ThatMate: A trusted friend of teens

ThatMate provides a personalized platform for identifying teens' experiences as precursors to problem behaviours such as low self-esteem, body image issues, non-assertive behavior, social and emotional distancing, inadequate communication method. These are the factors that contribute to stress, emotional disorders, risky sexual behaviour, substance abuse, social withdrawal and even depression during adolescence. We intend to do a systematic analysis of their choices in handling simulations and identify such ‘at risk students’ in need of intervention. We help them develop new perspectives through a tailor made intervention and potential enhancement programs.

 Our gender-dis-aggregated approach helps them understand their bodies and acknowledge differences from their own. This is a much required key skill as they enter into relationships, whether in the context of friendship, dating, sex or parenting.  

With tech and customizable curriculum (developed by experts), designed to appreciate contextual issues,  scalability to other countries will be achievable.

Adolescence is a tumultuous phase where adolescents go through significant social, psychological, health and biological transitions. WHO says 50% of mental and behavioral problems have their occurrence in teenage. There is no safe, reliable, age appropriate, gender inclusive and culturally relevant platform for teens to go to for their sexual and mental health related queries. 

Our focus is on addressing the lack of proper sexual and mental health education in India through our scalable learning solutions. India has 236 million children and adolescents aged 10-19 (world’s largest youth population) without any proper channel for discussing sexual and mental health-related topics. 

All young people have a right to accurate information to make healthy, informed decisions about their bodies and their relationships. Without access to gender inclusive programs, many students are left to believe that they are alone as they struggle to make sense of their rapidly changing bodies and feelings. These feelings, along with the stress borne of all-too-common stigmatization and discrimination, have been associated with alarming outcomes related to health and well-being, including disproportionately high rates of suicide, teenage pregnancy, suicidal ideation, depression, disordered eating, sexual risk taking, and drug and alcohol use. 

Online Curriculum: The curricula and instructional practices can be easily adapted to reflect the variety of experiences that young people have as they travel along the developmental path. The students will  download the app to access the content and the teachers, parents and school authorities can monitor the progress of the students.

ThatMate app 

We plan to take information such as age, gender and location. This will help us analyse our data and provide a more structured  and personalised approach. Our app is essentially the front end to the CMS with following features:

Questionnaire: ThatMate app has a section full of interesting questions that helps us understand the type of the personality of the user and based on the result we suggest them to content on the app.

Interactive Stories:ThatMate app comes with interactive stories and games where the player is put into vulnerable social and personal situations and asked to make decisions on behalf of the protagonist of the game. 

Comics: We continuously generate comics that educate readers on sexual and mental health topics with flipbook style format.

Bolo: We have built a ChatBot platform which has FAQs , and it moves to a counselor for more empathetic approach

Our target audience is adolescents (boys and girls 13-19 year old) who belong from the semi urban and rural background. We have served around 8000+ teens across 6 towns/cities in the states of Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka through our offline sessions. Over the past 2 years, our full-time team has spent time directly with the population we are serving and with the government that provide access to government schools and private affordable schools in these areas.

Adolescents have a lot of questions about growing up.They want clarity, moreover they rebel for clarity and answers. For example, when girls enter puberty and they get their first menstrual cycle, they are often told that their bodies are impure, which is wrong. It is essential for them to accept their body, its changes and its inherent working in order to be empowered.

We are a trusted friend of teens, we build this trust by partnering with schools, being a part of their curriculum delivering our online content and on boarding them on our application.Our approach helps teens take better decisions about their mental, sexual and physical health and create a gender-inclusive world for them so they can develop their full, authentic selves

ThatMate works to create a gender-inclusive world for teenagers (13-19 year old) so they can develop their full, authentic selves. We work with teens, parents and teachers,schools, corporations, government to bring greater gender understanding and inclusion. Our solution has positive outcomes for young people. Studies have consistently shown that when  well-designed and implemented, there is a reduction in suicides, sexual risk behaviors and negative outcomes,including teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) improvement in school attendance. Education that helps young people develop a broader understanding of gender diversity can also lead to healthier romantic and sexual relationships in the future. 

