#18 The Talkspace Turnaround

Hi friends, 

To the few hundred of you that are new here since last week, I want to say Hi!

It’s genuinely great to have you here and see so many smart people who are passionate about mental health innovation. I hope you find this content valuable.

Every week, I write about what’s happening in the mental health startup ecosystem. Sometimes that means a company Deep-Dive, like Flow, Pear or Headspace. Sometimes it’s an investigation into important trends affecting startups, like The Platform-Provider Problem).

The common goal across all my content is to help the people running mental health startups to succeed. That means helping you to scale your impact with patients and building a commercially successful business while you’re at it.

So who am I?

Above anything, I’m someone who cares deeply about improving population mental health. It’s the single most important problem we face as a society and I believe innovation and business must play a vital role in the solution.

Before all this, I used to work at McKinsey but left that to help build two tech unicorns (LetsGetChecked and Wayflyer). I learned what it takes to create and scale a successful startup and now spend my time doing exactly that for mental health businesses - helping them to develop winning business models and build Go-To-Market machines that deliver profitable growth.

And of course, I write about everything I learn.

But enough about me. This is about you.

So feel free to respond to this email. Let me know what you’re working on and any challenges your facing. If I can help out, I will!

So what’s on the docket today?

Well, we’re going to talk about one of the biggest online therapy providers in the world. One of the pioneers of this entire category and also one of the only mental health companies that is publicly traded. A company that was losing $60 million a year in 2022 but has now finally reached profitability. 

That’s right, today, we’re talking about Talkspace!

Two weeks ago, Talkspace released their Q2 earnings and it made for some very interesting reading. I’ve spent the last few weeks understanding Talkspace’s business, analysing their earning reports and reading transcripts from their leadership team. Turns out, they’ve got a pretty interesting story and it’s full of lessons for startups.

In this post, we’ll learn about;

1. The Talkspace turnaround. How they went from losing $60 million a year to turning a profit 18 months later.

2. The Talkspace Strategy. The four priorities of Talkspace and how they’re executing on them

3. Go-To-Market Machine: How Talkspace are growing revenue whilst reducing marketing spend

4. The future of Talkspace: The financial future of Talkspace and what it will take for them to get there.

Let’s get into it.

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