3 Things: Metaverse Flights, Competitive Intel Sleuth, Offshore Mental Health Providers
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Metaverse Flights
Competitive Intel Sleuth
Offshore Mental Health Providers
1. Metaverse Flights
There is not *a* metaverse like what is depicted in Ready Player One or Snow Crash. Today, people spend countless hours in many virtual worlds ranging from kids playing in Roblox to blockchain-based worlds like Decentraland and The Sandbox to VR experiences by Meta (fka Facebook). In fact, some people like Shaan Puri would argue that it’s not even a place but a time — when our entire lives are lived in the digital world. We are seeing virtual real estate companies pop up to take advantage of the opportunity to own digital property, brands creating experiences and selling merch, and musicians performing concerts in various worlds. There will continually be more and more things to do in metaverses, yet figuring out what is going on and navigating the spaces is still not a trivial exercise.
Given the war for the metaverse and the size of the prize, I feel pretty confident that there will be many different metaverses for different types of people and experiences. There are some good things about this. Just as we’ve seen the unbundling of SaaS bring about best-in-class point solutions for different teams and users, this will enable each metaverse to optimize for a specific use case and build truly amazing experiences. On the downside, just as SaaS users now have 10 logins, UI/UXs to navigate, and systems to use, having multiple metaverses brings with it challenges in that your avatars and all of the items associated with each are not portable. Going between these worlds will not be a seamless experience, just like traveling to a different country or even just different state is never easy… but what if you could make the “flight” between metaverses or even to different areas within a metaverse a fun and engaging experience on its own? The process could involve a metamorphosis of your avatar and gamified portal to auth into the new world or navigate the existing one.
2. Competitive Intel Sleuth
It is now easier than ever before to start a company and get a product off the ground. That also means that whatever you’re building, there are 5 other teams who are also working on the same thing and there will likely be 5 more in the near future. Companies spend a ton of time thinking about competition; both the incumbents they are trying to displace as well as the startups who are going after the same whitespace. They create SWOT analyses, build competitive battle cards for sales teams, work through messaging and positioning statements, and monitor competitor website updates. There are tools that help you figure out what ads your competition are running on Facebook, Google, and other platforms, and on the enterprise side, services will show you what content competitors are syndicating and where.
One area that people don’t often think of when it comes to gaining competitive intel is hiring and talent. When you think about it, what teams a company has and the open roles they are hiring for gives you a ton of information as to what is coming down the pike on their roadmap. When it comes to public companies, analysts will often signal major company initiatives when they find a JD for a specific role (such as Apple hiring for self-driving car roles) but the vast majority of companies don’t have access to this type of information. A startup could offer this as a service where you provide a list of competitors (or anyone you want to track), and they monitor open roles, shifts in titles, which companies new employees are coming from, etc to provide insights as to where each is placing emphasis and what directions they are building towards.
3. Offshore Mental Health Providers
Mental health problems have been on the rise across all age groups and demographics in the US. Prior to the pandemic, over 50 million Americans suffered from a mental health condition and that number has risen 25% during the pandemic. Demand for treatment has been surging for anxiety disorders, depression, sleep problems, OCD, substance and addictive disorders, and more. VC funding in the mental health sector has been soaring as well with $6.9B being poured into over 350 mental and behavioral health startups in 2021, up 3x since 2019. A lot of the innovation has been driven by the fact that mental health suits itself quite well to telemedicine and in 2020, there was a shift in reimbursements for telemedicine care. Companies popped up left and right providing the the ability to diagnose conditions, prescribe medication, and provide ongoing treatment.
One of the largest remaining challenges in this space is the massive gap between demand and supply of professionals. Psychologists are already overloaded with patients seeking treatment and are experiencing huge waitlists. Additionally, it is far more lucrative for practitioners like therapists to take self-pay patients vs patients going through insurance which means that many people struggle to find a provider. Many of the startups leverage a handful of MDs or psychiatrists and then rely on Registered Nurses, Nurse Practitioners, or other lower-licensed or non-licensed practitioners to handle the bulk of the care. The demand for practitioners has also spawned a few very well-funded startups like Wheel and SteadyMD who match supply with telehealth opportunities. Given the predicted 10k+ provider gap in supply, and the rising costs of care, an opportunity would be to aggregate foreign healthcare workers and match them with demand in the US where the need isn’t for a specific licensed professional. This would create a massive supply at a much lower price point to meet the demand. Additionally, this could allow you create pools of foreign language speaking providers to provide care for Americans whose native language is not English.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine