We made the same mistake our product was meant to fix

Think of a great day that ends with a cat peeing on your bed. A few days later, what do you remember about that day? The cat. One strong moment pushes out everything else. That simple idea was behind Mentegram, a mental health startup I co-founded. What I didn’t expect was that we would fall for the same thing ourselves, with our own launch. Here is the lesson it taught me about product launches.

Sign-ups are not users

The problem we wanted to solve was real. People in therapy see their therapist every week or two, and in between, they forget how those weeks actually went. Therapists knew it. Many gave clients paper mood charts or asked them to keep a journal, and the clients didn’t do it properly. So we made a simple app where patients could track their mood and add a note, and a dashboard where therapists could see the progress. When we launched, the conversion rates on our website were pretty amazing. Therapists signed up, and we were very excited. That was our cat: one bright moment that was easy to remember. The quiet part came later, when we looked at who was actually using the product. Most of those therapists never came back.

Ask about problems, not features

Our numbers could tell us what happened, but not why. People who sign up and leave usually have one of a few reasons. They don’t understand how to use the product, they don’t like how it looks, or they expected something else. On a chart, those look exactly the same, so we asked our users. Most of those who left never replied. They had already moved on. But the ones who stayed taught us more than anyone else. We didn’t ask them which features they wanted. We asked about their problems and their goals. That’s how we learned that therapists had to collect different information depending on each patient’s condition. So we added custom questionnaires, then a library of ready-made ones, and more. Almost every feature we added came from those conversations.

Launch is where the learning starts

Talking to customers also told us what we didn’t want to hear. Therapists didn’t consider the problem that big, and they weren’t very tech-savvy. Our growth didn’t go as we planned. But it also pointed us to a group that felt the problem more: psychiatrists, who had a stronger need to track and report outcomes. That made them a better fit. A better fit, but not the answer. Mentegram never grew past break-even. What I took from it is that launch day doesn’t prove much. The bright numbers are the cat. The real story is in the weeks after, and the people who stay are the ones who can tell it to you.

What to do

Include the people who left, even if most of them won’t reply. A short email costs you little. And before you launch, decide what real use looks like, so you know who actually stayed. For us, it was a patient tracking their mood and a therapist checking the progress, not a new account.