MonerAlo

In developing nation like Bangladesh, People generally think that health is all about physical health. Hence in most cases, people always ignore treating mental illness in the primary stage and gradually it becomes severe impacting patient as well as his/her family life. Even when most of the people realise, the patient or patient family must travel to city area just to find a good doctor. It is going to be very expansive and frequent follow-up becomes almost challenging for many patients which is required mostly in metal treatment. In current digital environment, the situation is becoming more challenging.

Even visiting abroad counsellors are not effective considering the linguistic and challenge to have continuous supervision & treatment. In our technology enabled solution, we’re going to ensure metal health treatment in cost effective manner accessible through our web-based solution from anytime anywhere by connecting licensed counsellors & doctors online and on-site (when required).

In developing nation like Bangladesh, People generally think that health is all about physical health. Hence in most cases, people always ignore treating mental illness in the primary stage and gradually it becomes severe impacting patient as well as his/her family life. Even when most of the people realise, the patient or patient family must travel to city area just to find a good doctor. It is going to be very expansive and frequent follow-up becomes almost challenging for many patients which is required mostly. In current digital environment, the situation is becoming more challenging & the impacted area is both residing in rural and city areas.

Our Online Web portal can connect our partner counsellors for our customers in mutually agreed time from anywhere. It ensures periodic counselling, convenient media preferred by customer (video, audio, chat etc.), on-site meetup (only when it is required & ensuring all are getting appointments at least once from best counsellors) in an automated and cost-effective way & of course in our local language. On the other hand, it gives flexibility & additional revenue earning area for our counsellor partners as well as distributors in rural areas coordinating patient session (on request only). 

Our customer segmentation is mostly in three categories staring from individual counselling, group counselling as well as Teenage or Child counselling. In addition, the topic covered within each type of counselling or treatment can be varied depending on each patient scenarios e.g. Depression, Anger, Relationship, Stress, Knowing Social values & practices etc. Thinking a scenario of a smart user being our customer can take the counselling service independently or with the help of their family member using our user-friendly online web portal. However, we will be arranging our distribution engagement for supporting our customers connecting from rural areas. Our distributions are well trained in our platform or solution and will support giving necessary arrangement e.g. Laptop, Speaker, Basic diagnosis etc. for our customers. So, it will be a win-win situation for our own customers, partners, distributor as well as for us. Our solution will address following needs or problems of our customers:

• Addressing mental stress near home or from home will be very convenient for both smart and normal customers
• Long term treatment shall be possible thinking its cost effectiveness
• Ensuring mandatory onsite visit with required counsellor
• Slowly people start addressing metal problems in early stage solving lot of mental issues in society

We planned to have the following product features within our web-based solution. The minimum viable product features are marked separately as MVP. 

• Ask a Counsellor (MVP)
• Happiness Blog (MVP)
• Free Subscription to motivational & social value materials (MVP)
• Subscription based counselling with preferred medium (Video, Chat, Phone) (MVP)
• Scheduling on-demand on-site counsellor visit
• On-demand counselling with preferred medium (Video, Chat, Phone) (MVP)
• Corporate Subscription
• Smart Device Sell

There will be following separate panel within our web-based solution:

• Customer Portal
• Counsellor Portal
• Distributor Portal
• Billing Manager Portal
• Administration Portal

In terms of technology, we are planning to use:

• Data Base Layer: Maria DB (AWS RDS is planned)
• Middleware/API Back End: PHP Laravel Framework (Restful JSON Interface)
• Responsive Web UI: Vue/React JS, HTML/CSS (Android APP & iOS APP is planned)
• Infrastructure: AWS Cloud/Cent OS
• Notification: SMS, E-mail, Push (Planned)
• Content: English & Bengali
• Third party Integration: Payment GW - SSLCOMMERZ, Live Video streaming - Dacast, Video conference - Zoom, Chatting – WhatsApp. 

Process:

In each product features, we will have our licensed counsellor & motivational speaker as partners serving the customer with quality. In addition, we will have our distributor responsible for assisting normal user for availing our services from specific area wise designated points. Finally Application Administration will be there to monitor all the activities incognito mode, analysing customer rating, customer experience, billing settlement and application performance matters etc.

