Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Rackley Nolan, Co-founder of Bravely, a mental-health app based in Singapore.
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Here’s what Bravely is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Understanding your own mental health is hard, and improving it is even harder. It takes an average of 11 years from the onset of mental health symptoms before someone seeks therapy. The resources teaching people how to take steps on their own, before it gets that far, are still so scarce. Also, there is tons of research out there, a lot of which can help you today that you’ll never see.
The Solution:
Our goal is to give people the tools needed to recognise and understand their mental health, and then start taking the best steps towards improving on the things they may be struggling with.
Bravely’s Guidebooks provides an engaging and novel way to discover the best, evidence-based mental health information, as a go-to resource for improving across a broad range of life's difficulties.
We also have an easy to use, in-depth habit tracker, that allows the user to record how they are feeling about their sleep, stress, social life, activity and self-care. It also gives a range of new recommendations, every day, for ways they can overcome whatever is holding them back from improving and feeling better.
Finally, we have an awesome mood tracker. It has been built for those who love to record their daily mood in a way that isn’t just “Choose 1 of 5 emojis”.
The Team:
We are two co-founders, Melissa, the CEO, and myself, the COO. We've got a small, fully remote team of 7 incredibly smart and empathetic people working across research, development, content writing and community. Our clinical psychologist helps to guide our direction, and we have a dozen or so volunteers who have been integral to getting us this far. We have had volunteers helping us with planning, brainstorming and content writing. Everyone is awesome, and we have a lot of fun.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
The idea for Bravely was a perfect combination of Mel’s mental health knowledge, & design background, and my interest in sharing interesting science, and helping people. Mel was well aware of the complete lack of effective tech solutions for mental health. Her design know-how comes from 10 years of working remotely, running a design agency, Melewi and having the product and design knowledge necessary to actually build something that works.
And for me, I was keen to do something that made a positive impact, and helping people discover some of the most useful snippets of research felt like the best way to apply that and make a difference. We saw incredible potential in communicating mental health research in a more understandable and accessible way.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
The world has just gone through a major period of fear and uncertainty, and while that has led to a worrying increase in mental health issues, it has also increased awareness about these kinds of topics.
Mental health is much more relatable now. We are all on the same page about the feeling of isolation, of fear, and anxiety. We have all been talking about the same feelings, the same problems and there has been a huge increase in the amount of people talking about mental health.
There are also more businesses that are aware of their employees' mental health. More people are realising that stress can have the same impact on our mental health as fall hazards can have on our physical health in a working environment. The duty of care that is workplace (physical) safety, should extend to mental health too.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We recently completed our mood tracker, and I'm very excited about it. It’s beautiful. I’ve always felt that most mood trackers feel too binary or shallow, only letting you rate your mood on a scale of five emojis, or just good/bad.
So we developed a mood tracker based on the mood wheel, and a concept from the literature. But it’s not boring! It’s really colourful, and our main focus here was the user’s experience, and we're really proud of how it turned out.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
We just started on raising a round of funding, so something we're struggling with as founders is balancing both product development, which is something we enjoy and are incredibly excited by, and spending the time condensing our vision for Bravely into a short pitch deck.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
To be really intentional with the process of user testing and validating.
We went through periods of working on features and putting a little too much time into ideas that were not yet validated. Even if the conceptual idea was validated and wanted, we could have gone back and validated and tested ideas in UI and UX as well.
It's important to keep checking the assumptions that you are making and the assumptions that the users are making and why.
But also, hindsight is 20/20, and product development is hard. I’m really proud of what we have all accomplished.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Just because you've been working towards or imagining getting a certain opportunity doesn't mean it's the right thing to be doing. Don’t be afraid to change the plans, or throw them all out!
Many people go to university and spend a lot of time working towards a certain goal or vision of their future, only to arrive there and realise that it's not what it should be or what they had anticipated it to be. In some cases, far too late.
The same applied to me when I graduated from my Master's. I had applied to a job that I had been eyeing for a few years and I got the offer, but it wasn't actually a path I was excited for, or perhaps would have been the best use of my strengths.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
For people who are thinking of founding something, my suggestion would be to not jump in with both feet until you have an idea of what the path ahead will look like. 95% of startups fail, often early on because the niche, the execution, or eventually the team wasn't right.
For people who have already jumped in and have started working on their startup, my advice would be to hire slowly and take your time working on and testing relationships with people you start working with. The right person and a good relationship can make or break the success and growth of your startup.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Don't keep your cards too close to your chest.
There is the belief in a lot of the startup world that you should be working in stealth mode until you actually launch, and not revealing too much too early on. In my opinion, we wouldn't be nearly as far as we are now if we had followed that. As soon as you start putting yourself out there, you open yourself up for great opportunities and learnings, even before launching.
For example, we have a standing form on our website for people to join us as volunteers, and we've had some incredible people contribute in design, dev, product development, and writing, all through putting ourselves out there. Also, putting yourself out there gets people excited and allows you to build a strong community early on, which in turn helps your product.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I very much admire my wife Melissa, she's a bit of a mentor to me at times. But in terms of personalities I believe everyone is equally capable of achieving things, some people might just have more resources, experiences or guidance than others. Get out there and spend some time working on the things that excite you.
What book do you think everyone should read?
On Trails: An Exploration - Robert Moor