#14 Tacklit; The business transforming care delivery that you've never heard of

In a first-floor unit above a locksmiths in St. Kilda, Australia, there’s a company quietly transforming mental healthcare delivery… and you’ve probably never heard of them. 

For the last four years, Tacklit has been building a care delivery platform for mental health providers that is now used by more than 3,000 clinicians and over 180,000 patients across the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East.

All without spending a dollar on marketing…

They’ve got a super small team, but have managed to build incredibly impressive software that is changing how providers manage their practices, how clinicians deliver treatment and how patients experience care.

And they’re not doing it all by the book either. 

In this week’s edition of The Hemingway Report, I tell the story of Tacklit, exploring;

• How they found product market fit by shifting their market (not their product)

• How they’ve grown to serve over 3,000 clinicians and 180,000 patients without spending a dollar on marketing

• What their products actually do and how they deliver value to providers, clinicians and patients

• What they are doing to address the supply/demand imbalance

• How their partnership philosophy drives ROI for providers and creates sticky customers

• The 10x product team they’ve built and why it’s a huge strategic advantage

• And why they have the potential to become a genuine mental health platform (and what that even means)

Let’s get into it…

Over the last few months I’ve gotten to know the Tacklit team.

In June, I sat down with them in their St. Kilda office. Isar Mazer (Chairman) and Chris Griffiths (CEO) told me all about their journey, what they’re up to now and what they see for the future.

And I knew I had to write about them because it was clear they are one of the most interesting businesses in mental health that most people haven’t heard of.

At least, not yet!

Let’s set the scene a bit. 

The mental health industry is full of challenges. But a few of these problems are more fundamental than others. 

First, there is a massive treatment supply-demand gap (I explored this in my article on Limbic a few weeks back). Our main methods of treatment (talk therapy) rely on the labour of highly skilled (and highly expensive) professionals. And unfortunately, there’s not enough of them to meet the demand for care. While this problem exists, there will always be patients not getting the care they need. 

The efficacy of these treatments also has a lot of room to improve. Even the most effective treatments far from guarantee remittance of mental illness. So for the people who are getting care, there is no guarantee that they will get better. 

Another challenge within mental health is that most disorders are chronic in nature. Chronic conditions require ongoing treatment and multidisciplinary teams, all coordinating around a patient’s care. This gets very complex very fast. And when stuff gets complex, it starts to fail.

Three hairy problems that are holding us back from delivering the improvement we all desire in mental health outcomes.

And yet, in the face of these challenges there is a special bunch of people doing everything they can to hold a line in the sand against an onslaught of demand. Under-resourced and over-worked, mental health professionals get up every day and bravely help as many people as they can.

They are genuinely heroes.

But if you saw the tools these professionals use to do their jobs, you’d be shocked. Actually, if you work in the industry, maybe you wouldn’t be shocked, and perhaps that’s an even bigger issue, that we now just accept many of the shitty, inefficient systems that healthcare teams have to use…

It’s an absolute mess of email, physical forms, notes, excel files, Zoom and an endless list of point solutions that don’t talk to each other. This creates massive administration burdens, wastes time, impacts treatment outcomes and harms both the patient and clinician experience.  

If we are to create a system where providers can deliver more scalable, effective and affordable care, we need to get rid of this spaghetti junction. 

We need systems and technology that empower providers. It should save them time, improve the supply-demand gap, enhance clinician capabilities, improve patient outcomes and unlock opportunities for new and exciting modes of treatment. 

Sure, there are businesses out there trying to solve this in mental health, from EHRs, to PMSs and other point solutions. Many of them are horizontal businesses, creating software to be used by a wide range of healthcare practices. Many of them are also just build point solutions for one specific problem, like scheduling.  

But Tacklit saw an opportunity to build a product that is (1) focused on the mental health vertical and (2) provides the majority of these solutions under one roof and (3) has an open architecture that allows other point solutions to plug into their platform where appropriate. They saw the opportunity to not just take care of the back-office admin tasks, but to also provide a care delivery system that improves clinician experience and patient outcomes. 

And that is exactly what they’ve been building for the last four years. 

The genesis story

Whenever I hear about a business doing well, I want to know how they got started. Like, what were the super tangible things they did on day one. 

When starting Tacklit, Chris went out and interviewed over 200 psychologists to learn about the problems they were facing. They were initially focused on solo practitioners and noticed that they felt there was big gap in what happened to patients in between their therapy sessions. So Chris and his team started to build software to fill in that gap, allowing patients to complete assigned homework, record notes and complete certain tests in between sessions.

Their early thesis was that the client-patient relationship is at the core of mental healthcare and that the role of technology should be to enhance that relationship.

