HelloSelf: Launch

In April 2021, Charles Wells, founder and CEO of HelloSelf was reflecting on the company's progress since it launched two years earlier. HelloSelf's goal was to help the mentally ill recover and those who were mentally fit to stay well and feel even better. To do this, the company intended to provide members most in need with convenient access to PhDs in Clinical Psychology. For members with moderate needs and those seeking personal coaching HelloSelf would develop AI-powered "personalized psychological advice." This platform would provide its members with the ability to set goals, track progress, and discover new things about themselves. While it would take time to build all these capabilities, Wells identified the first step as providing clinical psychology-based talk therapy - Clinical Behavior Therapy (CBT) and other clinically tested methods - to those in most need. Progress to date, according to Wells, had been "reasonable." The company had built a platform to support effective, secure, online therapy with rigorous measurement of outcomes, and 125 therapists were using it to provide help to over 400 members every week. Members could track their progress on a native app. This was helping almost 2,000 members a year to get well and generating annualized revenues of £2.5 million. Now, the company was aiming to be 10 times bigger within three years - "hypergrowth" according to Wells. But this was only the beginning. The long-term goal was to help 20 million people a year which would require hypergrowth for more than a decade! How was HelloSelf going to do it?

• Growth strategy
• Healthcare and treatment
• Technology and analytics
• Mental health