FullFill by FullCircle

Our CEO, Ananya Jain, founded FullCircle in 2017 as a way to bring students from around the world together to tackle global challenges; we are currently 11 members strong and based throughout India and the United States. Our past projects have led us to explore everything from the obesity epidemic to renewable energy, the latter of which earned us a spot as finalists in the 2018 Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. FullCircle is currently dedicated to tackling issues within the mental health ecosystem, a problem space which deeply resonates with every one of our members. Our latest project, a one-of-a-kind mental wellness app called FullFill, is our most ingenuitive and inspirational product to date, and we are excited to discover its full potential in the coming months.

FullCircle is committed to tackling the university mental health crisis, a problem which impacts students globally. As the stigma surrounding mental health has gradually lessened, it has come to light that students are plagued by feelings of stress, social and familial pressure, and isolation, all of which can result in long-term depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. To make matters worse, university counseling centers often lack funding and resources for those who need help, and many more students are hesitant to reach out in the first place. Our project, FullFill, is a mental wellness app that will be available to all students, allowing them to form social support structures and practice mindfulness and stress-relief from the comfort of their residences. FullFill will elevate humanity by empowering students to take charge of their mental wellness and help others along the way, all the while further destigmatizing the mental health ecosystem. 

Our product seeks to target poor wellbeing which university students experience on a daily basis, leading to a global university mental health crisis. According to a Spring 2018 study of mental health at the Georgia Institute of Technology, 54% of students reported feeling depressed and 57% of students reported feeling left out. Out of these, 40% failed to seek help from mental health professionals, friends, or family (National Alliance on Mental Illness). On a global scale, at least ⅓ of college students across eight countries faced a common mental health problem (Auerbach et al., 2018)

With the number of students struggling with mental health issues increasing every year, recent studies have noted higher demands for mental health services on campus which universities lack the resources to meet. This vicious cycle of inadequate demand and supply is where FullFill comes in by  making healthcare accessible to all students even remotely, which is the need of the hour due to COVID-19.

Our application, FullFill, is designed to minimize the levels of stress and isolation which many students feel on a daily basis by encouraging them to connect with others through anonymous forums and reflect on their day-to-day experiences in our “Speed Ranting” feature. University students can log into FullFill with their student credentials and gain access to a personalized dashboard, as well as our anonymous forums populated and moderated by their peers. FullFill currently features seven main forums- Academic, Personal, Social, Family, Financial, Future, and COVID-19- each one centering around a proven stressor for students. Within these forums, students can ask questions, get advice, or simply “let it all out”, all in a positive and judgement-free zone. FullFill’s Speed Ranting feature focuses on mindfulness, giving the user 2 minutes to rant and then allowing them to replay the dialogue and reflect on their situation. This method of talking through stressful situations is often used in initial assessments at counseling centers and is a positive way of addressing issues that could otherwise become sources for future stress and anxiety. Additionally, FullFill features mood tracking using real personality tests (such as the WHO-5 Wellbeing Index), as well as readily available crisis hotlines.

Most obviously, FullFill serves students and their mental health, but beyond this group, there are numerous others within university communities who are impacted every day by the mental health crisis. Counselors and mental wellness professionals must cope with lack of funding and student frustration due to lengthy wait times for appointments. Professors and advisors are deeply affected when they hear of students who are struggling with their mental health. This crisis even has resounding impacts outside of the student’s immediate community, affecting family, friends back home, and even students at other universities. As students, nobody understands this problem better than us. FullCircle has conducted meetings with numerous professors, mental health professionals, and especially students to truly encompass every facet of this crisis, but some of our most resounding stories come from our closest friends and, in many cases, our own experiences. FullFill is designed to be something that is unique to university students and which can integrate seamlessly into their day-to-day lives. When designing FullFill, we wanted to make something that we could use, something that would have helped us through our worst times and which could support us in the future. Every feature is designed by students, for students. 

FullFill elevates the issue of a poor university mental health ecosystem and emphasizes the need to destigmatize mental wellness and encourage students to become more compassionate, empathetic individuals. We encourage our users to talk openly about their ups and downs and to encourage others to be the best versions of themselves. By allowing students to open up to one another and truly understand what those around them are going through, we at FullCircle truly believe that our mental health ecosystem can change for the better.

