How an MBA Assignment Became a Startup
Most startups begin with intent. A founder spots a market gap, writes a plan, raises capital, and builds deliberately toward a defined future.
HearMeNow did not begin that way.
It did not start with a pitch deck, a funding strategy, or even a clear problem statement. It began, almost accidentally, as part of an MBA assignment, an intellectual exercise that slowly unravelled into a realisation about technology, mental health, and the hidden burdens of professional life.
Madrid, May 2025: The Moment That Wasn’t Supposed to Matter
The idea of HearMeNow came to me in May 2025, during a marketing module in Madrid, as part of my Executive MBA.
We were assigned an article exploring promising business ideas expected to shape the next five years. The exercise was straightforward: read, reflect, and sketch a hypothetical business concept inspired by emerging trends. Among discussions of sustainable travel, consumer sectors, and digital services, one theme caught my eye, the growing role of artificial intelligence in mental health. I had just started experimenting with AI tools and my exposure to ChatGPT had started just barely a few weeks ago. At that moment, I was not an expert evaluating a familiar technology. I was simply a clinician encountering a rapidly expanding field from the outside. This unfamiliarity proved important. Instead of assuming AI’s promise, I began interrogating its risks.
The First Idea: AI as a Mental Health Interface
My initial reading suggested that mental health support was emerging as one of the most common use cases for conversational AI. But I found some aspects unsettling. For example, I read a lot of about concerns about hallucinated response, lack of contextual understanding, and media stories describing psychological harm linked to unsupervised AI use. I was most concerned about questions relating to accountability and supervision.
I quickly understood that these were not abstract risks. In a clinical domain defined by nuance, trust, and ethical responsibility, they raised a fundamental question: Could AI meaningfully participate in mental health care without human oversight?
I attempted to reconcile this tension by imagining AI as a conversational support layer while clinicians retained access, visibility and supervisory control. Initially this idea sounded plausible, even progressive. But it quickly crumbled when exposed to reality.
To explore the concept, I reached out to therapists with a survey to initiate an exploratory discussion. But there was little enthusiasm for this idea in the mental health community.
What I learned quickly was that there was little appetite for AI-led interaction with clients.
Therapists were concerns about liability. Most importantly, they were sceptical about the maturity of this emerging technology to deal with an issue as sensitive as mental health.
I quickly realised that therapists do not dislike technology. Many already used digital tools. The issue was that the proposed solution did not address their lived challenges.
This understanding forced me to pivot. Instead of asking “how can AI be used to treat patients”, I asked “what problems do therapists actually face?”
A Study That Changed the Direction Entirely
My initial interactions with therapists made it abundantly clear that I was approaching this issue in a top-down manner. Instead, I needed to approach this problem from bottoms up approach. Thus began my grassroots research into “therapist burnout.”
I sent surveys to over 400 therapists and I received over 80 responses. The results were revealing, and I must say, astonishing.
More than half reported experiencing burnout.
This was not a finding I expected. Therapists are well equipped to deal with stress, I thought they might the last people to face burnout. But, the results of the research quickly cleared up this misunderstanding of mine.
An initial analysis of the data aligned with conventional explanations. Therapists carry a huge emotional burden, psychological exposure, and their work can be extremely intense. However, a granular analysis of the data showed me something very different. I found that the strongest statistical corelation with burnout was not emotional labour. Therapists are well equipped for this task. The strongest statistical co-relate was the daily administrative friction.
The Three Problems No One Was Solving
The issues facing therapists were not complex or glamorous. These were everyday tasks that crept into their evenings and weekends. Three pain points appeared repeatedly in my conversations with therapists- scheduling, invoicing and secure record-keeping. And these issues were invisible to outsiders and consumed disproportionate time and mental energy.
A conversation with a therapists laid bare the struggles that therapists face. They were struggling with fragmented systems. They used an online calendar, spreadsheet or a paper diary to manage their scheduling. They had to use a separate invoicing system. They used handwritten notes or a word document to maintain notes. Essentially, they were using multiple tools that were stitched together manually.