They continued to build on this thesis, looking at all the elements of that relationship and seeing where they could build tech that would improve it. They stayed close to their customers, and built more and more features, like telehealth offerings, scheduling and referrals.

Finding Product-Market Fit

At this stage of building a business, you’re looking for PMF (product market fit). The elusive three letter acronym that every investor wets themselves over. And there was one insight Tacklit had that allowed them to find it. 

They pivoted to larger providers. 

We often forget, there’s two variables in Product-Market Fit. Product and Market. We usually just focus on the product and how we can make that better. But sometimes, what you need to do is change your market. You can keep the same product, but find a group of customers that fit better with the value your product provides. 

Why were larger providers a better fit for Tacklit?

As the size of a provider increases, so does its complexity. In fact, its complexity increases exponentially. As you add more clinicians, more patients, more locations… the coordination and administrative burden quickly becomes a nightmare.

The core value of Tacklit’s product was in reducing the admin burden of being a mental health provider and effectively managing care delivery.

These larger providers experienced that problem in a more visceral way and also had bigger budgets to pay for solutions.  

Chris and Isar also realised that to genuinely transform mental health care delivery, you need to support larger, scaled services as they are the ones who deliver the majority of care. 

Boom Boom. Hello PMF!

Solving the Spaghetti Junction 

The Tacklit team got their head down to tackle the long list of problems these larger organisations were facing. They saw the spaghetti junction of solutions they were using and knew they had to build something better. So they did.

Problem by problem, they got to the bottom of it and built great tech to solve it. 

The operational fabric of mental healthcare

So let’s fast-forward to today, Tacklit now have two core products, Care OS and Engage.

Care OS:

Care OS is essentially a way better Patient Management System. It does all the basics that a Horizontal PMS like Halaxy will do, but because they are focused on the mental health vertical, Tacklit does it better, offers way more features and has a greater emphasis on quality care delivery. 

Providers use Care OS to run their care teams at scale, managing scheduling, finance, operations and clinical tasks in one platform. It also replaces a bunch of the patient facing tools that the providers would have been using; Tacklit has their own telehealth solution, client portal, scheduling and billing tool. What I really like about this is that they have built “consumer grade” products for patients. As a mental health patient, a lot of the tools you have to interact with feel like they were built in the 90s, so using something that feels like it was built this millennia is a pleasant relief.

This is Tacklit’s flagship product and the one providers tend to adopt first. But Engage is where they start to do some really interesting stuff. 

Engage:

Engage is focused on attracting, engaging (duh) and retaining patients in their journey, in order to improve patient outcomes.

In essence, it’s got a bunch more patient facing features that improve the experience for them. If a patient goes to the website of a provider using Tacklit Engage, their entire experience will be guided by the product. They’ll have a “digital front-door” with a self-referral flow, the ability to search for and select a clinician that fits their needs as well as the ability to see real time availability. When engaged with care, they can also access digital content, tools and programs as assigned by their clinician. 

For patients, this is clearly a better experience compared to having no visibility on who you’re seeing, having to call up the clinic during business hours, dealing with rescheduling over email and not having any contact or support in between sessions. 

For providers, it removes a bunch of admin, saves clinicians time and improves the quality of the care journey. 

These two products combined act as an operational fabric for mental healthcare. 

They allow providers to be more efficient and deliver better care journeys, whilst patients benefit from a much better user experience. Their open architecture also allows other solutions to easily plug into their core platform giving more value to providers and patients (more on that below). 

So what is so interesting about Tacklit?

1. Moving the needle on the supply/demand imbalance

You’re probably sick of me harping on about the supply/demand imbalance in mental healthcare. But until something changes, I’ll probably have to keep talking about it. Some companies claim to be helping to solve that, but very few are actually moving the needle.

Tacklit is the exception. Here’s how.

First, they reduce admin time for clinicians. Again, lots of businesses claim to do this, but Tacklit report an average of 16 hours a month saved by each staff member when they use Tacklit. That’s huge. That is perhaps eight more hours of clinical time that can be spent with patients. Which is also eight more billable hours for the provider increasing the ROI of adopting Tackling (which they already claim to be at 590%).

But there’s another, more interesting way that Tacklit can increase the supply of care.

They are unlocking new workforces. One interesting trend in mental healthcare has been the use of lived experience workers in the provision of care. In many cases it’s been shown to be highly effective and importantly does not increase demands on the core clinical workforce that are so limited in supply (and expensive).

The challenge however is that providing care pathways that include lived experience workers can get complicated for providers. Co-ordination, clinical supervision and risk management can get complex. Tacklit have built products to facilitate all of this, take away the admin burden and manage the risk - it’s actually one of the coolest things their platform does. And whilst the inclusion of lived experience workers in treatment is still relatively rare, Tacklit have customers who are doing it and using their software to manage it.

One way to improve the supply of mental healthcare is to continue to introduce new roles in the workforce. Of course, there must be evidence they actually help improve outcomes. But if the workforce continues to expand in breadth and variety, that will further increase the complexity of managing care pathways.

Now, the supply/demand problem is far from solved. But Tacklit are making inroads in to it and more importantly, have the kind of first-principles, practical approach that will allow them to continue to move the needle wherever they can.

1. Commitment to open architecture

I’ve long searched for a company in mental health with the potential to become a platform. 

In Tacklit, I finally see one that might just do it. 

There are hundreds of “Jobs To Be Done” in mental health. And whilst Tacklit aim to be a one-stop shop for care delivery, it doesn’t mean they actually need to create every single feature, for every single use case themselves. 

Instead, they have the potential to pursue a platform strategy, where they are the core product adopted by providers and used as their care management system. But where they also allow integrations with a bunch of other products and partners which will add value to their end customer. 

For example, self-referral journeys is something that gets a lot of attention. Sure, Tacklit could continue to build this feature themselves, but over time, it’s more likely that a company dedicated to that problem (like Limbic) will develop a better tool. 

Chris and Isar realise this and that’s why they’ve pursued an open architecture strategy with Tacklit - in short, this means that they’ve built their product in a way that makes it easy for other solutions to connect to it.

Customers love it because they get to use the best tools for each job, but without the added complexity of trying to stitch them all together (no, please, we can’t go back to that spaghetti junction!).

Whilst there are a few different flavours of platforms, Tacklit are focused on building a development style platform. This is a platform that enables the creation and integration of third-party applications, services, or data ecosystems. Platforms like this are really successful when they do more than just facilitate integration, but actually make it easier for third parties to build new products in the first place. 

Why do I think we need platforms in mental health?

Writing this newsletter, I see dozens of new startups in mental health every week. From Neurotech headsets to CBT apps to chatbots. And I always wonder, how are all of these going to fit into our mental health system? How are clinicians going to manage these new solutions and fit them into their care plans without becoming overwhelmed? How will administration and billing work for all these new offerings? Having a strong platform at the core of patient care will facilitate this and make it easier for clinicians and providers. 

Imagine this for a moment, a clinician diagnoses a twenty six year old male with Depression. The patient has poor English and a history of childhood trauma. As part of the patient’s treatment plan, the clinician could log into their care platform (e.g., Tacklit), find the most suitable digital intervention for this specific patient (provided by a third party who specialises in that use case with the right language accssibility) and assign it to their patient. The patient can then access this from within their patient portal and the clinician can monitor their progress. Billing and reimbursement can all also be managed in a closed loop.

Wouldn’t that be delightful?

Of course, being a platform is like going to the Olympics… Everyone dreams of it, but only a select few ever make it a reality.

But that’s no reason not to try!

1. A 10x product team

One way of summarising Tacklit’s strategy is to say they want to be the “one-stop shop” for mental health providers. It’s a great strategy that has created many leaders in other industries (Xero for accounting, Shopify for eCommerce, HubSpot for marketing etc.). The strategy is to define all the “jobs to be done” by a certain customer group and then build a product that puts them all under one roof. 

This strategy is easy to define but incredibly difficult to execute. Why? Because it requires you to build a bloody outrageous amount of product. And building that amount of product is difficult and expensive. 

So how have Tacklit already managed to build so many features and combine them in their solution. 

Well, it’s because they’ve got a 10x product team, capable of delivering great products really, really fast. 

You might be envious of a product team like this so what do they have that others don’t? In short, they are ridiculously talented and have worked together for a long time.

Chris led the global product, tech and AI division at SEEK, managing over 150 staff and was also CPO at True, who had 40m MAUs (Monthly Active Users). 

Kent, their Head of Engineering, has known Chris for over a decade and worked with him at Seek. He leads their engineering team which is based in Malaysia - which is also full of folks who have worked with Kent and Chris before. When you combine this level of talent with the efficiency that comes with working together for many years, great things can happen. Chris is also a clearly skilled product leader, using customer feedback to define their roadmap and then executing on it ruthlessly. That part sounds basic, but if you’ve ever worked in a startup, you’ll know how hard it is to actually do. 

This 10X team are following a coherent product strategy and are pumping out features at a ferocious rate. They’ve already solved enough provider problems to be adopted by serious organisations and maintaining this capability is what will allow them to continue to pursue their “one stop shop” strategy, especially as they expand into new markets. 

1. Philosophy of partnership

There’s one phrase I seem to write in every second edition of The Hemingway Report… “Mental Health is hard”.

And that’s no different for Tacklit. 

