Founder-Market Fit - Maria Barrera (Clayful)

I was at NEARPA for a long time. We sell to schools. It was all around how to use technology in education, how to use technology in a classroom. This was right when iPads were coming out. Chromebooks didn't even exist yet. So long time ago. Our thesis there was how do you take these devices that are making our way into the classrooms and make them into instructional tools that teachers can leverage to bring instruction to a new level? And learned a lot through that journey, especially how does K12 work and what is the impact on technology? And in just new things coming up for students in particular. Fast forward. I joined Charthop in January 2020. Good times. We didn't know it was coming, obviously, but two months later a pandemic unfolds and we sold into human resources. So as you think about the pandemic unfolding, one of the first departments, if you will, to get affected was hr. Because they're thinking about oh, how are we taking our people remotely? How are we thinking about employee engagement? How are we thinking about employee mental health? It became very clear that mental health was deeply affected by this pandemic that was unfolding. The while it affected all of us in some way, shape or form for students particularly if you think about elementary, middle school, high school students, not having structure, not having socialization, not being able to go to school, not seeing your friends every day, that type of isolation is not just hard, it's cognitively debilitating. As I was starting to look into it more and more I see this article about 8 year olds dying of suicide. That moment was that inflection point where I'm like, okay, well back up. If our system is at a point where an 8 year old not just knows what suicide is, let alone is carrying on with it, something's wrong, that's where you bring it back to mechanical engineering. We think about systems, we think about the whole thing. And looking at our mental health and our education system, if that's where we are, there needs to be something that needs to be done differently for us to not have 8 year olds dying. That was a big inflection point. At that point, texted my CEO we need to talk tomorrow. It was 2am on a Tuesday. I remember vividly at that point I basically quit my job and just started trying to figure out how do I do something about this? In true d school fashion was went into a lot of need finding talking to everyone I could talk to. And there were a lot of different aha moments through those conversations. One, a conversation with the clinical psychologist that said by the time a kid gets to me, everything that has to be undone just takes so much time. So anything on the prevention side could have 10 XD impact. And that really landed with me. So I'm like, okay, cool, we need more prevention. Then you talk. I think about myself coming from Columbia when I was 10. Wonderful family, wonderful parents. Love my mom, she's amazing. She was working two jobs, she was busy. She had left her whole family. She had literally left this whole life in Colombia to give me a better life. Hope I'm making it worth it. I wasn't going to go and tell her, hey, I need help. My friends are being mean to me or I'm going through this. I didn't feel like I could be a burden. So I wanted to build something that did not have to rely on the family being the main driver of the student's mental health. Then the third piece was really thinking about the financial aspect of it. If you want to build something that's preventative, it turns out the health care system is not there yet. Health care is very, very reactive. As we again think about the system, like, okay, health care doesn't necessarily is going to pay for it. I don't want families to pay for it because I want this to be accessible. I believe in equity. I believe in building something where families without disposable income can benefit. So then who else can care? Schools. And it turns out I have a little bit of experience in schools. So it became this interesting moment of founder market fit where there's this problem that in following months you start seeing students making their way back into schools and all this information about how Covid has affected their mental health and how that's showing up in schools and kids not knowing how to behave, kids throwing chairs across the classroom because they're upset, kids putting out like literally lighting fires in bathrooms because they don't know how to deal with their aggression. So schools are dealing with this big problem and don't know what to do about it. And like, okay, well, there's something here, right? All these things are happening. And then unfortunately, a couple months after that, there's a big shooting in Uvalde and the government decides, like this is our wake up call, that we need to provide more mental health support across the board and funding becomes more available. So it's all these different pieces. And when I was sitting at 2am on a Tuesday night, realizing this is what I wanted to do, none of those things were in the cards. I didn't know any of that was going to happen. It definitely is one of those right place, right times. But also, I was so obsessed with the problem that I kept on finding solutions along the way.