#29: Are you building just a perk or a sticky product? - Leonie Ellerbrock, Viktoria Lindner
Mental health and marketplaces - both are hot topics! Isn’t it a great idea to build a marketplace for mental health services? Viktoria Lindner and Leonie Ellerbrock, co-founders of Mindsurance, share a story of launching such a marketplace and then walking away from this model.
Building a business around mental health
Viktoria shares her story behind starting Mindsurance. A clinical psychologist by background, she was always interested in the topic of mental health. With the onset of Covid-19, Viktoria realised that the mental health market was going to grow rapidly, and decided to start a company in this space.
Leonie, an “overachiever” in her career, discovered therapy at some point. She saw the need for a platform that could match people with mental health services that have a high chance of making a positive impact.
Testing the idea and entering the B2B Market
Viktoria and Leonie explain how they tested their idea and ultimately pivoted to the B2B space. They initially launched marketing campaigns to gauge demand, however, quickly realised that people were not willing to pay for therapy sessions. At some point, the founder team decided to pivot to the B2B space. They started working with companies interested in people analytics to assess productivity and sickness rate. Without sharing personal data, they managed to support organisations on a mission to have a healthier workspace.
Building a strong value proposition
After switching to B2B, co-founders learned that just offering a platform of services is not enough to have a clear differentiation from the competition. They had to integrate into their customers’ operations and processes to provide a new and strong value proposition. The decision to become an integrated software provider was mainly driven by conversations with investors who didn’t see a strong case for investing only in the platform of services.
“We want to create value for organisations and to become part of their internal processes to make change”
About Viktoria Lindner (guest):
Viktoria is the CEO & Co-Founder of Mindsurance, a digital mental healthcare platform that connects employees with therapists, coaches and digital mental health tools. Viktoria is a serial founder with more than 6 years of experience in the HR Tech space. She studied clinical psychology and founded her first startup DIMPACT in 2018 which she bootstrapped to a 7-figure revenue. In 2021, she started Mindsurance with a mission to remove the barriers to mental health care for employees.
About Leonie Ellerbrock (guest):
Leonie is the COO & Co-Founder of Mindsurance. Leonie is a Berliner and joined the local startup ecosystem by 2011. She led teams in business development and operations and has a deep interest in the MedTech area. Leonie holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and Business.