Hi friend,
It’s hard to develop a defensible mental health business.
Many solutions are commoditised. Network effects, scale economies and switching cost are rare.
One of the few ways you can develop defensibility is through scientific credibility. The businesses with credibility close deals faster and raise more capital. And as they do this, they gain the resources and reach that allow them to develop more evidence and more credibility. Their defensibility compounds.
This asset of credibility is built by generating evidence that holds up under scrutiny.
When you can make defensible assertions about what your product does, you will win over stakeholders and close deals. If you can then build a collection of defensible evidence, your scientific credibility is elevated to a strategic asset. You become known as a business that can be trusted to deliver on what you put forward. And that brings success, especially in a market that is increasingly scrutinising solutions.
But when your evidence isn’t defensible, stakeholders poke holes and conversations quickly grind to a halt. It’s a horrible feeling to be sitting in a conference room and watch a deal die as you’re asked to defend a position you knew was shaky. When you find yourself in this situation, it’s already too late.
In this Hemingway Guide, Jen Huberty PhD joins us to provide a framework for building scientific credibility as a mental health business. Jen has spent over twenty years in both academic research and commercial digital health. She was Head of Science at Calm and has advised several of the world’s leading digital health businesses.
Use this framework to strengthen your evidence, close more deals and develop scientific credibility as a strategic asset.
Key Takeaways
Scientific credibility is a company's ability to defend its evidence with structured, stage-appropriate support that withstands stakeholder scrutiny.
It primarily operates at an assertion level — your ability to defend specific assertions.
Done repeatedly and with discipline, it can become a strategic asset
Scientific credibility requires four interdependent foundations: Problem, Population, Solution, and Outcomes. Weakness in any area undermines the entire structure.
You can use these four foundations to conduct a gap analysis before stakeholders expose weaknesses. Investors, enterprise buyers, and partners will find the holes eventually.
You should prioritise the assertions you want to make defensible by understanding which are critical to your near-term business goals.
Strong outcome data alone leaves critical questions unanswered: "Works for whom?" "Why does this problem matter?" "Is your solution what's creating these results?”
Different stakeholders probe different foundations; balanced evidence matters more than deep evidence in just one area.
Evidence expectations evolve with stage of your business. What's appropriate at pre-seed differs significantly from what's expected at Series A or enterprise scale. The goal is not to reach RCT-level rigor, it's to have the right evidence for the decisions your stakeholders are making right now.
Founders who build complete evidence before competitors gain a structural advantage.
Building Scientific Credibility
Scientific credibility is a company's ability to defend its evidence with structured, stage-appropriate support that withstands stakeholder scrutiny. It is not defined by publications or methodological complexity; it is defined by whether your evidence holds up when the people making buying, funding, or partnership decisions push back on it.
It operates at two levels:
The assertion level. Everything a company puts forward about the problem it solves, the population it serves, how its solution works, and what outcomes it produces should be defensible across the four foundations.
The company level. Credibility at the company level is the cumulative result of scientific discipline applied consistently over time.
In this Guide we provide a framework for developing credibility in your assertions. You can use it to stress-test specific positions (before stakeholders do). Do this consistently and with discipline and the company-level asset will follow.