Connecting People in a platform for providing counselling might be available in some other countries. However, it is not available in our country. Most importantly our rural area people yet are not developed to have smart phone, tablets and an internet connection and they always look for cost effective solution. Hence, we included a new model of connecting customer by setting up our trained distributors (even able to support minor health diagnosis) & they can server our customer to connect with our platform & counsellor. It will not only connect our rural people but also it will create job scope or additional revenue for rural people working with us as distributor. On the other hand, we will be having our platform at least two languages (English and Bengali) as well as our counsellors will be talking with customers in native language. Lastly, we would be providing free access to our motivational and social value courses to all our customers for creating a better culture in society & mental health awareness. In terms of technology, we will be using available technologies in market for faster roll-out & those are mentioned details in earlier section. However, within our solution, we shall be able to ensure better mental treatment in cost effective model and easily our customer can choose method of online communication, change counsellor with a notice, choose charging package, rate counsellor, can pay in various way e.g. Cash to distributor, Online payments etc.

In our random verbal survey within our friends and family with different educational background, minimum 40% of the mid-range mental patients are kept untreated due to lack of knowledge about mental health, failed to continue long terms treatment requirement, bitter experience with existing doctors or medicine side effects and financial inability. Unfortunately, in my family, I personally faced a similar case and mostly in city area, the underground scenario is going to be worst e.g. Children in Dhaka are growing mostly in four walls and are passing their time only with television or mobile due to lack of open fields to play. So, many of our parents anxious about their child health now & we are ensuing convenient treatment for their patients. In our application, our customer can easily connect either from their home or from our verified nearest distributor (noted in Google MAP) and take continuous treatment. Based on the situation, we will be helping our customer for required on-site counsellor appointments & continue rest of the treatment from online with low cost & in a convenient way. As our model is covering both city and rural area customers in an innovative way through our platform in local language, we shall be able to ensure better mental treatment in cost effective model and easily our customer can choose method of online communication, change counsellor with a notice, choose charging package, rate counsellor, can pay in various way e.g. Cash to distributor, Online payments etc. 

As we are still in concept stage, the current number of people we're serving is zero.

The number we’ll be forecasting to serve in first year is around 15,000

The number we’ll be forecasting to serve within fifth year is around 100,000

As we solve major problem in society or in computer science, we will use the similar strategy. Within our team, one of our members is a Child Counsellor and we will be able to start both on-site and online counselling quickly & she will be providing us inputs on partner strategy & building the platform. One of the key activities include completing the design, development and testing of our solution before lunching towards customer according to our business plan & product strategy. Then we will need to figure out all the sales channel & one of the strong indirect sales channel currently is Facebook in Dhaka. The most important and challenging portion is to articulate best ways for on-boarding our counsellor partners in a win-win method as well as our distributors in target areas.

So, within next six months, we would like to develop our products MVP features, keeping pilot areas mostly in city areas & treatment scope within children or teenage range and gradually expand it to all 64 districts of Bangladesh within next one year by covering adult cases. 

Gradually in next year, our plan is to setup our distribution channel in all over 492 Upazilas within Bangladesh for connecting our rural people who are not having adequate facilities connecting to our platform. 

Over the next three years, we shall be focusing on our customer experience, renovating our solution, increasing our revenue and strengthen our partnership and distribution model. In addition, we can extend the similar model to provide a certain types of physical problem as well. 

Challenges forecasting within very first years:

Financial: We would be needing financial support for building our applications & rolling out in target regions.

Technical: We've experienced building complex & similar application & hence we're confident to build the solution without any major challenge. However we do have challenge in application testing to ensure better quality. 

Legal: With online counselling what we can do or what we can't do limits our business domains e.g. With online counselling, doctor can't suggest any medication. 

Cultural: To roll-out our innovations in rural areas would be challenging due to current mind set and culture in initial days.

Partnering: In Bangladesh, there are less counsellors with respect to need & on-boarding experience & good counsellors are also be challenging for their busy schedule. Most of the counsellors are too much commercial & they don't want to give quality time to patients.  

Distribution: No one in rural or city area won't setup a separate setup only to do business with us in initial days.

Challenges forecasting within five years:

Customer Experience: Retaining customer and their better experience would be challenging. 

Partner Experience: Meeting partner expectation in terms of pricing and service quality would be challenging. 

Distributor Experience: How our customer is getting services from distribution would be challenging?

Extended Diagnosis Facilities: In long term if we would like to support major diagnosis facility with distribution support, then it would be challenging to cope up with present Eco-system thinking the diagnosis centre are third party to us. 

Competition: There might be competition which can impact overall business plan.

We have planned to address our challenges in following ways:

Financial: As part of our mitigation plan, we're applying here for funding as well as other potential areas. However, we're still planning to do a pilot application & deployment within our own financial capacity. 

