Home — Health Yana’s mental health tool for Spanish speakers nears 5 million users – TechCrunch

Yana’s mental health tool for Spanish speakers nears 5 million users – TechCrunch

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Yana’s mental health tool for Spanish speakers nears 5 million users – TechCrunch

Andrea Campos has struggled with depression since she was eight years old. Over the years, she’s tried all sorts of therapies — from behavioral to pharmacotherapy. In 2017, when Campos was in her early 20s, she learned to program and created a system to help manage her mental health. It started as a personal project, but as she talked to more people, Campos realized that many others might benefit from the system.

So she built an application to provide access to mental health tools for Spanish-speaking people and began testing it with a small group. At first, Campos herself was her chatbot, texting with users who were tired of dealing with depression. “During the month, I was pretending I was an app and would send these people a list of activities they had to complete during the day, such as writing in a gratitude journal, and then asking them how those activities made them feel,” Campos recalls.

The results from her small experiment were encouraging. She thought that sometimes with depression and anxiety comes “a lot of avoidance,” where people resist potential treatment out of fear. So, Campos conducted a more significant sample of experiments and raised about $10,000 via a crowdfunding campaign. With that money, she hired a developer to build a chatbot for her app, mainly via Facebook Messenger. Then an earthquake hit Mexico City, and that developer lost everything — including his home and computer — and had to relocate.

mental health

“I was left with nothing,” Campos says. “I realized at the beginning of 2019 I was going to have to do this by myself,” Campos said. So she used a site that she described as a “Wix for chatbots” and created one herself. But that developer introduced her to another, who disappeared with his payment and again left Campos “with nothing.”

After experimenting with the app with a sample of 700 people, Campos was even more encouraged and raised an angel round of funding for Yana, the startup behind her app. (Yana is an acronym for “You Are Not Alone.”) By early 2020, with just three months of runway left, she pivoted to create an app with chatbot integration that wasn’t just limited to us via Facebook Messenger. Campos launched the app more broadly during the same week that her city in Mexico went into quarantine.

At first, she said, she saw “normal, steady growth.” But then, on October 10, 2020, Apple’s App Store highlighted Yana for International Mental Health Day, and the response was overwhelming. “It was also my birthday, so I was at a spa in a nearby town, relaxing, when I started hearing my cell phone go crazy,” Campos recalls. “Everything went nuts. I had to return to Mexico City because our servers were exploding since they were not used to having that volume.”

As a result of that exposure, Yana had around 80,000 users teaching 1 million users two weeks later. Soon after that, Google highlighted the app as one of the best for personal growth in 2020, wleadingto another spike in users. Today, Yana is about to hit the five million-user mark and is announcing it has raised $1.5 million in funding led by Mexico’s ALLVP, which has also invested in the likes of Cornershop, Flink, and Nuvocargo.

When the pandemic hit last year, six of Yana’s nine-person team decided to quarantine together in a “startup house” in Cancun to focus on building the company. Earlier this year, the company raised $315,000 from investors such as 500 Startups, Magma, and Hustle Fund. The company had pitched ALLVP, which was intrigued but wanted to wait until it could write a more extensive check. 

That time is now, and Yana is among the top three downloaded apps in Mexico and 12 countries, including Spain, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela. According to Campos, Yana plans to “move away from the depression/anxiety narrative” with its new capital. “We want to compete in the wellness space,” she told TechCrunch. “Many people were looking for us to deal with crises such as a breakup or a loss, but then they didn’t always see a necessity to keep using Yana for longer than the crisis lasted.”

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