HopStair - your pocket confidence builder

Confidence is a widely neglected but critical root factor in good mental health and unlocking potential. Over 90% of young people wish they had more confidence but there is no accessible or attractive solution to help them build it. Confidence is something that "gets knocked out of you" throughout your childhood and teens, because of parenting styles, peer influences, societal rules, (social) media or adverse events.

To build confidence one must work through the mental barriers that stand in between being one's most confident self.

A confidence building platform, based on coaching, that allows people to build confidence on the go, in bite sized chunks, through daily personalised content on the science, exercises, tools and introspection; as well as a peer community and marketplace.

A demo can be found here: https://www.loom.com/share/fefd99112e2346f28a141a8eb0be3351

Over 90% of young people (Censuswide, 2021) and ~50% in the general population struggle with low self-confidence and related symptoms such as Imposter Syndrome, self-doubt, body image concerns, stress, depressive symptoms, anxiety, lack of motivation, low mood, worry and anxiety. These are all symptoms of low confidence. We are initially focused on university students who will face a range of struggles due to moving away from home, adjusting to and finding a new peer group, dealing with academic pressures and expectations, handling stress, and finding themselves as individuals.

Our solution will help them build their confidence in themselves and support them in trusting themselves and being courageous in being themselves. Our solution provides introspection to help with finding themselves, inspiration to embrace who they are, tools for handling specific challenging situations and moods, and community to connect with likeminded individuals on the same journey.

We are a team of 20 including myself as a generalist with significant experience in business and management, being a senior manager in the UK NHS/Oxford alumno, alongside a team of tech and non tech specialisms from startups and unicorns spanning app development, AI, coaching, confidence, psychology, design, and marketing. 

Nadine as the founder has founded HopStair based on experiencing most of the issues associated with low confidence herself before she built her own confidence and has experienced the transformational change to her own life. She has spoken to 100s of individuals with the same fate/on a similar journey and knew something had to be done about it.

We have are working with young people and students on an ongoing basis to seek feedback and seek contributions to building the product.

We are yet to start our pilot.

To access expertise and networks to support our fundraising, GTM and get support on articulating our USP. And to connect with other founders to tap into their knowledge and share solutions about common pain pain points.

We are working with and closely linking with our target community, students, on a regular basis.

Mental health is usually approached from a symptom fighting perspective, such that people individually and the system mainly invests in crisis and when mental health is poor. And even then, most of the focus is on making people feel better but not tackling the root factor, low self confidence, which protects against poor mental health. 

So what we are seeing is an ever increasing demand for mental health services and mental health deteriorating and a common perception that healthcare systems won't solve the crisis. 

We have the best chance when we prevent, and confidence allows us to do that.

But there isn't much awareness or a solution for people to build it. Yet >90% of young people wish they had more confidence. And confidence is that neglected but critical root factor for sustainably good mental health and one's ability to unlock one's potential, to lead a purpose-led, happy and fulfilled life.

If we were to have a world that was fully confident, we would see our mental health burden shrink, and we would see the colourfulness and diversity of people being celebrated and empowered.

Improving people's mental health for good, in a way that's sustainable and lasting, through building confidence.

Decrease the size of the mental health crisis and enabling more people to self manage.

Transform how we see mental health from a disease and symptom fighting focused space to a preventative and self management space.

To empower a whole generation of young people to be their best self and life happy, purpose-led and fulfilled lives.

By 2030, reduce by one third premature mortality from non-communicable diseases through prevention and treatment and promote mental health and well-being

By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship

We are building a confidence coaching platform, making coaching highly accessible and bringing together the science on what works to build confidence, and making it attractive for young people to use. The app supports people to get ready or to actively change behaviour. It allows self paced consumption through daily content, as well as community and a coach marketplace.

Ultimately the theory of change is simple: self confidence is a critical root factor of mental health and to build confidence, we use coaching, a highly effective technique, which supports introspection, habit building, and build up of a toolbox, whilst we combine this with a community, which is equally important for confidence building.

We have built in React Native and Firebase, and we have started to build early rules based systems which will eventually be transformed into AI models, to build our app and power our recommendation engine.

We have tested our platform extensively before and are just about to launch our latest round of pilot. We do not yet have a scientific paper against our solution but we are working with academics to do just that for the latest pilot.

We have a team of about 20, mostly part time.

1.5 yrs, since Sept 21, we are fully bootstrapped.

We have a highly diverse team spanning geographies anywhere between Chicago and India, with individuals from North America, Europe, Africa and Asia working in our team. Our team is about 40% female.

B2B2C and B2C subscription, commission based marketplace, and ad based in the future.

We are providing impact through a low cost and attractive solution that helps people build sustainably good mental health through confidence building, in their own time, through community, or with coaches.

We are applying for grants, are seeking investment and are looking to start monetisation in a few months.

We are so far pre revenue and pre raise which makes it hard to answer this question.