Momentu

85% of LATAM employees are struggling with some type of mental health challenge, but over 50% of them cannot afford any mental health treatment. On the other hand, Latin American businesses face substantial costs due to the decrease in productivity, increase in turnover, and absenteeism due to mental health challenges in their workforce.

We know that people need what we are making because: 1) We have been in their positions needing access to high quality mental health support, 2) We have conducted +100 user interviews, talking to +40 HR leaders & C-Level executives in order to understand their challenges managing mental health in their workforce and talked to hundreds of employees about their challenges in mental health, 3) we have seen a huge adoption of our services and organic interest from HR managers and employees.

Last but not least, regulation and laws in Latin America have increased the pressure for companies to assesses and manage mental health problems within their workforce. For example, in Mexico the NOM-035 enforces companies to diagnose and manage their workforce emotional challenges, we at Momentu have been repeatedly selected by companies to help them satisfy this regulation.

Momentu is a corporate mental health platform for Latin American . Companies offer Momentu as a perk to their employees and we solve the main challenges HR face: employee absenteeism, high turnover and low productivity due to mental health. In order to accomplish that we first assess our users mental health challenges through an emotional test. Then, based on their needs, we provide them with therapy, coaching, live mindfulness & yoga sessions, and online exercises based on CBT.

As said above, 85% of LATAM employees are struggling with some type of mental health challenge, but over 50% of them cannot afford any mental health treatment. The current solutions are not working as traditional EAP providers are the solution that has been used in the past, however, they haven't been innovating in the last years and their engagement rates are around 2-3% ( comparing to 20-30% of ours). There are a few B2C & B2B solutions in Brasil that are focused on that market (Zenklub, Psyalive, Telativa) and some others in México that are working exclusively as a marketplaces (Terapify and cuentame). Our value proposition stands out because: 1) We offer access to a wide range of resources to our users (live sessions, digital programs, coaching, and therapy), 2) We have are developing the most diverse care team in Latin America to serve every individual according to their needs 3) We collaborate with the HR teams of our clients to satisfy their specific needs of the people.  

As a consultant I (JP) found myself in the middle of the mental health equation. I was facing a lot pressure in my work which combined with my personal challenges, evolved into experiencing high stress and anxiety. Through that process I struggled to find the right type of care, until I discovered mindfulness and coaching. On the other side, while I was working within tens of businesses across LATAM the only common ground I found between all of them was: quickly rising mental health issues in their workforce. This led me to realize and be aware about the increasing of mental health challenges in the world and the huge need in LATAM (México is the 2nd country in terms of depression). 25% of Latin America has a diagnosable mental health problem.

Moreover, over the last 4 years as a Consultant I have learnt how to successfully grow businesses across Latin America and have establish an interesting network.

Noam from his side, founded his first initiative in the mental health space 5 years ago. While in college at UCLA he realized how many students lacked access to mental health support. That is why he created Wazo Connect, which is today one of the biggest US College mental health peer to peer networks. He made mental health resources more accessible, convenient and impactful for students.

We are hoping to get help on how to develop a sustainable solution that is not only scalable from a business perspective, but that answers the population needs. We know that MIT has developed frameworks on how to build social enterprises that are sustainable and that do not interfere with the current ecosystem we are targeting. We hope to get the advice from world experts on this matter.
Moreover, we would like to get connections in the Mental Health ecosystem to better understand how can we build the first stepped care model in Latin America.

We are the first stepped care model in Latin America. Stepped care has been proven to be the most efficient way to improve mental health problems time and again. Efficient in terms of results and cost. However, applying this in Latin America is not an easy task.

Stepped care models' key of success is that they find the right service for the right person. We understood that it's not only about finding the right service but mainly about finding how to deliver that service to our end user.
Consultants spend their day on the go and want to receive our services via WhatsApp, while developers spend their day in front of a computer and want to take 30 minutes breaks exercise from their apartment. We are bringing the right service to right person via the right channel. We are building the Latin American mental health stepped care model.

We are very much product oriented, and believe that a good product will change peoples lives. Our goal is to democratize mental health in Latin America and the first step is to get to serve our initial target population with the best results possible. This are our next couple steps towards that aim:

Our current focus is on improving the product for our payer (HR departments). We are developing features that solve the “hair on fire” problems we’ve discovered through our research.

• Dashboard to provide HR with visibility of their internal problems (e.g. realtime overall stress levels, burnout meter by team)
• Anonymous communication tools for employees to communicate and provide feedback
• Build the NOM-035 toolkit (features needed by Mexican employers to satisfy the new regulation NOM-035)

This will help us reduce the sales cycle and increase our cash flow.

This will last around one month and cost us around 30k in salaries.

The subsequent step will be two fold.

• Developping the mobile app for our end users (the employees)
• Developing the first set of therapy tools (e.g. digital CBT exercises, clinician dashboard) to serve our team of professionals (therapists & coaches).

This will last around three months and will cost us 90k in salaries.

This will boost engagement & care effectiveness for the user while increasing retention for the professionals.

On the longer-term there are 3 other business models that have been proven to work in terms of mental health results in the US and Europe. We would like to take a step forward with one of thWeose in order to reach more parts of the population. The 4 others are: B2C, targeting insurance, alternative drugs (psychedelics.) 

The main OKR's we use are:

Potential Employees: We currently have 7,500 and we have been growing 25% month over month over the past 6 months.

Active Employees: We have a 20% of employees with Access to Momentu who use our solution

Mental Health improvement: We are currently measuring the effect of our solution with several mental health questionnaires to understand the effect of our solution.

Mental health has three main barriers to adoption:

1) Cost: quality mental health care is expensive. It is unaffordable for most people in Latin America and the world
2) Stigma: Stigma is one of the main barriers, for people to access care. In most countries, individuals have a prejudice against accepting their own mental health issues and therefore do not look for treatment.
3) Lack of knowledge: If you or I break a leg we know the exact steps towards finding a solution. If we start having mental health symptoms, most people will not know how to approach the situation.

Our B2B approach breaks with those three barriers.

1) Cost: Having the employers pay this, eliminates the cost boundary

2 & 3) Stigma & Lack of knowledge: Going B2B, our contracts are annual and we therefore have a voice to communicate directly with all the employees, week after week, day after day. This helps us break those conceptual barriers, and therefore bring care to those who need it.

Here is our product demo: https://youtu.be/Cj20IPqP7jg

Our goal is to develop a matching algorithm, that is able to find the best match between one of ours users and a group of care providers according to a set of variables.

Diversity is fundamental to ensure the quality of our care.

• Our service is currently fully available in Spanish and Portuguese and we are now developing the English version and hiring native English care providers.
• Moreover, we believe that every country in Latin America has its own culture and identity, that is why we are building a team of providers that is where our users are. We currently have professionals in over Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Usa & Spain.
• We are finally also developing a team of care providers with a wide variety of cultural origins, belief systems, sexual orientations and gender identification in order to provide the most hand tailored solution to our users.