San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
As mental health needs rise, WeTree encourages users to seek help
Steve Cunningham and Lorenzo Gomez want people who are feeling mental health strain to use their recently launched app called WeTree to connect with family and friends for help. But while they seek to tap into the support of social networks, they don’t want people to think of their app as social media.
Unlike social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which strive to keep users engaged for as long as possible, thereby generating as much ad revenue as possible, WeTree seeks to be a catalyst for real-life therapeutic conservation. It asks users to fill out a basic questionnaire about their mental health, known as the Mental Health Minute, that asks what emotions they’re feeling, what they’re grateful for and what they’re struggling with — all with an eye toward strengthening and leaning on meaningful relationships.
“One of the things that we found in our research is that the single best way to protect yourself from all the stuff that’s going on in the world is to have strong relationships,” Cunningham said. “Being able to talk about the things you’re struggling with is critical for maintaining and nurturing those relationships. That’s what most people struggle with: ‘I don’t know how to talk about this stuff. I’m the only one who feels this way. I don’t want to be a burden to people.’ ”
There are several mental health apps available, but Cunningham and Gomez believe WeTree is the first that helps users form supportive networks
of family and friends for coping. Others, they say, connect users with professionals or help them resolve problems on their own.
Both founders are rooted in San Antonio’s entrepreneurship community. Gomez is co-founder of Tech Bloc and the chairman of Geekdom, while Cunningham is CEO of readitfor.me, which summarizes self-help and business books for busy leaders. They run WeTree from Pearl’s coworking space.
The app launched on May 3, during Mental Health Awareness Month.
Cunningham and Gomez recently sat to discuss their experiences with mental health, how they got the idea for the
app and their plans for its future. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How has the app fared since its launch?
Gomez: It’s been awesome. We’ve got a lot of inquiries, a lot of leads from businesses, a lot of individuals sign up. We’ve had a lot of people just in our personal lives coming up and saying, “Hey, I saw the app and referred it to someone.” I feel like we’re starting the word-of-mouth propagation.
Cunningham: As soon as we say, “mental health app,” all of a sudden, everybody’s eyes get bigger. They want to talk about it. It’s something that’s clearly
on everybody’s mind right now. Everybody is struggling with something. They feel like, “Finally, I’ve got something that gives me an opportunity to get (it) off my chest.”
Q: Why do you think mental health is on everybody’s mind right now?
Cunningham: The last few years have been hard. My background is in the personal development space, people wanting to get better at certain skills. A couple years ago, before the pandemic, I launched a simple tool to get people to basically deconstruct what they wanted in different areas of their life, as a personal development exercise. One of the questions was, what are your emotional goals? I sent it out to a bunch of people, and every single person that I knew personally wrote in their answer something along the lines of “decrease my fear and anxiety.” It was a real light bulb moment for me. Man, everybody’s struggling, including me, because I was like, “Me too. I guess I’m not the only one who feels this way.” I didn’t know what to do with it. So fast-forward into the pandemic, I know everybody around me is struggling. And I knew from their social media posts that they were not talking about it. Maybe we can give you an opportunity to be honest about it.
Q: So that was the genesis of the idea.
Cunningham: Part of it was we had done a lot of work in the positive psychology world. Just trying to understand, like, what does “flourishing” mean? What does “well-being” mean beyond just feeling happy? Lorenzo, in his book “The Cilantro Diaries,” wrote about mental health. So I knew at least someone in my crew was passionate about mental health. He was the one person I knew that had the courage to talk about it.
Gomez: It’s a mental health book about my middle school on the West Side. One of the things that I discovered is that, like what Steve said, everyone wants to talk about (mental health), but nobody wants to go first. When I published the book, everyone would just say, “Oh my God, I read your book,” and then they would proceed to tell me their version of my story. That was really eye-opening. I just wrote it because I wanted to get it out. So when Steve called
me to talk about what he was working on, just from that experience, I thought, “Oh, this is a really good way for people to go first.” I think that’s one of the great values of the tool, is it makes it really easy for someone to go first.
