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 Ananya Jain, co-founder of FullCircle, a GenZ mental health tech startup based in the US.
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Here’s what FullCircle is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
GenZ is more open to talking about mental health issues than previous generations, but the solutions available are scarce and outdated. This generation requires a more uplifting tone in mental healthcare, more flexible solutions, and better communities, especially now during Covid, where social interactions have largely moved online. From a scientific and data perspective, mental health problems overlap with loneliness and GenZ is ironically the most lonely generation ever, despite online communities and social media. Loneliness has the most adverse effects on mental health across the board and can be compared to the effects of chain smoking on physical health.
The Solution:
FullCircle is solving the loneliness problem as it relates to GenZ mental health. It makes small “micro communities” with 5-10 other people chosen specifically by FullCircle for every single user. It forms these small tight-knit communities not on the basis of surface level shared interest, but on a deeper level, taking into account sense of humour, shared past struggles in life, and shared goals in life. The team has iterated their app many times to get to this point with fast product shipments, while maintaining a close relationship with its early users on a private discord in tandem.
The Team:
There are two co-founders currently working on FullCircle, Ananya and Ankit.
Ananya is an engineering graduate who split her time at Georgia Tech, Harvard, and ETH Zurich. She is a TEDx speaker, whose first patent was awarded by the President of India, Dr. Kalam. She has received the “Diana Award” by the British Royal family for her work with FullCircle to create scalable solutions for mental health.
Ankit received his Masters from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Madras). He previously co-headed the team that was selected to represent Asia to Elon Musk at the International Hyperloop Pod Competition organised by SpaceX. He is also a TEDx speaker.
🚀 The Journey
Note: This interview was conducted over a zoom call, and notes were then turned into this transcript. Please note that some things have been added, subtracted, and edited for clarity.
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I immigrated from India to the US to study Engineering as a teenager. I come from a family of divorced parents: I came to the US with a lot of baggage that I hadn’t worked through yet at that age. This baggage, along with the stress of the Engineering degree and a fast paced life made it very hard for me to cope with the rigorous demands of my lifestyle. In my second year of Engineering, things got so bad that I lost all my hair. I was completely bald, and I had no idea what was going on with me.
At the time, I was also a peer leader for freshmen coming to my school, helping them integrate into college life. Since a lot of them were struggling with their mental health too, we would talk and share our stories, and I quickly realised that the mental health system at universities was completely broken. The University Counselling Centres across the US are completely overburdened. As students, we don’t have the financial resources to go out and seek help elsewhere. Someone needed to do something about this problem, and so I dropped everything else to work on FullCircle.
The company FullCircle really started in my first year at university, building jellyfish-inspired turbines. We had funding and went to international competitions with the business. However, when I saw my mental health and that of my friends’ become such a big issue that had no good solution I realised that I needed to make a change. Our entire team pivoted from making turbines to mental health solutions for GenZ.
We started to get quite some media attention, and one of the articles that had my phone number on it went viral. I wanted people who were struggling to be able to call somebody and face no fear of judgement. For the next few months, for a lot of people that somebody was me. I received 1000s of calls from people around the world. Those insights went directly back into our next product iteration at FullCircle.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Mental health is a huge concern these days. The Covid pandemic has exacerbated the already widespread issue of loneliness in our society. What we’re trying to solve is people’s loneliness, by giving them a place where they can talk about their life experiences and find community without the burden of having to create content to find “their people” online.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
I’m proud of having communicated with clarity about why FullCircle will succeed, and I’m proud of maintaining mental stamina to get through our fundraise. I have no plan B, my plan B is 50 other ways to try and make plan A work. It takes effort to get to a certain level of operational efficiency to work like this, and that’s what I would call a success.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Communicating a vision is hard. Something I struggled with initially as an engineer is realising that people who aren’t engineers don’t necessarily want to get every tiny detail of information from you. They need small snippets of information delivered concisely and efficiently. The overall challenge has therefore been to learn how to convey information in a way that is uniquely specific to every stakeholder I deal with. The language you use with your team is different from that you use with investors, and that you use with customers/users. Learning this can really drive success or failure, and while I have figured out how to communicate with some of our stakeholders, I’m still figuring it out with others.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
One of the things I should have done earlier is to not listen to too many people about how I needed to lead the company. As a young, female founder, a lot of people see me as someone who can easily be moulded and shaped by external advice. Something I have become very clear about is that I need to be extremely efficient about how I think about a certain problem and how I want to solve it and be clear about why I’m doing it so that I don’t get pushed around. This is something I didn’t know when I started. It’s important to surround yourself with competent people who can guide you and give you advice, but it’s equally important to have an internal compass that is guided by your own diligence and research.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Be aggressive and push for what you want. If 50 people tell you no, that’s ok, the 60th might say yes.
For me as a woman, this is particularly important to be able to get stuff done.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Crystalise your vision in your head, know what you have to do, and then stick with it. Young people today tend to hop around from one project to the next very quickly. To build anything of value, identify things that will yield high ROI, and then stick with it. Be diligent with your research so when people come around and tell you to pivot you know why you’re staying on a certain path and vision you’ve chosen to go with.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Building a relationship takes years, and the younger you are, the more of a disadvantage in this regard you have. You haven’t spent years meeting and connecting with people. Simultaneously, it is important to understand that young people have other advantages. We’re young, dynamic, and have plenty of energy. A lot of young people tend to focus on the things that we don’t have, and in doing so we end up doing worse than we would have if we just focused on what our biggest advantages are. Be authentic in the way you are, and stop thinking about the disadvantages.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
Nadia Comăneci. She is a gymnast, also an immigrant, and the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 at the Olympic Games. I see a lot of herself in me. She was a quiet and humble person - she never expected to score her 10 - she simply focussed on executing perfectly.
I derive a ton of inspiration from historic figures who are in completely unrelated fields because to do something groundbreaking in one field is to draw inspiration from other fields. You’re trying to do something that hasn’t been done before.
What book do you think everyone should read?
The Art of Noticing - Rob Walker