Empathie - Making Mental Wellness Inclusive & Accessible For Asian Americans

It wasn't until January '22 when my co-founder/CTO and I converted Empathie into a company and began conducting 50+ user interviews to validate our initial hypothesis. Francois, Product Designer @ Empathie, and I split the work on leading user interviews.

Given the constraint of an already limited pool of racially diverse therapists, I recruited licensed Asian American therapists to produce original mental health content — making support more accessible and inclusive.

Our team worked together to develop a standardized structure for education our audiences on mental health concepts and strategies. After each user testing cycle (next section), we iterated our learning content.

With the goal of launching and getting feedback ASAP across 50 users in a 1-2 week span, I built and tested a no-code app, which was limited based on Glide app's guidelines, over 3 iterations (next sections). Before doing so, we explored sketches to create a simple structure that would house our initial mental health content.

We received high-ranked evaluations on user successfully reaching their most common user goals, such as building self-awareness and reducing anxiety. We measured for product-market fit using the Sean Ellis test, achieving 17% over the target goal. This gave us signal to design and code a more scalable mobile app that could handle features the no-code app couldn't (customized notifications, ML personalization, etc.).

I worked with our CTO to determine these features, which are also based on a Kano Model feature prioritization survey across 100 participants previous private beta testing insights. I segmented responses based on demographic information to identify which audiences found our product features most desirable. We learned that Asian Americans with some knowledge of mental health strategies were most interested in our product as opposed to complete beginners.

Ann Kim (Product Designer @ Empathie) led usability testing and minor improvements over time. I collaborated with Sophia Lee (Content Design intern) to create the UX writing below while I co-created illustrations (Briana Tran, freelance Graphic Designer). I worked with our CTO to determine technical/UX feasibility, which was limited by Flutter (iOS/Android platform) app's developer guidelines.

In collaboration with our PM intern and PM advisor, I spearheaded the product vision along with product principles to guide our MVP and beyond. I led a design sprint with our engineering lead, Clinical Director, and team of designers to create a motivating vision of what the MVP would be working towards.

Acquiring our 232 public beta waitlist signups was one of our metrics for demonstrating product-market fit. This traction helped us get into the prestigious Berkeley Skydeck incubator twice and win numerous grants. After shipping and testing our private beta (See "Validation") section, we gathered those research insights and applied them to our MVP/public beta designs and mental health learning content. Our MVP/public beta has been built (~50% completed).

Briana Tran created some of the start illustrations. Based on those, I created the rest of the illustration library and led creation of our design system for our mobile app.

Empathie started as an idea of mine. I was doubtful if I had the ability to grow a team/product from nothing. Within a span of 6 months, the founding team grew to 3 and our team consisted of 18+ people across marketing, design, product, engineering, and clinical (therapists). We won the Hack for Mental Health award from Microsoft. We got into Berkeley Skydeck's incubator and won a few grants. 7 months later, I partnered with Dropbox (former employer) for a mental wellness event for our Asian affinity group.

I learned to lean into my strength of challenging the status quo and being unequivocally me instead of worrying about my ideas being stupid. Through all the tears shed, my insecurities, fears about failure, I let my passion for creating real change drive me. The people who supported us could feel my passion and felt moved by it.

However, after 1.5+ years of full-time entrepreneurship (accounting for my design bootcamp business at Product Design Fam), my mental health waned due to financial anxieties/instabilities. I also learned that I prefer to focus on design and product over business, legal, and searching for funding. Despite our awards and recognition, the economic downturn has affected our team members' priorities and startup funding has been challenging to secure — impacting Empathie's ability to succeed.