With regular discussion, I realised a fundamental problem. Like all clinicians, therapists are excellent in handling the clinical aspects of their work. But they had no training in operations, finance or administration. They were clinicians who were forced to operate as a small business owner. They had to building referral networks, maintain listings, onboard clients, reconcile payments, and manage sensitive records and they were doing this alone, often late in the evenings or over the weekend. The emotional strain of therapy is real.
But the structural burden of running a practice compounded the pressure manifold.
The Realisation: This Wasn’t an AI Problem at All
At that point it became clear to me that my original idea was misplaced. This was not an AI problem. It was not about needing more technology. It was about technology that understood the work of the therapists and that made their practice seamless and connected. If at all AI had a role, it was not to replace the clinical work. It was to remove the time-consuming tasks that distracted therapists from clinical work.
That epiphany reframed the entire project. HearMeNow would become a business-to-business platform designed specifically for therapists, not a consumer mental health app.
Designing With Restraint
From that moment, my philosophy became deliberately narrow. I decided that instead of building a feature-rich ecosystem, I would target the three core problems identified in the research and do little else. In my mind, HearMeNow was not about some fancy dashboard. Therapists were not looking for that; they simply wanted a system that solved one pain point. This rejection of feature bloat became a defining principle for me in this journey.
Where AI Actually Fits
I thought a lot about how AI can be used to assist therapists. And I incorporated AI with HearMeNow in a tightly constrained manner. I decided that AI would not offer diagnosis, suggest treatment or provide clinical interpretation. These were to fully remain in the human domain. But it would assist with transcription and summarisation of sessions, enabling therapists to document work efficiently.
Having therapists remain fully in control became the founding principle for HearMeNow. I did not envisage AI as a decision maker, instead I envisaged it as an able assistant that would save time for therapists.
Building With Privacy as a Starting Point
Working with highly sensitive mental health data required strict governance decisions from the outset. I followed this principle while designing HearMeNow- collect the least amount of data and retain it for the least amount of time. I designed that system in such a way so that all data is processed within UK-based servers. Information never leaves the controlled environment. Audio recordings are deleted automatically after seven day and the data is not used to train models.
The Unexpected Transformation: From Doctor to Builder
The idea of HearMeNow was not the only this that transformed in this journey, my identity transformed too. I have spent over two decades in clinical medicine and these two decades trained me to function as an expert within a structured hierarchy. Entrepreneurship required abandoning that identity. If I had to distil this journey into a single learning point, it was training myself to not be the expert. I had to navigate software development, negotiate with vendors, interpret technical language, and debug workflows. These were domains entirely outside my clinical training. Every decision involved uncertainty. I learnt that unlike medicine, there was no established pathway, no exam to pass, and no guarantee of success. I soon realised that entrepreneurship is not as glamorous as people make it out to be! It’s living with doubt and uncertainty every day.”
Launching Without the Illusion of Certainty
I eventually launched HearMeNow as a subscription-based platform aimed primarily at UK therapists, though accessible globally.
But launching HearMeNow as a functioning product was only job half done. I still had to decide my go-to-market strategy. And this decision required trade off. As a bootstrapped founder, I do not have the luxury of mass advertising. I also understood that therapists are discerning people who are unlikely to be persuaded by a marketing spectacle. Therefore, I decided to rely on direct engagement, conversations, professional networks, and gradual trust-building.
A Startup That Emerged by Listening
When I look back at this journey it’s obvious that HearMeNow did not emerge from invention. It emerged from correction. What started as an academic assignment became an exploration. Exploration became research. Research exposed a different problem. And solving that problem required building something entirely new. The original idea was discarded in this process and the real idea emerged from its ashes like a phoenix.
The Lesson: Ideas Are Rarely Right the First Time
The story of HearMeNow is not about technological ambition. It is about paying attention to what people actually need, and having the willingness to abandon what seemed like a good idea when evidence said otherwise. The market is the only judge. Everything else is just noise.
In that sense, HearMeNow was never meant to exist.
But once the right problem revealed itself, it became difficult not to build it.