As part of the startup Interview series, we are going to interview Mrs. Olga Pavuka from DeepH, a women-founded mental health startup from Latvia making an app that helps you to become more active and live a healthier and happier life.
Olga, thanks for taking the time to catch up with us. Can you briefly outline the company’s story, what is DeepH’s key goal? Who are the founders and how it all became what it is today?
My friend Jelena (DeepH Co-founder Jelena Gvozdecka) came back from the Burning Man Festival with a lot of ideas and inspiration and invited me to join a spiritual shamanic healing ceremony with a Columbian Shaman she met in the desert. This incredible experience transformed my life, values, health, and mindset completely. It became the starting point for DeepH’s vision: Real values for every human being are: health, happiness, mental wellbeing, inner peace and connection with nature. However, they require inner transformation, body and mind discipline and spiritual insight.
Personal transformation can lead to a collective one through individual actions. Change starts with each and every one of us on a personal level. There is no way to create a better, healthier, happier world on a collective level without personal inner work, so we created the DeepH App, an easy-to-use tool for healing both the individual and the collective.
“The key point is to have a genuine sense of universal responsibility, based on love and compassion, and clear awareness.” – Dalai Lama
The world is a gigantic living organism, which we humans are a big part of. We are all interconnected. We entirely rely and depend on nature to exist. Our health is tied to air, water and food from the earth. This means that we should keep them clean and stop dumping toxic wastes into them. Our health is also improved by exercise and mind control which should be a big part of our lives. Connecting with nature is beneficial for both our physical and mental health. Caring for ourselves and the biosphere would reward humanity many times over with improved health and happiness.
The DeepH App was born as a result of this vision to support people on the path to optimal health, lasting happiness and profound healing.
What kind of products and services does your company offer?
The DeepH App (available for IOS and Android) will guide you to optimal health, higher energy level will help you get a fitter, healthier body and a calmer mind. You’ll go on a journey of discovery and learn to live in harmony with yourself and the wider world.
The DeepH team, in collaboration with doctors, meditators, spiritual practitioners and mathematicians, has created an algorithm that analyses your activity, vitals, and health parameters to provide you with a DeepH Energy Level (a real-time indicator of your wellbeing, mental balance, and vitality).
Instant Feedback – you can get immediate feedback and personal recommendations on your weight, activity level, workout intensity, sleep duration, meditation time and resting heart rate based on your age.
DeepH Cosmic Meditations – created by spiritual practitioners from around the world, can improve sleep and relaxation, reduce anxiety and open hearts to unconditional love and compassion.
The DeepH Blog is devoted to physical and mental health, joy, consciousness, energy, spirit and collective evolution to open your mind.
Sync All your Health Data in One Place – If you track your activity using your smartphone, Apple Health, Google Fit, fitness trackers, medical devices or other health and fitness apps for IOS and Android, you can now sync it all in your DeepH profile.
What’s the latest progress in the project, and what are you focusing on right now?
We are constantly adding new features, and we just released a new one last week. We are planning one more release with the “mood tracking” function in the next 4 weeks. We are working on this right now, while also actively looking for options to promote our ideas and product. Working on marketing strategy and finding Market Fit, analyzing data for future iterations, etc.
What pain of your customers are you helping solve? What is your company’s offering and what kind of customers and partners are you looking for?
Anxiety, depression, unhealthy habits, loss of sense and connection, excessive weight, negative thinking – these are the problems we are helping our users to deal with. Modern life is full, breathless and packed with new pressures. Maybe in the face of these pressures, it is natural that anxiety and depression are on the rise. Modern lifestyles are just not compatible with positive mental health for most people. For many, life has become a burden, and year on year its weight is growing heavier and heavier.
We are looking for people who feel this way too and are looking for change.
We aim to:
- Make sustainable ecological ways of living the norm
- Make physical and mental health a priority
- Promote happiness and inner peace as a natural state of mind
- Help to reconnect with yourself
- Restore human’s connection with nature
What differentiates DeepH from its competitors?
We connect spirituality with health tracking, we offer revolutionary visions on health and wellbeing, we see humans as a whole, we promote a holistic approach. We are connecting humans and nature to restore balance.
Do you have any projects related to COVID-19 research? If so, can you explain how your product is contributing to a global fight against coronavirus?
Around the world, people’s mental health is in trouble. Even before the pandemic hit, rates of depression and anxiety were rising globally. All the virus-induced losses of life, jobs, social connection and freedoms have all led to a severe increase in mental illness worldwide.
The pandemic has highlighted the inadequacy of existing tools for coping with mental health problems. It’s not just that a health crisis can easily disrupt access to mental health services, though we’ve definitely seen that to be true. It’s also that drugs like traditional antidepressants are, at best, only a partial solution.
We offer a solution for stress reduction, for mental wellbeing, negative thoughts control, and healing meditations, positive affirmation, personalized guidance on health and happiness. It is a horrible time for the planet, but the right time for DeepH.
What is your business model and how are you planning to get early customers onboard? Have you already raised money for your operations and building the platform?
We are working on a B2C freemium subscription model. We invested our own funds we earned on previous projects to build our DeepH platform.
What milestones have you had in fundraising and where are you now?
We have invested around 200 000 Euro so far, and plan to raise capital as soon as we are ready to scale our business model.
What was it like growing your team? What are the challenges and surprises you encountered? What tips do you have for building a solid team?
This is the main challenge to find professionals who are devoted and interested. At the moment we managed to create a great team of professionals that are mostly women who worked on socially impactful IT projects before and share the DeepH values. Look for people who share your values and vision, as this is the most important thing in building a solid team.
What are your company’s plans for the future, your major dream in 2021?
10000 paying users, market fit, iterations, sustainable business model for scaling.
What do you think about the business climate in Latvia and in the EU in general?
Latvia is a very small country with a great digital infrastructure for business operations. The EU in general is a very complicated market as every country has its own language and culture preferences, and legal requirements may vary. A lot of bureaucracy, which is often very hard to manage for small companies. I believe there could be more support for start-ups and small businesses, especially in the field of sustainability, ecology and well-being.
To summarize our interview I would like to ask your opinion about the future of the HealthTech industry, especially considering the impact of the pandemic and all this economic turbulence.
Medicine is developing at a high speed with the advent of organ transplants, life-saving operations, testings, health tech, screenings, vaccines, etc., However, despite all of the progress made in medicine, more and more people are diagnosed with cancer every day; a third of the population is overweight or obese, including children; and depression and anxiety are rising at alarming rates. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors are responsible for most chronic diseases. Chronic diseases cause approximately 70% of all deaths and up to 75% of all healthcare costs. A healthier population will lead to lower healthcare costs. While modern-day medicine has brought many life-saving advancements, one of the downfalls is that it often fails to treat the human system as a whole.
Perhaps the simplest way to reduce healthcare costs is to promote a healthier lifestyle among the population. This I believe should become mainstream in the next decades.
