters were NOT tech savvy. Many didn't have a digital practice and almost all of them were excited by the idea.
They were cautious about missing body language cues during therapy sessions over video
Therapists were eager to use their phones for calls rather than having to navigate to our site and login. The ability to generate push notifications for bookings was heavily requested.
Our pricing plan wasn't clear enough and confused therapists
A percentage and time-based pricing model meant different charges for different sessions, this led some to think they were being overcharged
Pricing was tough because we were reliant on Stripe which took a 3.7% processing fee. So more expensive sessions required a higher processing fee before we even got our cut.
Losing a percentage of their income from calls to cover our payment processing and service fees made early adopters hesitant to bring existing clients onto the platform because they would need to pass the cost along to them
Ultimately therapists used us to find new clients, but quickly tried to move those clients to Facetime or other "free" video alternatives
This was hard to moderate, since we weren't hiring therapists into our company but rather trying to be the software of choice for freelance therapists.
Ultimately I concluded that while there was a market here, the target customer wasn't motivated to work within the platform. This turned the business into an enforcement play, moving away from the core ethos of providing affordable therapy to all.
When recruiting therapists I made these diagrams to help me and our sales team sell TalkTwo's technology.
I learned that people are cheap and unless it saves them money or makes them even more money, they'll try and find a way to cut you out of the equation
In retrospect, my laser focus on user experience and focus on product development shouldn't have taken precedent over core business value.
Approaching the problem of healthcare access was noble, but didn't resonate with therapists who already had an existing book of business.
Free offerings and existing players in the telehealth technology space had too much overlap, taking away from the already fragmented total addressable market.
