How I Achieved Explosive Growth in a Mental Health Startup: What I Learned Building Enthea
A few years ago, if you had told me that my company, Enthea, would grow by 5,300% in a year, I wouldn’t have believed you. Back then, like almost every other startup in its baby years, things were really challenging. I remember clearly at one point in Enthea’s life cycle, we had no cash flow, just one customer, and were running on sheer conviction. But today, some of the country’s largest unions are signing up for our mental health benefits. The journey from a nonprofit that relied on donations to the nation’s leading provider of innovative mental health benefits wasn’t easy - but it taught me lessons every founder needs to know.
Year 1-2: The Nonprofit Grind When we started Enthea, we were a nonprofit with a clear mission: to make innovative and effective mental health treatments safely accessible to those who need it most. It was a gap that personally pained me to see - the lack of accessibility to mental healthcare. During my time working in international development, I witnessed first hand how many people were struggling with their mental health. So, I created Enthea as a non- profit, this way lots of people could get access to the treatment they need. In the first two years, Enthea relied on donations, but we soon found out that funding a mission through goodwill alone was an unsustainable business model. It became clearer that to create real impact, we needed a different approach. Year 3: Survival Mode By year 3, we ran out of donations and only had 1 customer, so we were operating like a volunteer organization. This stage was tricky - it's usually at this point that most businesses have to make extremely hard decisions & many startups fold. We had to ask ourselves - do we keep going? How? The only option was to sacrifice payroll while we figured out how to build something sustainable. It was humbling, exhausting and yet - absolutely necessary.
Year 4: The Pivot We secured funding and restructured. The mission stayed the same but how we executed changed. Maybe you don’t know this, but raising money as a female founder isn’t easy. Women own 40% of businesses but receive less than 2% of venture capital funding. When I first set out to raise $100K, then $500K, I braced myself for the usual uphill battle. But something surprising happened - we ended up raising $3.3 million. I guess for us, the passion and commitment behind Enthea were undeniable. Investors could see that we weren’t just building another benefits platform, we were tackling one of the biggest crises of our time: the mental health epidemic. And perhaps a little bit of lucky wind blew my direction but when you’re deeply mission-driven and relentless in your pursuit, the right opportunities find you. Year 5: Impact Focus We started getting traction. We were relentless. Instead of trying to look at household-name corporations to take on our innovative benefits, we concentrated on areas we could have the most impact - who needed this the most?
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