Q: Where are you getting your funding from?
Cunningham: Right now, we’re getting it from customers. That’s step number one.
Gomez: It’s basically selffunded. I’m working for free right now.
Q: Do you plan to seek investors later?
Gomez: We don’t know. We’re completely open to it. What’s funny is we’ve had, gosh, probably half a dozen customers either offer to invest or introduce us to investors. So there has been a lot of investor interest in the app.
Cunningham: At this point, we’re taking it day by day. Whether it’s customers or venture funding or angel investors, we don’t really know exactly what the need is right now.
Q: So the users of the app are encouraged to check in every day.
Cunningham: You’re encouraged to do it daily. Most people will do it multiple times a week; a lot of people do it daily. It’s enough that you’re in communication with the people that are in your inner circle. Over time, it’s kind of like peeling an onion. People get more and more comfortable sharing the things that they’re struggling with.
Gomez: We’ve heard this from multiple users — conversations I never would have had. This whole notion that it’s facilitating things that never would have come up organically. It gives you a reason to do it. I think there’s three obstacles we’re overcoming. The first one is, we’re conditioned in polite society to just tell a little white lie, which is, “Hey, how are you doing? I’m good.” There are so many people; they’re not good,
but we’re not taught to say how we really feel. The second one is, it’s not normalized. You know, I didn’t even hear the term “mental health” until I was in my 30s. It’s not part of our vernacular. The third thing is that even with the people that we care about, even the people that we know care about us, we tell ourselves this lie, which is, “I don’t want to bother them. And I don’t want to be a burden to them.”
Q: So if someone indicates they’re in trouble, you’re encouraged to reach out to that person outside the app?
Cunningham: Right now, the idea is you would text them or call them ... and offer your support. But also, follow up when they’re doing well. It’s the whole spectrum of just being there for somebody. A lot of times, when people share good news, they don’t have a lot of slaps on the back. It’s about building those relationships with the people that will be with you on both ends of that spectrum.
Q: Is that something you might change? Having them reach out inside the app?
Gomez: One of the things that we both love about it now is that it’s very simple. I feel like most social media platforms are trying to get you addicted, so that you never leave, and we’re OK with our users leaving. We’re OK if this is a tool that just facilitates the human experience
again — you know, let me get you off and back to human interaction. That’s very important to us, because everyone has seen all the research come out about how the endorphins hit you every time someone likes that. And that’s really not what we’re about.
Q: Do you consider this a social media app?
Cunningham: No. I think we specifically don’t want to call it a social media app for that very reason. Social media apps are designed to get you addicted to them so that they can serve you more advertising. That’s the entire purpose. I think we want to position ourselves as far away — the anti-social media app, almost, although there’s a social component to it. We’d rather name it a mental health app.
Gomez: I would only add one thing. I believe we’ve created a new category, which is mental health engagement. I consider social media to be this different solar system in the marketing world. In the mental health space, you have the meditation apps on one side — which is sort of, you know, self-discipline, “I have to do it by myself.” And then you have apps that connect you to a therapist. We’re this completely third category, which is you do it in a community with at least one other person.
Q: Do you have plans to add more functionality?
Gomez: The next big one is mobile. Mobile is not out. I think that one will be in the next couple of weeks. But specifically, notifications. The whole idea that when I do my daily pulse, you’ll get notified, which is a passive way of saying, “Hey, have you done yours?” We think that’s going to be the next big engagement booster.
Q: Apart from that questionnaire, can you submit a long-form post?
Cunningham: No. I think that’s one of one of the reasons why people are attracted to it — probably similar to how Twitter was. You can only do so much in it, but the idea is, how do we get you out there to then go talk? Because your spouse or your kid or your parents or your best friend, they don’t need a blog post from you. They just want to know, how are you doing today? And if we need to talk, let’s talk.