EHRs, PMS or Care Management Systems are critical parts of a provider’s infrastructure. That means they don’t change them too often. 

But it also comes with a benefit, once you get in, you’re very sticky. The switching costs are just too high to be jumping between solutions every couple of years. 

So when you get a chance to get your software into a provider, you need to make sure to do it right. Tacklit are extremely aware of this and also realise that the only way to deliver real value for their clients is if they get this “installation” phase right. 

But what they do that many other SAAS companies don’t, is invest significant time and resources into doing this. 

A lot of SAAS companies are pure self-serve, but Tacklit offers implementation services to make sure every new client gets configured correctly and that all of their staff successfully adopt this program. Yes, this is a lot of work for Tacklit. Yes, it is low leverage efforts and service revenue with low (if any) margin. But it’s critical to their mission of delivering value to providers and will allow them to generate long term value by having very sticky customers. 

Isar reminded me of a great quote about healthcare;

When I spoke to Chris in Melbourne, he was just back from New Zealand where he had been spending time with a new customer. He has been on the ground with them, working through their specific use cases and making sure Tacklit was set up exactly how they wanted it and that all their practitioners were using it. 

Some VCs hate this kind of stuff because it takes the company away from being a pure-play SAAS provider (and the margins associated with that). But thankfully Chris and Isar realise that just because some set of VCs don’t like the strategy, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. 

Another benefit of this is that it brings them super close to their customers. If you want to know what people really think of your product, sit beside them for days as they try and install and use it - it’s usually a humbling experience. But because Chris and the team are doing this every week, they know exactly what their customers want and can then go and build it for them.

I love the fact that they haven’t conformed to SAAS industry norms and are instead following first principles and their understanding of the market to drive their decision making on how to serve clients. 

I can’t empirically prove it, but I suspect this philosophy of partnership has been key to a lot of their success so far.

Where to from here?

Tacklit have only just scratched the surface. There are tens of thousands of mental health providers and every single one of them needs a Care Management System. 

But competition is hot. I see a few companies going after this space and although Tacklit have a  clear value prop versus horizontally focused products like Halaxy, they still have to do the tough job of converting all those customers from their existing solutions onto Tacklit. 

So what will it take for Tacklit to win?

1. Build a Go To Market machine

So far, Tacklit has spent almost nothing on sales and marketing. They’ve done great to acquire as many customers as they have without this, but if they are to reach the penetration to which they aspire, they will need to develop a Go To Market machine, one that gives them a repeatable method to profitably acquire and retain customers. 

1. Scale Their Philosophy of Partnership

Whilst their deep partnerships with customers has been a huge advantage so far, if they are to reach the next order of magnitude in their growth, they will need to find a way to scale this service. 

This may mean that they maintain the hands on partnerships they already have but find a way to fund it as it grows, or perhaps they outsource it to an implementation agency. Companies like Salesforce, Hubspot and many more have done this. Sure, you lose the ability to sit with your customer, but it makes it more scalable by reducing the demands on your capital. 

1. Avoid Becoming Tacklit Tagliatelle

The second law of thermodynamics states that for a spontaneous process, the entropy, the degree of disorder or randomness, of the universe increases. This is true for technology products also. Nobody sets out to build a messy product, but as time goes on and feature after feature gets added, the system gets more and more confusing until it is unusable and people yearn for the good ole days when they didn’t have to deal with so much crap. As an aside, whenever I get stuck in an infinite 2FA, log in loop, I often wonder if this trend towards software complexity will one day just break everything… But anyway…

Whilst Tacklit have done a good job of solving the spaghetti soup of point solutions, paper forms and disconnected systems, as they continue to pursue their strategy of being a one-stop shop, it will get harder to keep the product usable for customers.  They must focus on emphasising simplicity and ensuring they don’t become another pasta flavoured mess, a Tacklit tagliatelle if you will.  

The potential for Tacklit’s future is huge.

There’s the opportunity to become a leading platform in mental healthcare and to use the data they collect to create more visibility on care outcomes and improve treatments. They also see potential to move outside of mental health in the long term by expanding into other chronic conditions that require complex care plans delivered by multidisciplinary teams. 

In case it’s not clear, I like Tacklit. 

I like that they’ve been under the radar, quietly building a great product and getting it adopted by great mental health providers. I also like Isar and Chris as people. They’re serious operators but also just nice blokes too - my kind of people. They care deeply about the solution but above anything else, they know how to get stuff done. They’re hands on and tackling the real world problems that need to be dealt with to make an impact in mental health.

If you are a mental health provider and want to explore Tacklit for your own organisation, you can reach out to Isar at [email protected].

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve

Founder of The Hemingway Group

P.S. feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn

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