Most of the organizations working with schools and students conduct classroom programs to create awareness about taboos. We also conducted workshops, webinars, seminars, consultation meetings etc. to achieve our objectives. We brainstormed ideas, consulted with experts in the fields of technology, psychology, teaching & administration. After the consultation we have developed an age appropriate curriculum; we will  start our 6 years  journey with the students right from their 7th grade ie roughly at the age of 13. The curriculum covers topics like sexuality, sex, love, relationships, stress, anger, peer pressure, consent etc.

•At these various touch points (workshops, webinars, seminars, consultation meetings) with our stakeholders (students, parents and teachers), the number of questions answered, myths broken, or doubts cleared is very limited considering the time. However with the gamified learning app they can learn and ask things at their own pace and according to their convenience

•The extent of personalization achieved in resolving queries in a group setting is minimal. However with the app they can ask us any question whenever they want with personalization being the main feature.

•Also, there is some level of discomfort among participants to ask questions in a crowd. The chatbot platform provides information in a private and confidential manner. 

•With the help of analytics we will  identify users with low self esteem, body image issues,  gender issues, stress. Proper counseling can be provided to them based on their responses, this will improve their coping mechanisms to such distress.

We are a cloud native mobile app. We use AWS for all our infrastructure, federated identity and OTP based login for easy onboarding. We use AWS Cognito for authentication, Docker and Fargate for scalable backend. SNS, SQS, SES for various messages exchange. RDS and DynamoDB for scalable database and Redis as our memory cache. The architecture uses micro-service paradigm and uses NodeJS.

The App is written in React Native to deliver to both the mobile platforms with our limited resources. The content management system is written in ReactJS. The Chatbot is powered by Google DialogFlow. The user analytics is done by Amplify.

 Infrastructure is managed by Terraform scripts and CI/CD pipelines exist for quick rollouts.

The technologies that are mentioned are extremely popular. They are used and backed by the top software companies.

React Native/JS: Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Discord, Tesla and many more

Docker: Docker is used by almost all major tech companies, here is a study from 2018 https://www.datadoghq.com/docker-adoption/

AWS Technogies: Used by giant corporations like Netflix, Twitch, LinkedIn, Adobe and Twitter https://www.contino.io/insights/whos-using-aws

DialogFlow: Dutch Airlines, Dominos, TicketMaster, Oracle https://dialogflow.com/case-studies

Amplitude: DropBox, Doordash, Paypal, Intuit, GoFundMe, Microsoft https://amplitude.com/customers

If your solution utilizes a widely used and accepted technology, describe how and where it’s already used. If it’s a less common technology, consider providing a link to an academic paper or some other form of publicly available evidence. If possible, share a link to a video of a product demo.

We address the teens (13-19 years old) living in the rural and semi urban/ peri urban region of the country. We have expertise in delivering the sexual and mental health content to the teenagers. We partnered with local government bodies like Zilla Parishad and Secondary education departments to work closely with the schools. We are a trusted source for teens and we build  this trust by partnering with schools. We have worked with 8000+ teens through our offline workshops, in 80+ schools across 3 Indian states( Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa.  

Our alpha testing of the app had excellent results with the users. We already have 500+ registered users for our Beta testing of the app. 

1 year Goal: In the coming year we want to impact 50,000 teens to test out implementation through state run government and private schools. This will be our first step in building a replicable model of scale to be implemented across different rural and semi-urban communities across India. We have also partnered with NGOs like Sahi Career, Project khelo, Slum Soccer, Sukhi Bhava to reach our target audience.

 In the next 5 years: ThatMate will be present in 10 states  impacting 5 Million teenagers. We will be partnering with the local NGOs’, Zilla Parishad, chains of schools and Secondary education departments to deliver our content across the various districts in these states. 

With ThatMate around adolescents are well equipped to handle biological, psychological, social changes accompanying adolescence there by improving the physical and mental health.  

1 year Goal: In the coming year we want to impact 50,000 teens to test out implementation through state run government and private schools. This will be our first step in building a replicable model of scale to be implemented across different rural and semi-urban communities across India. 

Tech:

1. Dashboard: User stats display bird eye view and individual. This data will help us analyse the behavior pattern in a better way. 
2. Push notification by usage and new content availability
3. App major rewrite: dynamic home page that shows the content (more like Netflix home page)
4. Third party integration, 
5. Image optimization for low bandwidth, 
6. Parental / School dashboard. 

