I spent 18 months building a mental health app. Here's the honest version.
I want to share what I built and the real story behind it — because most "I built
this" posts skip the part where you question everything.
The problem I kept running into:
Every mental health app I tried felt like it was designed for someone who already
had their shit together. Calm is for people who meditate. BetterHelp puts you in
a room with a stranger on day one. The gap between "I'm struggling but not in
crisis" and "I'm ready to talk to a therapist" is enormous — and nothing lived there.
What I built:
HeadStrong is a mental health platform built around a 6-step progression:
Anonymous peer community — vent to strangers, no judgment, no name
Cold AI support — Liam or Ariel (two AI personas) for 2am conversations
Warm AI + assessment — Resilience Baseline, Shift Check-in, AI remembers history
Pro AI with memory — RAG-backed, knows your patterns over weeks and months
Therapist webinars — group format, lower barrier than 1:1
Warm handoff — when you're ready, your AI history transfers to a real therapist
The idea: meet people where they are, not where the app wants them to be.
What surprised me:
Getting the AI tone right took 6x longer than expected. Liam is calm/analytical.
Ariel is warm/empathetic. Which voice at 2am vs. during a structured check-in was
unexpectedly hard to figure out.
Where it is now:
iOS beta. Zero users. Zero revenue. That's the honest version.
Looking for:
- Feedback on the 6-step model — does this resonate with how people engage with mental health support?
- Anyone who's built in this space and has opinions
- Early users willing to poke at it and tell me what's broken
Happy to answer anything — the messy stuff too.