[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today, we're speaking with Danny Fried, CEO and founder of Blueprint, a therapist and enablement platform that's raised $13.7 million in funding. Danny, welcome to the show. >> Thanks, Brett. Great to be here. >> No problem. Super excited. Let's go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are, and a bit more about your background. >> Sure. My name is Danny Fried, I'm the founder and CEO at Blueprint. My background is really on the product and design and technology side. I got in the world of startups about 12 or 13 years ago. I started my first company, I was in school, was a consumer facing app. I actually scaled that to a few million users around the world over the course of a year or two. I then moved out to Chicago and joined a startup called Trunk Club, and was there for about three years on the product and design team, and then left there to start Blueprint? What was that aha with Blueprint? >> The story for Blueprint actually goes back to about 10 years ago. Blueprints in the mental health care space, as you mentioned, were a therapist and enablement platform. The whole reason I got interested in this world is because about 10 years ago, I lost one of my best friends to bipolar disorder. The thing about my friend is he had access to care, which not everyone has. He was seeing a therapist, he was seeing a psychiatrist, on medication. In some ways, he was really fortunate. He had lots of resources to go and access those things, but unfortunately, care didn't work, and he died by suicide between appointments. I knew nothing about mental health or mental illness, or let alone mental health care at the time. I spent the next five years on this sort of fact-finding mission, journey, whatever you want to call it, with no intentions of starting a company or starting Blueprint. I was busy doing other stuff at the time, but I was just genuinely trying to better understand what my friend had been going through, because this whole world was so opaque to me. I had a bunch of conversations over those five years, eventually got fixated on this really, at the time, small set of problems, and really tried to bring at the time just an ounce of technology into the space, helping mental health clinicians to utilize data in different ways at the point of care, and it's snowballed ever since. It was part-time for me for a while. Eventually, it got to the point where I couldn't spend any waking hour thinking about anything else, and that's when I made the leap to go all the time. Well, I'm incredibly sorry to hear about your friend, but that's such an incredible backstory, and an incredible way to take something awful and turn it into something good. So, that's one of the coolest founding stories that I've heard so far on the podcast. Let's talk about the early days. So, the first 90 days after he launched, what were those 90 days like? That was quiet. So, yeah, I mean, for us, we had some early... Before we raised our first round, it was just me, and I'm fortunate in that I was able to use my skills to sort of design and build a good enough version of our platform to go and put it in front of some early people, therapists, psychiatrists, clinicians, sort of what we thought were going to be and ended up to be our customer and our users. And so, we were able to get a couple of early commitments, a couple of people to sign some contracts and pay us some money to start using the product, because we're really, really, really simple products at the time. That plus a good story and a good day allowed me to go and raise small three-seat rounds. And so, the first 90 days were really a combination of building that product, designing that product, getting it in front of customers and iterating on that feedback loop combined with sort of taking that validation and parlaying it to go and raise a little bit of capital to go and hire, I think it was two engineers at the time, maybe one engineer at the time, to allow me to go spend more time with customers, share that information back with this engineer who could go and do some of the building, and he was a much better engineer than I was. So, the first 90 days were sort of really entrenched in designing building, talking to customers, and then had various points raising them. At what point did it start to feel like things were really working? Was it within that period or close to that period? Was it three years later? How long did it take? Yeah, we've been on a journey. Honestly, I'd say like probably like three or four months ago, is when I really started to feel like things were working. So, we're five years in. And we've had almost three different versions of Blueprint in those five years. None of them would really constitute as full pivots. You could maybe call them like half pivots or shifts in our strategy in various ways. But our mission and sort of the problems that we've been solving has sort of remained constant. How we solve that problem has changed a little bit over the years. So, yeah, I would say probably like three to four months ago, we've launched this new product, which has really become sort of our centerpiece and our entry point into our platform for now 95% of people signing up. And we've seen pretty incredible growth over the last three or four months. And so, I think it's really hard to define product market fit. And there's a bunch of interesting articles on this on the internet. But you never really know until you have it. And you still don't really fully know if you have it. And I feel like it can escape you pretty quickly too. But now it feels like people are pulling the product out of us. And we're just honestly trying to keep up with the demand we're seeing versus trying to generate demand for the first four and a half years. And so, yeah, it's a February 1st when we launched that product. And since then, it's really felt like things have taken a whole new shape. A video I was watching a while back on product market fit, they described it as people think that finding product market fit is like just really a nice feeling when it happens. But they described it as you get like sucked into a hole. I believe it was the analogy that you use. They said it's painful and stressful