In Conversation With Ariba Khan

1. How did you come up with the idea of launching the app?

Ans. Both Piyush and I (Ariba) (Co-founder & CTO), come with a decade of experience in the wellness industry. Piyush’s stress started talking over during Covid-19 and he just couldn’t seem to find any solution to this. After a long chat with me, one friend trying to make the other feel better through his challenges led to the orientation of The Friend’s Therapy. That alongside, seeing the stress levels rise to unprecedented levels, particularly during the pandemic, urged us to build India’s largest smart Mental Health & Wellness Ecosystem – jumpingMinds.

The experience of building jumpingMinds has been enthralling and humbling at the same time. We launched the jM mobile app in 2021 as the user-friendly Go-To-Feel Better platform and have been receiving overwhelming love from users and industry giants alike.

2. What are the major challenges you faced in this journey so far?

Ans. Our journey at jumpingMinds has been full of crucial learnings, the key being addressing the social stigma and raising awareness on how Mental Health is a part of our everyday lives and making it “Cool”. Along with that, hiring and retaining good talent, delivering quality results to users with limited resources, and keeping the spirits high during the lows are few of the challenges that we faced while building jM.

3. What is so unique about this start-up?

Ans. What differentiates us is that, unlike most players who are going to therapy first, jumpingMinds adopts a user-first approach to make wellness easy, accessible, and fun along with a heavy focus on advanced technologies including A/ML and Big Data, to provide a safe, non-judgement and delightful experience to our users within seconds. We believe that to sustainably solve issues related to the Mental Health & Wellness Industry, any solution will have to address the two key industry pain points – low user retention and scaling challenges, given the low supply of Mental health professionals. jumpingMinds community approach or ‘The Friends Therapy’ combined with Deep Technology not only solves for user retention by making the entire experience relatable and effortless but also ensures end-to-end security and scalability while providing a delightful experience to users within minutes. 70% + users feel better after a single conversation on the jM app.

4. How does this app work? If you could elaborate on this.

Ans. jumpingMinds is a Deep Tech Mental Health app. A very easy, breezy, Go-to-feel better platform to experience. jumpingMinds is a user-first, anonymous, safe space with ‘The Friends therapy’ as the primary offering. It is an empathetic Peer to Peer community to not only vent but has meaningful conversations with individuals smartly matched to users’ profiles. jumpingMinds gives the space to talk and share your feelings anonymously & with no judgements.

5. What is the role of AI in Mental health?

Ans. AI in the mental health eco-system could be a game-changer. Using this technology, professionals could sieve through patient charts that include them behaviour, pattern, history, or any such insightful data that can help them make better decisions. Even though Mental Health still carries a lot of stigmas around it, and many people struggle to share their thoughts, and express their emotions or feelings directly, Mental Health chatbots offer an opportunity for those who are too inhibited and encourage them to take the first step towards self-care.

6. Do we get any Mental Health experts to talk on this platform?

Ans. Yes absolutely. It is important that experts guide our users and help answer their questions. We generally conduct these sessions on the inspire section of our platform. On a weekly basis we conduct our “Ask Me Anything” (AMA’s) with the audience. These experts not just help with the response but also suggest ways our users can practice towards bettering their Mental health.

7. How many founding members are there? Please share the details.

Ans. Ariba Khan, Founder & CEO: Top 25 Women Entrepreneurs, 2022 by Entrepreneur India. IIT Roorkee, IIM Bangalore alumni. Piyush Gupta, Founder & CTO: CTO of the year, 2022 by Indian Achievers Forum. Built IPL’s social chat feed for 50 Mn+ concurrent users IIT Roorkee alumni. The founders know each other from IIT Roorkee and bring over a decade of extensive Health tech and Consumer tech to transform the global Mental Health & Wellness industry for long-lasting value creation.

8. What does the future look like?

Ans. The Mental Health industry is a blue ocean in making with huge untapped potential and is poised to grow rapidly particularly in the APAC region, primarily India. Furthermore, as Wellness & Happiness becomes the new non-negotiable for the younger population, the 18-45 years age segment is expected to grow the fastest. With increased government boost to increase awareness, it’s crucial to make Mental Health & Wellness easy and accessible for everyone. Jumping Minds’ vision is to be the Largest Community-led Global Mental Health & Wellness Ecosystem and to spread over #OneBillionSmiles! And I am glad to say that in just a year, Jumping Minds has been able to create a tremendous positive impact in the country by touching 60 Mn+ lives and spreading over 15 Mn+ smiles. Going forward, we plan to grow the Jumping Minds community aggressively and expand internationally primarily to the US market facilitated by a smarter and safer deep tech platform. The focus on Mental Health in Union Budget 2022 is a welcoming move and aligns with our approach as well as our growth plans.