InnerSense: Daily mental care practices
NBS Apps is a company that digitizes psychological practices. Its founder Ivan Kuznetsov tells about launching the first app, InnerSense.
What are we working on?
Our global objective is to create a marketplace for psychological practices — a kind of Netflix in psychotherapy.
Practicing therapists know that different people respond to certain methods of treatment in their own individual manner. We select approaches with proven effectiveness and recommend them to people who would benefit from them. The key criteria are that practices must be scientifically based and adaptable for self-help work without a counselor.
The ability to determine effectiveness of the impact, track progress and process data on user behavior is our main know-how. Using it, we build processes for developing practices and recommendations.
About the design: seems like we’re doing pretty well here, too.
We’ve just released our first version of the app in the App Store. We started with basic and simple universal mechanics. The application is now free to use.
Why do we do it?
We are a team of people united by a common goal. We see a real need for qualified psychological assistance, on the one hand, and the archaic approaches still practiced in this firld, on the other.
For example, I just can’t bring myself to fill out any tests or worksheets with a pen. I can write, of course, but I’d rather use a laptop, like I’ve been doing for over 20 years.
Who is the target audience?
In the US, 40 million people experience anxiety, according to the American Counseling Association (ACA) — that’s about 18% of the population. WHO reports that in the European Region (including Russia) 40 million people suffer from depression alone. But even people who have never gone through depression face stress, difficult life situations, and all kinds of shock. We all need to learn to deal with it. Our goal is to give people simple tools to support and enhance mental well-being, explaining how each practice works.
Our user may be familiar with psychology and probably has already worked with a therapist. Or he/she can be as far from this topic as possible. The main thing is that a person must be open to life changes and ready to devote 10–15 minutes a day to practices.
Why now?
At this point, I should say that now is the best time to invest in mental health, right? In fact, I would have been in this area earlier if I had arrived here before.
Nevertheless, now really is a high time to enter the market: on the one hand, it has already formed — there are other applications, transactions, investments, and large players. On the other hand, many niches are still vacant.
A year ago, I said that people would move from once-popular meditation apps to more active work, because meditation alone would not make them happier or more relaxed. My guess was right: the leading player in the meditation app industry, Headspace, is now actively entering the app market.
The market was underdeveloped a year ago, and it was not clear where are all the really big players. Now, when they’re here, all our assumptions prove to be true. At the same time, the market is constantly growing. There is more than enough space for niche players and supergiants to coexist.
Why us?
We do what we believe in and what we are interested in, and we know how to do our job. When we started this project, I knew that if anything, I would be able to do it alone. But fortunately, in six months, incredibly talented and smart people joined in. They are all experts in their fields — talented designers, developers who worked in startups such as Prisma and Flo, and a leading psychologist advising companies from the F500 list.
We do this because we love creating good products and want to do something that benefits people — and the benefits of psychotherapy have been experienced by most of us.
How to try it out?
You can download our app from the App Store and share your feedback by writing to us at hello@nbs.vc.
What are the next steps?
Client-side encryption of user data
Signing in with Apple allows you to easily create accounts with high anonymity. But to enhance privacy even more, we want to encrypt all entered text data on the client (as in Protonmail or Telegram secret chats).
New practices
We started with basic practices and content sufficient for MLP (Minimal Lovable Prototype). Now we continue filling the app with new features.
Advanced psychological testing system
We came up with a unique mental well-being index founded on a set of well-established scientifically based psychological tests, and we are implementing it into our application step by step.
Attracting new investments
I invested the very first money myself. After that, we raised a small pre-seed round from a close circle of friends in fintech and venture capital. That was enough to develop a product and introduce it to the market. Now we are collecting a seed round, so if you are a professional investor interested in supporting a good project, please email me at ivan@nbs.vc.
