Reflections on building Spill, 6 years in

I’m Calvin, the Founder and CEO at Spill. I’m a first-time founder — I started Spill when I was in my 20s. I’ve since turned 30 and I’ve been building Spill for just over 6 years.

To try to process my identity crisis of being a millennial who has done the same job for 6 years, to bring some honesty to the conversation of what it’s like to run a startup (scaleup?) and to share some of the things I’ve learned over the last 6 years, I thought I’d write about my reflections.

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Some quick context if you don’t know anything about Spill: Our first product (a message-based therapy service for businesses) ultimately failed but we found success in 2020 with an improved product that supported employees with video therapy sessions and regular mood check-ins. We’re now a 15-person team, we work with over 500 companies, we provide access to mental health support to ~40,000 employees, and we are profitable as a business as of last month.

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Two things I think we got right

1. We made sure that the business made money early on

Spill is venture-funded. Because of this, I knew that we’d chosen the path where the only goal I would ever have would be to make Spill huge. This means that our goal is always: grow.

One way to grow faster is to sell your product for less. As the saying goes, it’s easy to sell a £10 sandwich for £1.

Before pivoting in 2020, we’d sold our first product for less than it cost to run the service. We paid our counsellors — who sent up to two messages per week — between £60 and £80 per month. We then offered this product to businesses for £2 per employee per month with no limit on how many employees could use the service. Why? Because we had salespeople who wanted to close deals (more on that later 🙈) and we were drinking the “grow at all costs” Kool-aid.

When we decided to pivot the product away from message-based therapy in 2020, we only had 8 months of runway left for a 5 person team. To make it past the 8 months, we had to sell our product at a price that not only covered the variable costs of producing it (e.g. paying counsellor), but had enough of a profit margin to cover our fixed costs too (meaning office rent, software costs, our five salaries, etc).

Over the years that followed, I had many conversations where people pitched to me that we lower prices and lose money on new contracts in order to grow faster. The pressure was there. Looking back, with the UK in a recession and funding markets harder than ever to access, I’m grateful that we said no every time and that our future can be in our own hands. In order for Spill to be huge, we need to exist.

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2. The therapy

At the risk of sounding too earnest, I’m proud of our therapy product and some of the stances we’ve taken with it.

When I talk with people who have used Spill, they gush about the impact that one or two sessions had on them, even years later. People love their Spill counsellors.

When Maria (our Head of Product) joined Spill in 2018, she took the stance that some therapists would be better at delivering therapy to our customers than others. This is a controversial opinion within the industry, with most therapy institutions operating on the assumption that there isn’t a big range in ability level amongst similarly accredited professionals.

As an aside, this view (that one accredited health professional is generally as competent as another) is baked into how most health systems work. For example, you don’t get the option to speak with the “better” doctor when you go to your GP. Even the progressive parts of health services generally focus on improving processes and structures rather than who the specific practitioners are.

With this in mind, we built a hiring process for Spill therapists in 2019 based on the assumption that it was important to check for a lot more than just “Are they accredited?”. It’s safe to say we’ve benefited from that assumption ever since.

I’m trying to find a new therapist now. Because I’ll likely want to talk about Spill-related topics, I can’t have therapy through Spill (dual relationships etc). Not having access to a vetted group of therapists and instead having to go through the rigmarole interviewing 10+ therapists is a very frustrating experience. I’m pleased that we’ve made the experience really nice for people who can use Spill.

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Two things I think we got wrong

1. We weren’t commercially minded enough with what we worked on

I have always wanted to build products that are novel and interesting and say something new. Naturally, I hired people who shared those values too.

In a business, having too many people who share these values can mean that you spend too much time doing research and development work and too little time building what your customers really want. Which is exactly what we did in 2021. 🙈

In the first half of 2021 we built and launched 12 new features that extended beyond our core product of mental health support for employees.

All of these features were at the intersection of mental health and company culture. We built a tool to make yourself a user manual/personal README, a tool to check in with how your colleague was feeling before a 121, a tool to communicate your emotional needs to teammates.

