How Barbara Estimated the Market Potential of her Idea to Help Women
Barbara is a self-employed consultant and strategist applying and blending methods of human-centered design and agile to create meaningful products, processes, and spaces. Up until recently, she was running her own design consultancy business based in Switzerland. When she’s not using design to help people, she enjoys being in the mountains snowboarding, bouldering, and mountain biking.
By Barbara Schnyder, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
Women’s topics are close to my heart and I’m consistently frustrated by the lack of solutions and resources made available to women. One day, I stumbled across a World Health Organization article about postpartum depression. Approximately 1 out of 10 women suffer from this condition, and this led me to believe that there must be some sort of resource out there for women who suffer from this condition. It’s hard enough for any woman who’s just given birth to organize her day, let alone do this when you’re suffering from a mental disease like postpartum depression.
So, I started looking into digital solutions for women suffering from postpartum depression and I didn’t find any. I decided to then take it upon myself to start drafting a potential digital solution for women suffering from postpartum depression.
“I found out there were no solutions and I just thought, this can’t be. So I said to myself, we must do something.”
I reached out to a couple of my friends who are psychologists. I heard from many of them that there is a surge in blended treatment approaches in psychological treatment programs, especially since the pandemic. Blended treatments entail having patients both do online counseling and in-person counseling. The approach I came up with after a bit of preliminary research was to incorporate a blended treatment approach with being able to get a formal diagnosis for postpartum depression. Fostering an online community would be a part of this approach, as many women tend to feel isolated with postpartum depression.
“So I would theoretically create a community for people with this condition, plus matching patients with a therapist. It should be a one-stop-shop.”
Now that I’d drafted a product idea, it was time to see if it was feasible from a business perspective. The first step to determine this idea’s viability was to conduct some simple market research, which involved conducting interviews with potential customers and therapists to examine strategic positioning. It became clear that I’ll have to properly differentiate this product and have begun to explore the viability of the overall idea by prototyping various potential business models.
Another aspect of the market research was simply done at my desk, where I read about current studies and trends in mental health disorders. Some smaller studies have indicated that there has been an increase in anxiety and depression during the pandemic, and health experts predict that digital forms for therapy will play an important role in the future of mental health care for self-management of various mental health disorders. Digital therapeutics as a field are expected to grow to $56 billion globally by 2025, and Switzerland just mandated a law that stipulates psychological treatment must be covered by insurance for patients as of March 2021. Therefore, it can be easily proven that not only is there a growing trend in this arena, but a political push to ameliorate people’s mental health in a digital manner. I knew that the idea was interesting and could be helpful, but it was important to analyze and estimate the viability of the project from a business perspective.”
I then estimated the market potential of this possible product using prototyping with numbers with a Top-Down approach to better substantiate my research with hard numbers.
Here is how I approached my Top-Down analysis. The total addressable market (TAM) of pregnant women worldwide is 140 million, and if we are to take 6.5%–12.9% of this number, (the estimated percentage of women suffering from this condition), to estimate how many suffer from postpartum depression, we get 9–17 million. About half of these women have access to healthcare and treatment, which brings us to approximately 4.5–8.5 million women. Furthermore, only 50% of these women seek help, which brings us to 2–4 million women (SAM). If we assume that of the 2–4 million women who seek help for postpartum depression, 20% of them would use a digital solution, that brings us to our Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), which is roughly 400,000–800,000 people.
These simple calculations show that there is considerable potential in terms of user numbers seeking a digital solution for postpartum depression.
The Top-Down Calculation for Barbara’s Idea.
The great thing about having gone through this process of estimating the feasibility, desirability, and viability gives me greater confidence in my venture design journey. Since I’d already gone through this process while doing the d.MBA, this challenge didn’t feel as daunting and I had an idea of what steps to take to identify the knowledge gaps. I know exactly where I am in the process and can anticipate what comes next. As a part of the market research, I also conducted interviews with potential customers and therapists and thought about strategic positioning to differentiate this idea from others on the market. My probable next step is testing the viability by prototyping different business models.
I’m eager to see how this project develops further and I’m learning a lot every step of the way. What especially inspires me is the prospect of helping women in need with a digital solution.