Oasis

Oasis was founded based on the hypothesis that offering a listening ear could alleviate emotional pain and act preventatively against mental health issues.

However, it’s not always possible to get the listening ear you need. By conducting user interviews and reviewing clinical literature, we found that:

1. People don’t always want to appear negative to friends

2. People often don’t want to be a burden or consume community resources, especially for “small” problems

3. Friends aren’t always available

4. Mental health services are often stigmatized and therefore underutilized

We created a pay-as-you-go, on-demand listening service for anyone to talk about anything.

We addressed the above 4 issues in the following ways:

1. With our service, clients speak to strangers

2. Clients pay the listener in exchange for our service

3. We provide 24/7, on-demand service

4. Our service is not framed as related to therapy or the mental healthcare system

Significant responsibilities and achievements included:

• Co-founding a for-profit venture for preventative mental healthcare (active venture from 2015 - 2017)

• Taking service from ideation (e.g. design thinking, competitor analysis) to market (e.g. A/B testing)

• Personally hiring and leading a team of 15+ listeners

• Receiving VC funding through a startup accelerator (Cardinal Ventures)

• Breaking even to profitability within 3 weeks of launch

• Conducting ads analytics and redesigning customer acquisition funnel to increase clickthrough rate to 7% (7x industry average)