Legal: We will be contacting respective government regulatory bodies for taking approval for e-prescription if the doctors are confident. Otherwise we would need to limit our business only to counselling.   

Partnering: This is the most challenge problem we would ever face after getting our funding to manage our partner. Initially within first few years, we planned to keep as minimal revenue percentage for us by sharing mostly to partner to mitigate the challenge as well as declaring incentives. 

Distribution: We can start giving distributions who has already a small shop (including a PC/Laptop, head phone, speaker). Then we will support them by providing required training and promote them to purchase basic in-house diagnostic kits e.g. blood pressure machine, diabetic measuring kits, heart rate measuring kits etc. 

Customer Experience: Customer experience excellence is the key for any technology enabled service business model. Keeping in mind, we keep incognito mode enable for tempering any session with our customers by taking their permission to measure experience. In addition, we would be careful handling cases with lower service rating from either side. If required based on customer experience, we have our mind set to enhance our solution as well as our business process.

Currently we are only two team members. I am working as lead founder of this initiative and one of my co-founder is a 60+ year Australian lady who is a child counsellor. I have experience dealing with complex IT Solution End to End delivery for solving different types of business problem in my job experience in different roles starting from Solution Architect to CEO. 

I'm Palash Gupta graduated from one of the Bangladesh public engineering university named KUET and having good academic & research track records. I have around 14+ Years’ Experience in IT and Telecommunication industry in different roles both home ground & abroad mostly in multinational as well as owned Company. In parallel, I am Big Data Practitioner & Trainer and I am TMFORUM Certified professional. In addition, I handled multi-million $ projects as Lead in my career. I'm suffering for a mental disease cases within my family & handling since 2012 end till today and I know what the expectation from a customer for mental patient treatment is and what is limitation in current process. 

My co-founder Tahmina Parven was a faculty member of one of the Bangladeshi Private University and an Australian citizen running different business over there. She wants to spend her time mainly for social welfare considering the situation she observed for children in Bangladesh specially in Dhaka. 

Regardless of our individual capabilities, we would say that we both have passion to solve the current metal illness medication process & tendency to contribute to our society especially in rural area. Even we could see a clear future to support certain level of physical treatment for our rural people using the same solution which will be game changer.

I'm currently leading an IT Enable Service based firm (NG Solutions System Ltd.) as CEO and would like to make partnership for delivering the overall solution faster. The reason is, we have similar software built for other use cases which will reduce the lead time to market significantly. 

I am also involved one of a startup (CTG IT Services Ltd.) in Chittagong City working on Robotics and Kids Programming educations mainly. We can use them as Chittagong area distributor for rolling out the idea in Chittagong City as well as sub-area faster in a win-win basis. 

I am requesting you to look into following URL:

MonerAlo Business Model

We will be able to generate revenue out of our value proposition offered to our customer by targeting existing available business & expanding business volume as well (Currently initial stage mental issues are not being treated & rural people are mostly continuing their medication properly). So, it is fully a service selling concept by connecting our partner and distributors. Please find all our product features and their revenue model. 

Feature Code: F1

Feature Name: Ask a Counsellor

Feature Revenue Model: Indirect

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F2

Feature Name: Happiness Blog

Feature Revenue Model: Indirect

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F3

Feature Name: Free Subscription to motivational & social value materials

Feature Revenue Model: Indirect

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F4

Feature Name: Subscription based counselling with preferred medium (Video, Chat, Phone)

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F5

Feature Name: Scheduling on-demand on-site counsellor visit

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F6

Feature Name: On-demand counselling with preferred medium (Video, Chat, Phone)

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F7

Feature Name: Corporate Subscription

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F8

Feature Name: Smart Device Sell

Feature Revenue Model: Transnational

Stage: MVP

Truly We're applying for all the potential funding opportunities to see my dream come true with our committed hard work & knowledge. We feel Tiger Challenge appropriate for couple of reasons:

1. It is matching with our region which is our motherland as well as solving mainly developing & densely populated countries issues. 

2. Before our application, we reviewed the funding application process & that is highly organised. It gives us feeling of competitiveness and challenges by world leader evaluating our applications as well as it's a learning for us throughout our application submission process. 

4. The funding amount is sufficient for us to reach close to break even as per our assumptions. 

5. One of our local leading IT company is connected to with this initiative, it makes us proud and comfortable with the journey. 

Our key partners are:

1. Counsellors/Motivational Speaker 

2. Distributors

3. Technology Solution Provider

We will be doing revenue sharing model with first one and two. For the third one, they will act like a technology provider under a contract with agreed purchase order scope.