The idea for FullFill was borne out of a collective goal to improve student mental health. In December 2019, following a pivot from our previous project on obesity, FullCircle began to consider issues that were close to home and impactful on a global scale. We were drawn to the mental health ecosystem, something which so many of our university peers had struggled with. Every one of us had experienced stress, frustration, and isolation during our time in school and had found ourselves in low places that we could not imagine recovering from. We wanted to create something that could have helped us through those times by allowing us to strengthen our social support networks or gain some perspective on our situations. After nearly five months of stakeholder interviews, we began our product ideation phase. In order to appeal to our Gen-Z user base, we needed the draw of a social media-style platform; and, in order to truly improve users’ mental health, we needed to base every one of our features on real psychological principles. Our main features were the products of weeks of product ideation (May-June 2020) and are constantly evolving to better meet the needs of our users.

Everyone on the FullCircle team has always felt a deep connection to this problem space and FullCircle’s purpose because we have seen first-hand the impact which poor mental wellness can have on those close to us. The moment that we truly realized we were “head over heels” for this project, however, was when we began our student interviews. In order to test out our list of interview questions before approaching our university peers, FullCircle’s members first conducted one-on-one interviews with each other to get a sense of what everyone on the team had been through. Each of our interviews was very moving and helped us to realize that almost every university student has experienced a low point in their college life that they couldn’t see a way out of. And when the team reconvened, we concluded that, when facing challenges and low points, every one of us had found solace in social support. For many of us, that vital social support wasn’t always easy to find for ourselves. FullFill gives students the ability to forge meaningful social connections even in their darkest times, an idea which the team has been wholly devoted to ever since.

Most importantly, FullCircle is well-positioned to deliver this project because we are students. We aren’t doing this out of a need for fame or fortune; we are driven by our passion for this problem space and the desire to improve our own skills through our work. On top of that, we are Gen-Z students creating an application that is specifically for Gen-Z students (something which gives us a bit of a leg up on most of our Millennial counterparts working with mental wellness apps). FullCircle’s extensive research into this problem space, as well as our full market analysis, has given our team a solid understanding of the mental health ecosystem and the measures which we can take to address specific issues. We have forged important relationships with mental health professionals at several universities in the US, India, and Switzerland, which have come in handy when marketing our product and looking for feedback on our features, and we will most definitely continue to reach out to these contacts through future iterations of our product. Finally, the diverse nature of our team gives us a unique advantage when tackling any problem. With members hailing from the US, India, and China, we have a wide range of perspectives on global mental health. Our team is composed of driven, talented members specializing in everything from business to computer science to UX/UI design to communications to psychology and we have learned the importance of communication and accountability during our time as a group.

The transition from 2019 to 2020 was not easy for anyone, and FullCircle was no exception. At the time, we were just beginning to pivot projects and were still very uncertain about our problem space and what our solution might look like. In addition, several of our members were graduating and would no longer have time to devote to the team, so we were losing a good deal of talent and weren’t sure who we needed to recruit to fill the void. Morale was low for everyone, and the team was beginning to lose momentum. Ananya explains: “Making this transition was not easy. But being a female CEO is also not easy.” Our team stuck together and pushed through this rough patch. We conducted extensive interviews with stakeholders in order to truly understand our new problem space, and we worked together to discuss what a solution might look like every step of the way. We hired Shreya, our wonderful psychology consultant, Kristine, our amazing UX/UI designer, and Ayush and Samyak, our diligent computer scientists, in order to overcome this rough patch and create FullFill as we know it today. 