Content: We intend to deliver the content in 2 Indian languages. We will add additional features like video streaming and activities in the app. We will do pilots, test the app  and will collect data to provide better content.

 In the next 5 years: ThatMate will be present in 10 states  impacting 5 Million teenagers. We will be partnering with the local NGOs’, Zilla Parishad, chains of schools and Secondary education departments to deliver our content across the various districts in these states. 

Tech: We plan to develop a robust tech solution which will benefit millions of teens. We will keep working on the content to make it more engaging and interactive.

Content: We plan to develop the content in 10 Indian regional languages. Along with India we also plan to have some global traction, especially  from the developing and under devloped countries .

One year: 

Operations

Challenge: Content limitation, and language appropriation and internet availability could be bottleneck

Finance

Challenge: Scaling the software, content generation and support center can be money sink

Market

Challenge: Educating and showing the parents and schools the importance of sexual and mental wellbeing.

 Five year :

Regulation

Challenge: Given the sensitive nature of the topics there may be regional or religion group that may retard the expansion to their area

Scalability

Challenge: We want to scale up our solution to countries other than India, with very limited experience of building things at scale and working with governments in India and across the borders

One Year Mitigation plan:

Operations:

Hiring  a multilingual content team, publishing content that requires no text to understand will be helpful. We will think about audio based support for people with vision impairment. Internet bandwidth could be an issue where downloading comics and games could be problematic,we need to have low resolution content and text only (light weight) contents for such a scenario. Internet unavailability will require setting up schools with pre-loaded content and letting kids come and use the school computer to learn things.

Finance:

Mitigation: We are following lean startup methodology and getting work done on contract basis. Using cloud function, micro-services and auto-scaling to only use resources when they are demanded to decrease costs.Support centers will help to automate the chat bot and eventually causing a drop in call center employees. 

Market:

Mitigation: While 80% of parents agreed the requirement of such education, we will deliver the content that is socially acceptable and culturally appropriate but contains necessary information

Five Year Mitigation Plan:

Regulation

Mitigation: Since the software is location and user association aware (which school, NGO, or local government users are linked to), we can discuss the content and block certain contents. On a larger level, we need to make policy level change so that every child must be education on these important yet neglected life skills.

Scalability

MItigation: Having experienced people on board who have scaled their products not only in India but also across the globe will help us streamline our efforts.

Full-Time: 6

Part time: 6

Interns: 5

Madhavi Jadhav, Co-Founder & CEO – Petroleum Engineer from Pune University, has worked with companies like Reliance, Schlumberger and Shell, has around 9+ years of work experience in operations and business development. She extensively worked with teenagers for 2.5 years and understood their concerns, questions and needs. While working with teens, schools and parents she had already understood the need of a scaleable (tech)solution for this problem. She is a Tedx speaker and has been covered in a lot of reputed media in the country. She was in USA today in 2014 as New Faces of Engineering, she has also received Young Member Outstanding Service Award in 2013 by Society of Petroleum Engineers. 

 Nishant Neeraj, Co-Founder & CTO - Mechanical Engineer from IIT Kharagpur, Software architect with 13 years of experience and has helped several startups with product in the past.

Asmita Dalvi, Clinical Psychologist - 3 years, RCI registered clinical psychologist with M. Phil in Clinical psychology from CIP.), working with adolescents and adults on their psychological and emotional problems.

Ruchi Sharma, Brand Lead - Completed Electronics & Communication Engineering. Has 3 years of experience of working with different brands. 

Sagar Kulkarni,animator/illustrator.Completed B.des in animation from MIT institute of design. 

We all have experienced the lack of having a proper channel to address our sexuality and mental health related queries and problems. We have battled it alone. We don’t want the next generation to go through the same experience.

Deshpande Foundation: With their support we could impact teens working in the Hubbali district of Karnataka. We reached 1000+ teens with their support

NCore: They helped in the capacity building of our organisation.

AU Small Finance Bank: With their support we impacted 3000+ students in Satara, Sangali and Pune district  of Maharashtra, India

JSW Steel: With their support we impacted 5000  students in Bellari, karnataka

Persistent Foundation: With their support we impacted 500  students in  Nagpur and Canacun, Goa.