and it's hard and obviously there's good things happening. But it's not a light moment for a company when that does start to actually happen. Yeah, 100%. It's not light, but I will say myself and many of the folks on our team, I think we're motivated by building something that people really, really love. And really, really see value in. And I think it gives us energy. So it is like the days are longer. The work is in many ways more stressful in some ways less stressful, because I think you feel like you've sort of struck gold in a way, but more stressful in that there's more things flying at you in every direction, every hour of the day. But you sort of get this energy along the way of like for us, we get all these sort of testimonial videos and we talk to customers and our value proposition is just so much more obvious now and we hear it and feel it every single day much more frequently. And so it's dual sided. It's definitely heavier in every way. But you sort of get this energy picking up on a more freaking basis too, which I think is critical. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now, back to today's episode. And what do you think you got right on this product launch to have it be so successful? Yeah, a lot of founders I speak to just from my own personal experience. It's not that common that you have a massive success with a product in the first release of it. What did you get right? I think like thematically and something we still do today, but thematically the way that we got to where we are today is just continuing to talk to customers, users, and let them guide us. We have some like grandiose vision, great. And that very much aligns with where we think customers want to go, but sort of the short and medium-term tactical moves. I think we've really leaned into our customers. So specifically, like we launched our first product was a measurement-based care tool, it's called. And it basically lets clinicians capture data from their patients, mental health clinicians capture data from their patients in between sessions and before sessions, and then utilize that data in various ways during a session at the moment of care. So that was sort of our initial foray. About 18 months ago, we launched just a feature that turned the data we were capturing, these questionnaires about symptoms, and turned it into what we call documentation snippets. It was a very simple feature. It basically converted a data point into a narrative three to four sentence description. But the key was now, this tool was not only being used to help clinicians deliver great care, but also save them time on this thing they had to do, which was document their progress and document their sessions. And so we launched that feature, we started to look at the data. And we saw that people who adopted this feature that was sort of like kind of hidden in the experience. But once they adopted it, there were two to three times I was engaged. And every way we looked at it, stickiness, I'm on site, attention, and sort of everything. But to get to that point, you had to like crawl through six different holes and know the secret passcode to all these different things. And fundamentally, like people were signing up for that purpose. But to get there, they had to go and buy into this whole other concept. And so the launch from three or four months ago was sort of switching the order of this and letting people sign up for Blueprint so they could actually get that benefit right up front. And it was all out of that insight, which came from this really small feature and came from just digging into the data and then talking to people who were using it and really understanding the different pieces. So what about investor appetite for mental health tech? So how have you seen that change since founding in 2019? Yeah, it's changed a lot. I mean, in 2019, there was some appetite. I had been sort of exploring in the space even a couple years prior. I was sort of tinkering it. It was even more nascent then. There's definitely been a lot more dollars that have come into the space. What's interesting is a majority of the dollars have really gone towards helping more people access care. Like there's been a few different waves of this, but there's been like a telehealth wave and there's a tech-enabled services wave and sort of every wave that's come within at least mental health specifically has been at least till now sort of really been focused on better access. And there's different angles that people have taken to this, but more access for more people, which is great. Our thesis from the beginning has sort of always been different in that we're not really going after the access problem. Not that it's not a problem, but our fundamental belief is that access to care is critical, but ultimately meaningless if the underlying care itself is not effective, not high quality. And so we've sort of focused on that second part, which if you get right, also solve some of the supply and demand and access problems. We started to sort of hear that when we were raising our last round about 12 months ago, our Series A, that was the first time that people started saying that back to me, which was pretty cool because I had been saying that for three, four years up until that point. So it feels like we're in this new era where people are focusing not just on access, but also on quality. The dollars have definitely continued to flow and sort of track. I think it's now like a key part of the ecosystem, which is great. And there's been some companies that have done well, some companies that have raised a lot of money and maybe not done so well, which I think is typical, but yeah, it's definitely growing. And I think more eyeballs on this basis is good. More eyeballs and more dollars is ultimately good, I think. Yeah, I think it's good to have money going into this and not the next generation of Pinterest or Twitter or whatever social network. This is stuff that the world really needs. So that makes me happy to hear that investors are having more and more interest in this. Definitely. Let's talk a little bit about the marketing strategy, the marketing philosophy and just the general approach. What does that look like today? Yeah, it's funny because I'd