Some of them really took off. Our most popular feature was a tool called Wall of Praise. The way it worked was that it collected the answer to “What’s great about {FirstName}?” for a randomly selected person in a business each week and then sent all of that praise in a huge wall of text. People loved receiving their Wall of Praise.

When we rolled this feature out of Beta almost all of our customers made (built?) a wall. We’ve had walls running (standing? — I’ll stop..) for over three years. On the face of it, our new features were a success.

We had a few problems though.

Problem one: all of these work-culture features started to dilute the brand of Spill. Employees used to associate Spill with the place to go for great mental health support. And then it became something different. We got feedback early on from one of our customers saying “I don’t really know how to explain Spill to people now”.

Problem two: although people loved using the features, they weren’t really driving the business forward. We didn’t demo them on sales calls and although people used them a lot it was always our mental health support that our customers referred us for.

Problem three: we ended up spending a lot of company time supporting these culture tools. Customer support, engineering support and making them work for bigger teams all took time and resources. We wanted to improve the therapy experience on Spill but could only spend half of our time there.

So we’d invented these cool features, but keeping them running required time and investment that took away from improving the experience that our customers really cared about. At the start of this year we had to announce the retirement of these culture features to over 300 customers who’d been using them for years.

It was a scary thing to do as we knew how much our customers loved them but we could no longer justify the time they took away from what really mattered.

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2. I stepped away from the commercial side of the business too much

The second mistake not staying engaged with our commercial team when it grew.

We grew our commercial team quickly in 2021 by hiring a Head of Sales, SDRs, account executives and a customer success team.

I didn’t run this part of the business well. The main mistake I made was simply not engaging with the day to day of this side of the business enough. Looking back, I didn't engage enough with this team for pretty stupid reasons.

I stepped away in part because I didn’t want to be seen as a micromanager by this team I had hired. I thought "we've made this investment into this part of the organisation and I want to be seen as somebody who trusts people who he's hired to know what they're doing".

I also stepped away because I’m introverted and if I didn’t have to expend a lot of energy doing sales anymore then that was better for me. It was a probably a 50/50 split between the two.

The problem (if it isn’t already obvious) was that it was difficult to collaborate with the team when I needed to because I felt like a visitor to that part of the organisation rather than a resident. One place that this became an issue was when prioritising the product roadmap. We ended up in a dynamic where we would prioritise some product features that would "close the next deal" (eg language support for a little-requested language or availability for some niche timezone that only one company would ever use) because that's what customers were asking for in sales calls. And the knock on effect of prioritising those short term wins was that we would go to the other extreme with the other product work and make that work too long term focused (see mistake number one). The ideal is obviously a harmonious middle ground.

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So that’s a few reflections from the past six years. Like many (all?) companies, there are some things we did well and some things we failed to do well. We grow, we learn, and we keep turning up.

Spill has come a long way in the last few years though. We now have a clear product strategy and I am much more involved in every function at Spill. (I have learned to be involved without micromanaging.)

When I think about the future, I feel even more excitement now than I did 6 years ago. Here are two of the things that give me most cause for excitement for the future.

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Two reasons I’m excited for the future

1. Our mental health support is only getting better and better

This year we’ve already shipped major improvements to our therapy service: 25 minute sessions for people with neurodiversity, more specialisms, and a trial of values-based matching, not to mention a full set of tools for feedback and quality assurance that will mean ever more nuanced improvements in the quality of care.

This month we’re releasing a major improvement to our Ask a Therapist service and are starting to think about how courses of counselling can be more tailored to somebody's goal.

It’s all bloody cool work :)

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2. We get to keep helping more people

People are actually just great.

I spend a lot of my time talking with business owners about their problems. I find it really easy to empathise with people who are working hard to build something they’re proud of. They do genuinely inspire me and make me feel less alone every single day.

I also spend a lot of time talking with employees about their experience with ill mental health. It's easy to empathise with someone isn't feeling great but doesn't want to be a burden but also doesn't know how to stop feeling not okay. They are the reason I turn up to work every morning.

I'm grateful that I get to meet these people and I feel energised by the thought that Spill can help them, even by just a bit.

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Thanks

Thanks for reading and thanks for supporting Spill over the years.

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