Investment in digital youth mental health is on the rise. And for good reason: more than 21% of young Americans battle a mental or behavioral health disorder.
But as more companies enter the space, it’s important to know which ones are truly making a difference in youth. During a Tuesday panel discussion at the Behavioral Health Tech conference in Phoenix, four investors shared what they look for from digital youth mental health companies and how they should be measuring their impact.
According to David Ball, senior director of SecondMuse’s Human Well-being Group, it’s important to get feedback from young people. SecondMuse runs an accelerator program called Headstream that is focused on youth mental health, as well as the Youth Collective, in which youth co-design digital products.
“We bring young people into the process of selecting the entrepreneurs for our accelerator program,” he said. “Through that process, they have agency to make the selections with our team and with other professional advisors who can look at different aspects. If we hear during that process that they call an innovation a scam or something that they could just go straight to YouTube for, we’re gonna pass on that. Because ultimately, we’re looking for uptake and adherence to drive the type of scale that’s gonna have the impact it needs.”
Ball added that it’s necessary for companies to invest in measuring their impact because it’s “good for business.”
Another investor — John Bailey, strategic advisor at Fiore Ventures — noted that the firm understands that at certain stages of companies, it’s going to be difficult to show impact. However, it’s important to have “at the top of your mind how you’re gonna measure that,” he said.
“The other thing is, especially in the digital world, it just gives you such new, rich data that can be used to help provide impact and other types of outcome measures,” Bailey said. “And we’re seeing this in some of our great portfolio companies, with Little Otter, with BeMe. When you have hundreds and thousands of different sessions and millions of different data points, it unlocks the different ways of telling stories and telling impact and showing outcomes that you just don’t get through other sorts of survey measurements.”
Fiore Ventures is also using its philanthropic arm to fund studies and randomized controlled trials, since those are expensive and challenging for a lot of entrepreneurs to conduct, Bailey added.
In addition, companies in the space need to recognize that mental health is not a “single one and done thing,” according to Kelsey Noonan, director of program strategy at Pivotal Ventures.
“Young people will move in and out of different states of well-being over the courses of adolescence. … I think that that’s a very different reality than in a lot of physical health interventions, in that we can’t just look for an outcome which is a cure, a final finish of a treatment or therapy,” she said. “But rather, are we seeing young people use these services and then stay with those services over time? Are those young people and their families finding an empathy match or a lived experience match in the provision of services?”
Efficacy and impact can also be defined in different ways for different solutions, according to Erin Sietstra, head of investments at Hopelab. Some companies will use well-known clinical assessments, while more consumer-focused companies may just be asking people if they “feel directionally better.”
“I think that’s okay if that’s what your solution is designed to do,” she said. “We’re not expecting, at a seed stage, for a company to necessarily have done a randomized controlled trial yet. Hopefully someone in this room will fund you to do that. But I think as investors, what we’re really trying to understand is, is there reason to believe that this can affect well-being outcomes? Is there any early data to suggest that it actually does?”
Sietstra added that ultimately investors are trying to understand if something works and if it’s something that people will pay for.
“When you can have those two together, then we would say that’s evidence of product market fit, and therefore potential for impact at scale,” she said.
Photo: Mykyta Dolmatov, Getty Images
