Taarush Goyal
1· Introduction∘ Who am I?, and why this project?∘ Timeline, role, and constraints
2· Research∘ Objectives∘ Findings
3· The journey of finding a supervisor in India∘ Summarising the journey map
6· Why would supervisors and mentors even join?
I will give you 2 phrases and I want you to paint a picture in your head
Now, I am assuming the vast majority of us are going to paint 2 kinds of picture:
Who’s going to be right about this prediction?, well, I wish its the later, but we would have to see, however the present dictates a fact that I want you to be aware of:
There’s been a 50% increase in the number of students enrolling in psychology courses in our country
That is a beautiful number. Careers in psychology are estimated to grow at an average of 14% on year, with increasing awareness and acceptance of mental ailments, the field of psychology is bound to grow.
My intention with this project is therefore to cater to the wishes, needs, and requirements this industry has and contribute it in its fight against the mental health epidemic.
I am the 50%, I am someone who quit engineering and made a switch to psychology in hopes of understanding myself and others around me, and to cater to what people needed in order to feel better and thrive in their lives.
I did my bachelors from SD College, Chandigarh, where for the last 2 years of my undergrad, I was elected to represent and lead the department of psychology and the psychology club. This enabled me to have conversations with students and teachers about the state of affairs of psychology and psychotherapy in India, allowing me to understand its various pain points that need to be addressed, one of my core motivating questions being:
How can India stand up if it fails to even get out of the bed?
This project is my conceptual understanding of the needs and requirements of therapists, which was also the core target audience of this project.
The research for this project involved reading articles and papers, and talking to multiple people at various points of time.
Although I got to know about the various interesting facets of Psychotherapy and how it is practiced in the real world, staying consistent with my core objectives, here is what I found:
All this research brings us to the following problem statement
How might we enable aspiring young therapists in India to have better access to mentorship and supervision services so that they can grow in their practice?
Interestingly enough, there were no competitors in the market for this kind of a service, and that makes sense cause its not a profitable market to address in the first place, but that is not stopping me from building it, after all this is a passion project, and has potential to achieve the first mover advantage.
What this service intends to be is an online space where therapists and supervisors can come together and help each other out. Here you can:
This is an important question to ask, why solve for a problem that has no validity in the first place?
However the chicken and egg dilemma here is without a large number of MAU, mentors and supervisors won’t be interested to come and on the other hand, without good supervisors and mentors, users won’t come to this service.
This dilemma will eventually be solved by the virtue of future design and marketing, but at the present level, the service has been designed to massage the ego and vanity of supervisors by the exhibition of virtue signals like:
In the future the app could even integrate AI services which would allow mentors and supervisors to generate content out of the sessions that they conduct, thereby enhancing their content marketing game.
I wish I could write everything about my process and my learnings, but I have to respect the time and attention of the reader, however if you are interested you can book a discovery call with me and discuss this further anytime.
I don’t want this passion for therapy, for this conversation to end right here and would love to further learn (and/or unlearn) about this space more.
Thank you for your time…