We’re saying bye to HelpMate

Jun 9, 2022

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since we gave an update. When we first started building HelpMate, we made a promise that we would build in public and bring you all along our journey.

Today we’re sad to announce that we will no longer be working on HelpMate

Many of you have followed our journey since we first announced HelpMate last September, so we wanted to share why we’ve made this decision.

If you’re seeing this for the first time, hello! We’re a team of startup operators, engineers and PhD students who cofounded HelpMate, with the aim of empowering caregivers of people living with dementia.

Why we’re not moving forward with HelpMate

Team: It mainly comes down to this. With the rest of us starting full time work this year, our time commitment to HelpMate has undoubtedly wavered. We were able to keep this up as there were still 4 of us to share the workload, but over time our collective output as well as morale declined
Product market fit: We have failed to nail the exact problem we were trying to solve. We knew that caregivers experience a plethora of pain points, but to our detriment, we couldn’t nail it down to a specific one. As a result, our product thinking lacked cohesiveness and we were unable to gain traction on what we launched
Our initial intentions: We rode the high of winning the MYMI Medhack and positive feedback we received from the judges, overly optimistic about moving forward with HelpMate. While this naivety was advantageous at times, we also underestimated the commitment needed to successfully turn HelpMate into what we initially envisioned

If you’ve been following the HelpMate journey for the last 9 months, you’ll know how far we’ve come. We started as students who met during the Startmate fellowship (shoutout to Anubhav, Cam et al!), then formed a team that went on to win the MYMI MedHack 2021 which spurred the decision to continue working on HelpMate.

Since inception, we’ve achieved some huge milestones that we’re extremely proud of

Some milestones we’re incredibly proud of achieving:

Sep-Nov 2021: Spoke to dozens of caregivers across ANZ and USA
Nov 2021: Joined the Blackbird Giants program
Jan 2022: Launched our post-diagnosis action plan
Feb 2022: Incorporated HelpMate!
March 2022: Joined the Peter Farrell Cup ‘22
April 2022: Brought on our first advisor Dr Janice Tan
April 2022: Launched waitlist for our cohort based caregiver program

We’re incredibly grateful to have gotten this far with HelpMate

Building HelpMate has been an incredibly humbling experience, especially working in an impactful problem space, that is caregiving and dementia. Most of all, we couldn’t have asked for a more passionate, talented and dedicated team.

While we’re sad to let HelpMate go, we know this isn’t the end. Our team separately have some new and exciting projects coming. To everyone who has supported us since Day 1, thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you.

If you have any questions or want to share stories, we’d love to chat and share our learnings over coffee or drinks!

Over and out,

Pia, Renee, Aryan & Darren 💜