Rebalance: Its a accelerator program especially designed for women entrepreneurs. They are helping with our product fine tuning and investment.

We have multiple revenue streams such as:

1. B2B

• CSR partnerships:  We will partner with foundations and organisations who work extensively in education and health space especially targetted towards the benefit of teenagers

• School Partnerships: Partnerships with chain of  private schools this will be our sustainable source of revenue. One the students onboards with us in their 7th grade we become their ThatMate till their 12th grade. 

• Sponsored content: Collaborate with Organisations to sponsor content on topics which the organisations care about like periods, abuse, alcohol addiction etc.

• Partnerships with organisations working with schools: Partnerships with NGOs and organisations which have their target audience as teenagers or schools will also be a useful revenue stream

1. B2C: Parents paying for the counseling services or teens subscribing to the app. Once we have established our brand as trusted friend of teens through schools, it will be easier for us to position ourselves as a go to platform for the teens

   

Revenue: 

In the initial 2 years we will be partnering with organisations which already work with schools like ERP companies and NGOs whose target segment is similar to ours. After two years we plan to build a trust with the parents and will be able to get our online customers. This will be a subscription model. We have basically identified two main methods of monetizing our solution. We charge a subscription fees of $10 from each student per annum for our online curriculum and app. This fees is paid either by school, parents or big foundations. Our online curriculum can be adopted by schools or big foundations.
Equity Investment
We are looking to raise $200,000 from impact investors which we can use for the next 18 months, to develop the product better.
Competitions/Grants
As this is a novel idea, we have high chances of winning competitions, we have already received grants from Ncore, Deshpande foundation etc. We were finalists in many competitions like NASSCOM, 3M Challenge etc.

MIT Solve has consistently been a path for advancement. Be that as it may, at Solve, we perceive there are extraordinary pioneers all around the globe, and Solve intends to provide us with an opportunity to curb at least one of them. If we receive the grant from Solve, we would be able to finance and accelerate our progress with sustainable growth. These partnerships will also help without networking and build connections that would impact our work immensely. We are a young technology start up and we do not have all the answers. We have limited experience at building things at scale. But we have a bold vision for the future and strongly believe that our nugget of an innovation has a bold potential. Solve provides an opportunity to be guided with an industry experienced mentor which would help us reach our goals faster. The meet and greet seminars and workshops would help us facilitate partnerships with the investors. The strategic connections would also help us get connected with experienced individuals who could audit and help us validate our business model to achieve our goals. Apart from this, getting well equipped with industry best practices would make us reach better heights and pitch it to more audiences.

1. We would like to partner with technology partners/ experts/ entrepreneurs who have scaled solutions to millions of users in developing settings and who have talent who can help us architect our solution to be scale-ready. We want to scale up our solution to not only in India but in other developing and under developed countries. Such partnerships will be extremely useful for us to reach the millions of teens and achieve our mission.

2. Partnership with subject matter experts and groups that are experts in content/subject matter, we are looking for experts who has worked on psychology of teens, parents and teachers. We are also looking for expertise in developing and fine tuning our product for international audience as well.

In India, a large number of physical, mental, and emotional issues are faced by individuals in age group between 13 to 19 because their bodies undergo various changes, like puberty, but they do not find any potent medium through which they can get the answers to the myriad questions which arise with these changes. So grave is the impact of this mundane problem that it manifests itself at a much larger scale leading to dropouts from school, negative behaviour pattern, making wrong choices, emotional instability, etc. WHO says 50% of all psychological problems develop at adolescence. Every year 23% of the girls drop out of schools as soon as they hit puberty and 12% of girls become pregnant when they are 15-16 years old. 

There is no safe, scalable, age appropriate, culturally relevant and gender inclusive platform for these teens to go to.

ThatMate with our innovative approach which leverages tech based approach will empower these teenagers to take informed decisions. 

This investment will be utilised for the following purpose:

1. Technology: Product development 

2. Content Development

3. Accelerate Onboarding of adolescents/school: To help 50,000 students in schools and onboard 100,000 adolescents on the app in 3 states; Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Karnataka

4. Online and Offline Outreach: Digital amplification and partnerships to drive growth