Startup Interview with Steven Gramlich, Co-founder and CMO of Headversity

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’m one of 4 Co-founders of headversity, a digital mental health training solution for employers. As the CMO I handle all things marketing and brand communications. My background is in consumer marketing, primarily in the agency space where I spent most of my career in media strategy, consulting, and leading the integrated marketing spend for brands like Red Bull Canada, Canadian Tire, KAYAK, and Sirius XM.

Coming from the intense advertising agency world, I experienced burnout at various points in my career, which was not uncommon in our industry. This was where my interest in mental health really started.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

headversity is a leading provider of preventative mental health solutions for employers. Launched in Fall 2019, we’ve impacted the lives of nearly half a million people, in 8 different countries, across more than a dozen industries. Through our unique approach of upskilling employee mental health, our mission is to set the new standard for workforce mental health by shifting the focus to prevention.

What is the origin story?

Our CEO, Dr. Ryan Todd, had arrived in his dream job as a psychiatrist after a decade of training. Upon starting this job, he inherited a 6-month waitlist of patients and was discouraged at the lack of accessibility to care for so many people. He also saw an overwhelming number of patients that were experiencing work-related mental distress.

As a result, he decided the consultative skills that go into his work with patients could easily be translated to a digital experience and democratized for use by those who need it most: the workforce. Ryan then brought together a founding team comprised of mental health, digital learning and communications experts, and technologists to craft a skill-based mental health training platform that brought these vital skills out of the clinic and into employees’ hands.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

What I love about our team is the passion to do good and the understanding that to make the impact we’ve set out to make that we need to challenge the norms of a traditional industry. Before headversity, in Canada, there weren’t mental health training providers talking about prevention. We’ve opened up a brand new market segment and are forcing the more established players to step up their game to reimagine workforce mental healthcare. Our focus on prevention is taking the conversation away from mental illness and towards mental health, which is every employee, everyday challenge.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I’d likely still be applying my trade at an advertising agency had I not become involved with headversity. As a first-time founder, however, I think I’ve tapped into a passion in entrepreneurship and there’s no going back to the old corporate life.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

For employers, we measure things like absenteeism and presenteeism and how our program reduces this for employers, as well as safety incidents. We’ve seen up to a 50% decrease in absenteeism days as a result of training with headversity. With safety incidents, it’s widely known that stress and workplace accidents are directly correlated. Through our training, we’ve seen double-digit increases in employee happiness and an overall reduction in stress.

Finally, through our work in reaching the workforce at more than 5x the rate of Employee Assistance Providers (EAP), we’ve given organizations insights on statistically significant representations of their employee population. In short: we help employers make better decisions with leading indicator data on the behavioral health of their people.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

I think aside from our huge growth during COVID-19 (+1600% in our userbase in less than a year), our user feedback continues to be what excites us the most. The stories we’ve heard about how headversity helped employees get back to work, how it potentially saved their life and how they’ve changed their behavior as a result often leaves us speechless.

Working in corporate learning we often get drawn to the big splashy numbers of active users and things that affect the bottom line and help us renew with our partners. But at our core, we’re a platform that is built for the individual employee. Hearing from our users that we’re making an impact on their lives is by far the most exciting thing about our journey so far.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

In our industry, the path to predictive health I think is really exciting and something we’ll see that impact our industry very soon. I think that has me most excited as the impact will be monumental.

I’m not one to get worried about technology. I think innovation and tech are solving many of the world’s problems that we as people have created for ourselves.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Getting nominated for this award was my entry point to HackerNoon. I’ll be sure to check out more now!

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Gain all the life experience you possibly can, and enjoy the lack of responsibility.

Networking is a life raft that will carry you in your career, so be sure to find some great role models and if you have the good fortune to meet them, ask a million questions and do your best to soak it all in.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

My wife and I had our first child this summer.

I’ve learned that parenting brings all the clichés of lack of sleep and time, but even with less time than I had previously, it’s been a huge help in restoring balance.