Mental Health Match: From hibernation to acceleration
Mental Health Match is an online therapist-client matching platform founded in 2019. With a network of thousands of independent licensed therapists across the United States, the company’s unique matching service shows people profiles of therapists that fit their needs (in such areas as budget, presenting issues, and cultural needs). It makes finding the right client-therapist fit much easier for both therapy seekers and therapists. Therapists pay a subscription to be featured on the platform and therapy seekers access the service for free.
After experiencing some initial success, the company had to lay off its entire team and nearly closed down during the pandemic due to a major drop in revenue. Founder Ryan Schwartz explains that when demand for therapy surged at the beginning of the pandemic, therapists booked up and the need for them to advertise their services dropped dramatically. Over the course of the pandemic, Ryan continued to nurse the company along.
In the later part of 2022, the company began to grow again as revenue bounced back. At that point, Ryan says, it was time to figure out the future of the company.
”We hadn’t done any development in a few years. Everything felt stale and for us to keep surviving but also thrive and accelerate our growth and realize our vision for the company, we needed a better way to stand out among competitors. I knew that we needed to do development and actually create more of a product rather than just be a simple directory and that we also needed to update our code. We had a few feature ideas that would allow us to really stand out among competitors.”
Ryan sought a fractional CTO to partner with to help develop those new features for the platform, after which he figured the company could then move back into maintenance mode in terms of development. Going into the search, he had a few concerns.
“One of the concerns I had was that we would find somebody who was calling themselves a fractional CTO, but was really in between jobs and then four months later would get a full-time job and we would lose them or just become an afterthought. I was also concerned about right-sizing the staffing. Lots of firms require long-term commitments and have a whole team and it’s a lot harder to scale up and down.”
In the course of his search, Ryan connected with me and found that I was the right fit. He could see I was committed to serving clients in a fractional role, had the ability to scale appropriately as needed with an extensive network of trusted developers, and understood the sensitivity required in the approach to the technology and data in the field of mental health. He also appreciated how I listened in our early interactions.
“I would talk to folks who were also fractional CTOs and it felt like they had the skills, but they would say something like, ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. I got it. I know exactly what you need.’ And I thought, ‘We’ve talked for 30 minutes, you don’t know.” Sam listened and he seemed to meet me where I was at and really focused on the needs that I was communicating rather than pretending he had all the answers.”
Setting priorities, establishing an effective development team and process, building new features
Having first gotten a clear understanding of the company’s business goals, I reviewed the existing code base and consulted with the former CTO to get insight and background into the work that had already been invested into building the platform. I assessed what needed to be addressed in terms of technical debt and security updates and how those needs should be prioritized.
“Rather than just say, ‘Here are all the things that we need to change,’ Sam really helped me understand, ‘If this is where you want to go as a business, here are the things that are holding you back’ and helped me address those pieces.”
I onboarded a trusted team of long-term remote developers who would begin to tackle the technical debt and start developing and shipping new features. I put the team on a two-week sprint schedule and established DevOps processes so that every push of code would kick off automated quality control, enabling us to ship changes more quickly and with greater confidence. I also ensured that we addressed any site performance issues that came up as we made changes to the platform. Ryan appreciated the peace of mind he gained knowing the code base and development process were well taken care of.
“I don’t have to worry about that. There have even been some times when Sam has intervened in ways that I don’t know. I just see the end result. I feel like I’m in good hands with Sam.”
Every feature has a cost to build and maintain. Throughout my work with Mental Health Match, we looked at whether proceeding with a particular new feature was a good idea from the lens of what will help grow the business, focusing on what creates value for therapists and therapy seekers.
“What I really appreciate about Sam is that he actually brings a lot of business expertise. He’s not there just to manage code, but he’s willing to share things that he’s picked up along the way about our business models, about our revenue models, about the way we engage customers, about the product. He’s really helpful in sharing that expertise and helping me shape the direction of where we are headed.”
Filling in the missing leadership team pieces
During the course of our work, it became clear that Mental Health Match would benefit from bringing in additional expertise.
Ryan was handling work that a product manager would typically do, including scoping and writing tickets for the development team, which he notes is not his area of expertise. I communicated the value of not splitting his focus and instead having a product manager take on those responsibilities and help further develop the product. I helped bring on a fractional product manager, which freed Ryan up to focus on other areas and helped improve the ticket quality, increasing developer throughput.
Ryan found a head of marketing to help the company through a rebrand and develop a stronger consumer brand. I helped with onboarding and ensured that the marketing ecosystem and product technology stack were well integrated and aligned.
Improving internal reporting capabilities
I helped the company improve their internal reporting capabilities, including migrating to a new user-friendly reporting platform. Any Mental Health Match team member can now create reports on key metrics without involving a developer. The improvements have enabled more effective and nimble reporting and have increased insight into metrics needed for decision making.
"It enables us to make product decisions about how people are using the product with greater clarity. It allows us to make marketing decisions about how we target and prioritize marketing dollars. It allows us to measure the impact of changes that we’re making on the site. And it allows us to understand our customers with a little bit more granularity than we had before.”
Advancing the technology to deliver value and improve the customer experience, supporting business growth
Ryan says our work together has meant the company is able to think more strategically about the way the technology intersects with their business goals and what is possible with development and changes to the technology. We successfully implemented several new features that help improve quality of matches on the platform, including making it easier for therapists to indicate which insurances they accept and introducing new spam controls. We also made changes to Mental Health Match’s tech stack to better meet the company’s business goals.
"Sam has helped us think about the ways that we can ultimately advance the underlying tech to really deliver on the value proposition that we have and create a product experience that is really unique in our space. One of the business goals he has helped us address is to make our tech work better with some of the marketing channels that we rely on and to think about creating a whole consumer experience for therapy seekers. Another goal he’s helped us address is thinking about the way our product and our tech create experiences that create more loyalty and stickiness with the product for therapists, who are our paying customers.”
Over the course of a year of working together, Mental Health Match achieved some impressive growth over the previous year. The company saw a 113% increase in revenue, a 109% increase in the number of therapists subscribed to the platform, and a 67% increase in the number of therapists contacted per month. Ryan notes there are of course several factors working together that have contributed to the growth, with our work together being one of them.
Ryan also says that our work together has helped the company move beyond the idea of developing a few new features and then going into maintenance mode. Instead, we’ve created an ongoing, streamlined and continuously improving development process to advance the business. We’ve also decreased time to deployment from once per month to once per week, increasing the speed with which Mental Health Match can confidently release platform updates.
"I feel like we came out of hibernation with Sam. We shook off the dust and got to realize a whole bigger vision of what our product could become and what our service could become and really start flying towards that vision. We really moved the company from something that was very static and stale to this dynamic, ongoing force of how we are going to grow the company but also shape the industry that we’re in."
I enjoyed a wonderful working relationship with Ryan and other members of the Mental Health Match team. Ryan says he appreciates working with me and would recommend my services to others.
"Sam is really smart, reliable, and easy to work with. He brings a lot of business smarts in addition to development smarts and he has a large network of people to bring in when needed. Not only can you trust him with all the development and feel peace of mind that it’s taken care of, but he’s really helpful at shaping bigger questions around business and product and filling in the gaps with the people that he knows when needed. He really brings the experience and network of a big firm, but with much greater flexibility and just more joy to work with."