say for like many years, we were really trying to go and create this category. And it was a different category than sort of the category that we've now emerged into. It's funny. I think we were so fixated and focused on using the word, trying to create the category that it almost felt like we were climbing uphill without real product market fit. Now that we have product market fit, it feels like that category is being created. And it's actually a good thing. We're not the only ones pushing that category forward. We have competitors, which actually is a really good thing. Of course, we want to beat those competitors, but the education of the market is happening sort of with or without us, which we didn't have as much in sort of the measurement based care space. We still operate in that space, but now we've sort of unlocked this new bigger arena around AI note taking. Our marketing right now is really focused on the practitioner. So our entire go to market strategy is focused on the practitioner, meaning we market directly to therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists. What's interesting about that is about 75% of therapists are individual practitioners. They run their own practice, or maybe they're a 1099 contractor at a few different organizations, but they're sort of an entity of one. And so it's almost like consumer play. We call it prosumer sometimes internally. The other interesting part is the remaining 25% work as part of groups, mostly smaller groups, but some larger and some 100 or 1000 person companies are even larger. And what's interesting is by marketing to the practitioner, we're also able to reach those organizations in a bottom-up way. So we've stayed really practitioner focused, both in our product and in our go to market strategy and sort of how we message everything. And so that's sort of been our focus and remains our focus. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. How do you reach therapists? Is there like a dedicated media platform that they like to consume? Or where do you find these people? Yeah, I mean, for us right now, it's a lot of content. We do a lot of stuff on social. We do a lot of stuff on search. It's a lot of digital right now. I would say therapists are also preachers of their colleagues, meaning like they really value the referral and the networks of other therapists that they're part of the communities. And so we're starting to lean a lot more into that, supporting other people's communities that they've already built and starting to build a community of our own. One of the things we do on some of our like demo calls now, because we've had volume grow so much, we actually started having these like office hour demos, where we have five to 10 therapists who join a call together with one group and representative. And we can sort of see this like community aspects happen in real time. It's really, really cool. A therapist might ask a question about the product, another therapist, maybe they've already started a trial and they'll actually answer the question. And so the best calls are when we sort of just get out of the way and we elevate the therapist who's using the product and we let them shine. And so a lot of our marketing strategy is how do we elevate therapists? How do we make therapists sort of super therapists? And how do we enable them to deliver great care and then showcase the great care that they're delivering is sort of core in our strategy? Do you talk to a little bit there about the category creation efforts? A few answers ago, was that initial category therapist enablement? Or what was that category that you were trying to initially create? It was more measurement based care. And so a therapist's enablement is like sort of a reframing, sort of an expansion of that. I think with measurement based care, we had this debate internally for a long time. Measurement based care is a term we did not invent, but it's a term people know. And you think about, I think defining a category, like naming is really important. And so for years, we sort of just went with measurement based care because we figured, oh, at least people know about it, right? But as we went further and further and we realized they know about it, but a lot of the practitioners have a connotation, typically a negative connotation around measurement based care. Maybe they've been introduced to it in the past and it was this thing that their manager or their company sort of forced on them in a mandated way. It actually, the way it was implemented, it actually wasn't useful to them. It was just more work. And yeah, maybe it was beneficial to the company for whatever purpose, but didn't actually add value to them. And so then they came to Blueprint. Blueprint was really designed to make measurement based care useful and actionable to clinicians and to their patients, but they had this bad taste in their mouth. And so the therapist's enablement sort of rebranding of the category we play in is both an update on that, but also an expansion of the product suite. So the other thing we realized is clinicians, therapists are super busy. And so our new product, which is called scribe, what it does. And this is where most clinicians now start with Blueprint. It saves them about five to 10 hours per week by automating their documentation. And then we sort of bring back the measurement based care product and it's reframed in terms of what it's called. But now they have five to 10 hours to explore this new thing. And so we save them the time first and then we show them this different and hopefully better way to deliver care going forward. So I think that shifting all the way up to the name is really important. Talk to us about the decision to move towards that new term. Was that a hard decision to make? Well, we knew we needed a new term. I think we sort of got forced into it because we were building this new product and we had a lot of confidence in the new product because we started building the product maybe a year ago and we started rolling out an alpha nine months ago. And the feedback for people using the product, it was so clear and obvious. And so then the mission just sort of became how do we build this MVP and get it out to people and just sort of