When creating FullFill’s MVP 1, our team quickly realized that everyone would need to communicate extensively and hold one another accountable in order to produce our product in the span of one month. Our CEO, Ananya, was especially vital during these times. She explains: “I have always tried to understand different people’s perspectives, their drives, and motivations. My goal is to see something till the very end, and finish it well.” And our team did just that. We decided that everyone should step up and take leadership of a specific aspect of the MVP, then meet consistently to coordinate deadlines and major milestones. From CS to business to psychology to UX/UI to communications, everyone on the team had a specific leadership role and a defined end goal in mind. We coordinated with one another in frequent late-night Google meets, created elaborate spreadsheets detailing our weekly tasks, and helped each other out if we fell behind. In the end, after extensive collaboration, FullFill’s MVP 1 was rolled out and featured amazing UX/UI work, a solid business plan, a community platform grounded in psychological principles and, of course, plenty of vital background code.

FullFill is innovative both in its purpose and in its execution. It has always been our team’s priority to disrupt the current mental health ecosystem within universities, finding an alternative to the underfunded university counseling centers which students can fall back on when appointments fall through. Through the process of interacting with FullFill’s wholesome community platform and exploring our concept of “speed ranting”, we hope that users will discover the power of their social support structures and their own self-confidence, leading to a generation of young people who are able to talk openly about mental wellness and offer compassionate support to anyone who needs it. FullFill’s execution is equally disruptive, steering away from the more hands-off approach of so many other mental wellness and meditation apps. As students, we know that there are some problems that can’t be solved by breathing exercises or soundscapes; instead, we encourage our users to rant and reflect in Speed Ranting, offer and seek advice in our Forum, and contact on-call professionals when times are tough. Above all, FullFill inspires people to empathize with and help others, a sentiment which cannot be stressed enough in our current society.

With FullFill, users can expect to find that day-to-day activities are providing them with long-term benefits. Each of our features works together to achieve the long-term impact of a student being able to better manage their mental wellbeing. A user might start with Speed Ranting, in which they are expected to take 2 minutes to talk about a stressful or troubling situation that they don’t seem to have a clear answer to. FullFill then replays this dialogue back to the user, allowing them to hear their own words and reflect on their situation. If, after this reflection period, the user feels more in-control of their problem or realizes something which they can do to better manage their situation, then, at the very least, they have taken an important step in learning to problem solve. If, however, the answer to their problem is still unclear, the user can collect their thoughts and write a forum post about their situation. Other forum users can comment and give advice, ultimately forming a bond with this user which they can come back to if they ever need help. In the short term, FullFill aims to help users understand and manage their stressors; in the long term, FullFill’s community platform provides students with a social support structure which they can rely on in the future and teaches them to embrace valuable elements of mindfulness when dealing with stress.

• Currently serving - 44 

  • The app is used internally by team members and close friends.

• In the next year:

  • We will be directly serving a total of  100k+ students in three universities within the US and India.

• In the next five years: 

  • We will be serving all the 850+ member universities of The Association of College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) in the US and Top 100 universities in India.

  • We will be serving close to 10M+ students.

Within the next year, we plan to successfully complete pilot testing in 3 universities each in the US and India. The universities will be selected in such a manner so as to cover the entire diversity of the student community. We will be working closely with Tier-1, Tier-2 and Tier-3 universities each in the US and India, so as to make sure that our product meets the expectations of the entire student community placed at different levels in the education system. We want to make sure that our product is useful and accessible to the students from all walks of life and economical background. 

In the next 5 years, we want to make a pan US-India network of universities that would be using our product/app. This will help 950+ universities to be connected and share resources with each other. We plan to digitize the entire university mental health ecosystem in these 2 countries so that there is a seamless flow of resources which will ensure cost effective, easy access and de-stigmatization of mental well-being resources. This will enable universities to take data driven decisions to ensure university well-being.

Parallely at the dawn of year 5, we will start running pilot projects in european countries as well.

Tackling the mental health ecosystem is quite challenging, given the inherent complexities it comes with. A constant battle we had to fight in the product development stage was ensuring the compliance with legal aspects in the US. Though our community model is based on anonymity, we at FullCircle highly value our students' privacy. Currently and within 1 year, a major obstacle is overcoming the legalities and ensuring we comply with different State regulations. Financial barriers are a given, as we are a student-led team and we need to use state-of-the-art technology to ensure data privacy, storage, and high levels of engagement for our student community.

