Launch HN: Quirk (YC S19) – Open-Source Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

I started working through the exercises and saw a dramatic drop in panic attacks. (https://i.imgur.com/P29BSRC.jpg)

That's an impressive, likely clinically significant effect, congratulations! May I ask what is the x axis in the graph?

So it's not OS. Got it.

WOAH thank you for the in-depth feedback dude!

On Pricing - Agreed. This pricing mostly came out of a bit of nativity on my part. I assumed that wanting to make something accessible meant being really cheap. But we're very quickly realizing that both we won't be able to sustain this price and also that by having this price, we're basically telling people it doesn't work.

The reason why we haven't done too much on pricing quite yet is because it JUST started working as of a few weeks ago. We technically had it working a month and a half ago, but we messed up heavily with the rollout. Due a bug, it involuntarily canceled everyone on Android and then messed up our attempt at grandfathering existing users as "free-forever."

We might try freemium in the future, but at the moment we don't have the resources. In our past experience, freemium products tend to be basically two products where one is trying to sell you on the other. In a purely-paid model, every hour we spend on making a better product directly contributes to keeping the business alive. Since we're so small, we don't have the hours to spend yet.

On branding - This is super true, but when we tried to just say "therapy" or "feel better" people thought we were talk therapy and then got upset that there wasn't any talk therapy. If you say "CBT" the folks that have heard of it LOVE the product and the folks haven't we can explain what it is from a blank slate rather than trying to change any past stigma or misconceptions about therapy.

But this is something we're still not that great at. Figuring out how to do it well will be a lot of our core focus in the coming months. Especially considering our current website is basically a wall of text: https://quirk.fyi

On Stigma - This is exactly what we want to do, but haven't been very good at it yet. If you're reading this, CBT can probably help you, regardless of any specific condition.

> While going from bad mood to good mood is obviously valuable and desirable, so is going from good mood to great mood. But if you make it seem like using the app is effectively self-identifying as 'mentally ill', many folks in the latter camp will be turned off.

That is a REALLY good way of framing it. Holy moly, I'm gonna steal that.

This advice is amazing! Thank you so much! Seriously!

The x axis is a labeling bug. I THINK it was weeks? But the code that generated this was a small python script that was on a laptop that I wiped.

I wouldn't assign any clinical significance though to it (or to Quirk quite yet), especially since it's an N=1. But even if it's buggy, that graph shows one of the most important things that's every happened to me.

To be honest, I just kind of picked it and went with it. I think at the time I had been talking a lot with my dad (an old copy-left enthusiast). I never really thought it would really be a thing.