continue this iterative feedback loop of more people, more feedback, more people, more feedback. And so once we had that, we knew we needed a different or new term because what we were doing now was bigger than just measurement based care. And so I think we sort of had that as a forcing function, which enabled us to step back and think about what we were doing in a more holistic sense. Coming up with the term was still challenging, but I think once we landed on it, it clicked. It sort of slid into place pretty quickly. But yeah, and also I would say like the naming and marketing of our product and our platform and all these things, the category is also still a continuous work in progress. I love therapist enablement. It's just crystal clear of what it does. Sometimes when I hear new categories, if you hear it and you still just walk away wondering like, okay, well, what the hell does the company do? That's super, super clear. I think that's really well done. Are you starting to see competition use that term yet? Not yet, not yet. Most of our competition right now, they do a part of what we do, right? And so I'm sure that this will come and I think it'll be a really important day for the category. But right now, we have competitors who just do measurement based care. We have competitors who just do AI note taking or just do digital homework. And so the value in Blueprint today is we do feel like we stack up really well as a point solution to any of those things. But the value really is, hey, this is really going to be like the co-pilot for a therapist in the full spectrum. And it does more than just this one individual specific thing. And these pieces when they are connected together work better than any piece individually, right? They sort of feed off of each other and intertwine with each other. But no, no direct competitors, at least using that term quite yet, hopefully soon. In the journey so far, what would you say has been the lowest point that you reached and how do you navigate? How do you work through that point? It's hard to pick a lowest point. I mean, I think I would say, but it's just the culmination of many highs and many lows. One day we're signing a customer, the other day a launch goes wrong. One day we're raising around a funding. The next day a customer backs out of a renewal, right? It's sort of this like constant inevitable roller coaster that I think goes with starting any company and building anything. I can't think of one specific low point, but I think it's just this emotional roller coaster that I spend a lot of time trying to stay in the middle, which means not getting too high on the highs and also not getting too low on the lows. And that's my number one piece of advice for anyone who comes to me asking for advice starting a company is that because there's just so many, both highs and lows. And sometimes you get 10 lows and you really need to win. And sometimes you're on a winning high. And at least for me, I'm always looking around the corner because it feels like it's too good to be true. So you can never truly enjoy the highs and equally you have to also never get too fixated on the lows to sort of bounce out. And in this post product market world for you, what's an average day look like for you right now? Oh, it really varies. We put on my calendar to even remind myself pretty much every day is some combination of internal meetings or focus on our product. So where are we going? What are we building? What are we releasing? Sort of depending on the life cycle, any given feature product, improvement, etc. So spending time on our product, I would say also the second pillar is probably spending time with our customers and that for me, it's both spending time with individual clinicians. I actually still host some of our, where we are now playing office hours. They used to call them console calls, which is either one on one or small group settings of introducing clinicians to our product. And we have a couple other people on our team who do it, but I like to stay in the mix because it's a really cool way to be on the front lines and talk to customers and hear their feedback directly. And then the third piece is also sort of talking to like the organizations, right? So we're really practitioner focused, but we think by being practitioner focused, there's a lot of opportunity for us to partner with more enterprise-esque organizations, companies who employ 100 therapists or 1000 therapists or 10,000 therapists. And so we're starting to have more and more of those conversations as well. Final question for you. Let's zoom out three to five years into the future. What's the big picture vision look like here? Yeah, I think for the first time therapists have software that is A, designed specifically for them and B, designed in a way that really gives them superpowers. I think therapists have an incredibly difficult job in many ways. They already are superheroes, but historically, they really haven't had great tools and technology and software that's been designed for them, let alone designs to help them do great work. And I feel like the world I come from, which is like this tech world, we have amazing new tools every single day that are coming out and we have, it's sort of like the best time ever to go and build a company given all the tools that are out there to help make that process easy. But therapists have sort of gotten left behind in this revolution of technology and tools. And so I really feel like three to five years out and sort of the journey we're trying to enable is they're no longer left behind and they have amazing tools and technology that ultimately allows them to deliver amazing high quality care and do so really efficiently. Nice thing. Love the vision. All right, Danny, we're up on time, so we'll have to wrap. Where should founders go if they want to follow along with your journey as you build an execute and make this vision happen? Yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn, I'm an occasional poster, and then the Blueprint website and our blog, blueprint-health.com. Amazing. Danny, thanks so much. Thanks, Brad. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontline's Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode. [Music]