In the next 5 years, we have planned to expand to 950+ universities and, therefore,  a constant flow of finances are a prerequisite to expand operations and incur the cost of legal advice going further. We will need support in interacting with government bodies to make sure there are regulations in place that provide students a right to access mental health services.

First things first, there are legal compliance and data privacy concerns we need to overcome.

Presently we are using free, pro-bono services provided by lawyers that work closely with TiE-Atlanta Chapter. A potential plan of action is to reach out to universities to extend their legal services to us, but that might result in delays to our project timelines as establishing relationships with legal cells of each of the universities where we plan to implement our application is a time consuming process. With respect to barriers with data privacy, we would soon need to reach out to professionals who are experts in the field of mental health and lawyers, too. Unfortunately, we can not afford an expert lawyer but, in the long run, it’s the way to go. 

 For funds in the initial year, we plan to reach out to Georgia Institute of Technology. But that is still a time-consuming process and will lead to considerable delay in the project given the current COVID situation.  

 For the 5 year plan, we have planned to capitalize and raise series-A funding on the success of pilot projects that we will be doing this year in 2020 with 3 universities each in the US and India, through VCs.

Our business model is simple and clear with a motive to help students enhance their quality of life at universities by actively working on their well-being. Our revenue model is subscription-based, which ranges from universities to individual offerings. We earn by empowering universities to analyze the wellbeing and mental health of their students with gamified assessments and much more.

We want to take it one step at a time and start by selling our products and providing services. We will be selling FullFill to universities and charging them a yearly subscription fee; they, in turn, will make the app available to all their university students. We will also provide universities with a monthly comprehensive mental wellbeing report of their students for which they would be charged separately. As the number of universities who purchase FullFill increases, we will invest the profits back into the company to purchase advanced technical tools and hire talented engineers to ensure data privacy and storage and take legal advice to comply with regulations. However, that process would be slow and the mental health crisis in the university is increasing at an exponential rate. Therefore, we opt to get seed funding from universities with whom we will be doing pilot projects, in exchange for the application  and services that we provide to them. In order to accelerate the process of scaling up,we will go for Series-A funding after 1 year by the time we would finish with our pilot project with a total of 6 universities - 3 each in the US and India. We will raise Series-A funding to incur the expenses of the next 5 years and expect the money to be given to us in a tranche of 2 years. This way, we are ensuring our financial sustainability.

We have not raised funds for our project- this will be the first competition that we’ve applied to get feedback, and get initial funding. We are currently in conversation with 5 customer universities- ETH Zurich, Georgia Tech, GSU, IIT Ropar in India, and King’s College in London. The reason we have been unable to start making revenue is because of 2 issues: legal documents related to privacy and data issues that this game creates with healthcare info, and immigration issues that tie into earning money from this because I’m still on an F1 visa, and COVID has created more issues with starting to accept revenue. We would be grateful for your help figuring out these issues so we can move this project forward. We already have a plan to start raising funds that extends into the rest of this year. For our revenue streams, we’ve discussed that in the business model above: $5000/month adjusted per country index for a data report on the students on our application, as well as a subscription fee charged to the university. We don’t want to charge our students, which is why we have this model of revenue generation.

Our estimated expenses are $95,000 for the year 2020, out of which 45% of it goes into purchasing technical tools and resources, 40% goes in hiring people as interns, 15% goes into campaigning and outreach. Because of the ongoing COVID situation, we have be working remotely from our home and hence needn’t incur the cost of setting up an office space.

1. Help with legal aspects- privacy is important 

2. Need money to scale and deliver soon due to COVID-19 

3. Our aim is to elevate humanity and empower students, so we are well-suited for this prize. 

The Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) would be an ideal partner for us. It has more than 850 US universities as its members, and we want to work closely with the association and devise a strategy for the execution of  our app in all these universities, which can be of benefit to both university counselling centers as well as university students. Through a single point, we can reach out to universities across the US. We want to work with the association to come up with quantifiable parameters to evaluate the performance of counselling centers and the wellbeing of students - based on that, we will modify our Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms to capture the student behavior.  

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): We can use the guidance of experts and professionals from NIMH to make our mobile application/product more backed by research and the scope of it to  be expanded well beyond mental well-being.