Why I pushed to build a client care app before proving market fit, and the framing that turned it from a wellness clone into a companion.
We walked out of a discovery review this week with fewer questions than I expected, and the wrong question still hanging in the air. Our mobile design lead had just presented months of work on a client care app, the piece of our platform that would live on a client’s phone between sessions. The review itself went fine. Then, in our debrief, she named the doubt that had surfaced on the call: how do we know this is worth building and investing in, beyond our belief that it’s where the world is going?
That’s a fair question. I pushed back on it anyway.
Here’s the thing about a product that doesn’t exist yet. There’s no way to predict its revenue, its growth, or its churn from research alone. We can talk to 6 clinicians or 60, and we still won’t know how many of their clients are willing to accept guidance from an app, or what those clients find useful once they do. The only way to get that baseline is to put something in people’s hands and watch. Leaders outside our product org have been asking for this app for the better part of 2 years. Gating the build on proof of market fit reads to me as a way to keep not having it.
I was listening to DHH on Lex Fridman’s podcast this week, and he put the general case better than I did on the call. Nobody knows what they want until they receive it, he said, and the way you arrive at good software is you write a little of it and then try to use it. He was talking about agents and 20 years of agile. It applies just as well to a care app that doesn’t exist yet.
There’s no predicting the revenue, growth or churn of something that doesn’t exist. You build it to find out.
The second thing I pushed on was differentiation. Wellness apps already let you track your stress, log your mood, and set a reminder to breathe. If we rebuild what’s in market, we hand our customers something they could have gotten elsewhere, with our logo on it. The question worth answering is what only we can give them, and the answer is the clinician relationship. Nobody else has the clinician on one side of the app.
So I tried a framing, told as the experience a client might actually have. Your new clinician sends you an intake form, and the email says: download this app to make intake easier. You do, and the app is the intake. Voice-first, chat-first, whatever it needs to be. When you finish, it says: welcome to care from your clinician. Here are a few things to get you started. From there, the app is a companion. Not the clinician. The companion that helps you show up for your clinician: a reminder to do your homework, a prompt to take 5 minutes and breathe, and over time the recap from your last session and whatever notes your clinician wants you to hear back. Every feature earns its way in because it makes the next session better.
Our mobile design lead was already there in spirit. She’d been sketching small nudges as a v1, reminders that build the muscle of the app being a resource before anyone builds a full tracking interface. That instinct is right, and the framing gives it a destination. Nudges first, homework and recaps next, with the platform positioned as something bespoke for our clinicians and their clients rather than a copy of a consumer app.
Earlier in the review we’d spent real minutes on whether to call these people clients or patients. I’ll admit I got caught up on the wrong thing. It doesn’t matter what we call them. What matters is that they’re comfortable getting guidance from us alongside their clinician, and that our clinicians are comfortable with us keeping the care warm between sessions. We’re in the middle of a two-part story, and the job is to tell it more clearly, especially to leaders who are still ramping on the work.
If more research is the price of proceeding, fine. Let’s run a proper study with a real sample size instead of 6 interviews. But we’re building this, and the learning is the point. There’s been a lot of great momentum on this squad, and I’d rather ship something small and be corrected by clinicians than sit on a strategy deck waiting to be sure.