Reducing anxiety and depression while building resilience with Superbetter

In Series 2 Episode 2 of the Health Points Podcast Ben and Pete welcome Keith Wakeman, the CEO and co-founder of Superbetter, a digital education and mental wellbeing company. Superbetter is recognized as one of 14 top innovators globally in youth mental health by the World Economic Forum. Keith has led the development and launch of over a billion dollars worth of new products in the health industry. He explains how he used his marketing background to create innovative solutions for improving health behavior change. Superbetter is based on using gameplay psychology as a framework for achieving goals and overcoming obstacles in all areas of life. The app has been backed by published randomized control trials that show it significantly reduces anxiety and depression while building resilience.

You can listen to this episode below:

Episode summary:

We discuss how Superbetter has been used to treat depression and anxiety, as well as its versatility in other areas such as career planning and chronic pain management. The origins of Superbetter are also explained, with Jane McGonigal creating the game after suffering from a concussion. The new update to the app called Squad Play is introduced, which allows teachers and therapists to create squads and host challenges for their students or clients.
Players receive an invitation to create an account and can play on a free player account through a web or mobile app. The game is available on Android, iOS, and the web version. Playing in squads has several advantages, including winning epic rewards for completing challenges and achieving daily goals that take less than ten minutes. The platform allows teachers, therapists, or anyone else to create their own challenges easily. The social component of squad play promotes higher retention rates compared to individual play in self-help apps. Squad play also shows promise in addressing youth mental health issues and has gained interest from educators at various levels as well as therapists. Research is underway to validate the effectiveness of squad play in improving mental wellbeing outcomes.
The launch of the latest version of SuperBetter, which aims to address youth and young adult mental health. The company is currently undergoing a soft launch and expects to learn more about its target audience in the coming months. They plan to use partnerships with teachers and schools to reach those who may not actively seek out mental health resources. The pricing of SuperBetter is affordable, making it accessible for students and their parents. We also touch on the business model and revenue strategies of the company. 

Outline:

Chapter 1:

Introduction to Superbetter (00:07 – 01:29). 
Ben and Pete introduce the podcast (00:07 – 00:16).
Keith’s role as CEO and co-founder of Superbetter (00:32 – 00:52).
Superbetter’s approach to using gameplay psychology for mental health (00:52 – 01:29)

Chapter 2:

Overview of Health Gamification (01:34 – 07:18). 
Keith’s background and interest in bringing game psychology to all areas of life (01:34 – 06:47).
Superbetter as a framework for looking at the overall world (07:15 – 07:18)

Chapter 3:

User Experience of Superbetter (08:43 – 09:50). 
The framework of Superbetter: focus, determination, goal-setting, collaboration (08:43 – 09:12).
Example of using exercises in workshops to improve wellbeing (09:36 – 09:50)

Chapter 4:

Research and Evidence-based Approach (09:51 – 12:16). 
Keith’s research on the gameful approach (09:51 – 11:19).
The evidence-based nature of Superbetter (12:16 – 12:18)

Chapter 5:

Applications of Superbetter (13:55 – 21:58). 
Superbetter as a useful tool for career planning and transition (13:58 – 15:35).
Jane McGonigal’s books on gamification and Superbetter (15:35 – 19:25).
Superbetter’s adoption by teachers and therapists for resilience building and mental health support (20:58 – 21:58)

Chapter 6:

Superbetter as a Digital Platform (22:14 – 28:53). 
Optimizing the overall user experience of Superbetter (22:14 – 23:20). Creating challenges and customization options (25:14 – 28:53)

Chapter 7:

Superbetter for Education (28:53 – 29:41).
Superbetter’s potential in educational settings (28:53 – 29:41)

Chapter 8:

Validated Methodology and Framework (29:41 – 32:17).
Ensuring the use of validated methodology in Superbetter (29:41 – 30:04).
Example of using personal toolkit for self-improvement (30:12 – 31:56).
The effectiveness of the Superbetter framework (31:56 – 32:17)

Chapter 9:

Collaboration and Partnership (36:11 – 42:06).
Collaboration with schools, teachers, and therapists (36:11 – 40:23).
Accessibility and reach of Superbetter (40:23 – 42:06)

Chapter 10:

Customization and Impact Goals (43:35 – 45:15).
Customization options for users (43:35 – 44:26).
Supporting impact goals of greater reach and impact (44:26 – 44:42)
Conclusion (45:02 – 45:15). 

Episode Transcript:

Ben
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Health Points where we talk about anything and everything. Gamification, health. I’m Ben and I’m here with my co host, Pete.

Pete
Hi, everyone.

Ben
And joining us today we have Keith Wakeman, who has led the development and launch of over a billion dollars of new products in the health and wellness and food industries. As CEO and co founder, he leads the expansion of Superbetter to address the global mental health crisis among young youth and young adults. The World Economic Forum recently named Superbetter as one of 14 top innovators globally in youth mental health. Superbetter is a digital education and mental wellbeing company. They are a global leader in using the psychology of gameplay to empower people to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals. Over a million people have played super better and super better was invented by world renowned game designer Jay McGonagall. Keith, that is a hell of a bio and intro to live up to. It’s fantastic to have you on the show today.

Keith
I’m thrilled to be here and I hope I can live up to half of that bio that you just read.

Ben
I mean, if I had even a fraction of that bio in years to come, I would be over the moon with it. So, yeah, really looking forward to talking to someone who has been there and done it. When it comes to health gamification, it’d be great for you to give us a bit of an overview of your background to begin with, Keith.

Keith
Sure. Let me start. So my career started in marketing and brand management. So I worked for large US food companies like Nabisco, Keebler, Kellogg’s for almost 20 years. I found I loved the process of looking at the market, figuring out how to grow brands, grow businesses, and I had lots of opportunities to lead innovation teams, corporate strategy, kinds of roles, new venture development as well. Part of kind of the way I identify is I’m an innovator. And just because I’ve done it a lot in the bio you read, I’ve created and launched over a billion dollars of products or led teams to achieve that. So that’s where I started. It was in the food industry at one point, I worked with Keebler and Kellogg for about seven years. Keebler was acquired by Kellogg and Keebler is a us cookie and cracker company primarily.

Keith
And so one day I had counted up how many cookies had my teens launched in the seven years I was at Keibler and Kellogg’s and it was over 30. And there’s a part of me that says, wow, intellectually I love the problem solving nature of that. How do you figure out the 31st cookie in a category like that? But in terms of making the world a better place, the world does not need another new cookie. Some I know in the audience will argue with me, and I very much respect that opinion. If you think the world does need another new cookie, but the world does need other kinds of innovation. So I left large organizations. I created a consulting business that I ran for about a decade.

Keith
We ran alongside organizations to build healthier food platforms, to build businesses that are in the space that superbetter plays, in which, at the time, we just called scalable models that improve health, that have proven health outcomes. And then from running the consulting business, I was the co founder of Superbetter. That now has my full attention.

Ben
How did that journey happen then? Where did Superbetter come from? Was it a meeting with Jane or kind of, how did that come about?

Keith
Yeah. So two things came together. First is when I ran the consulting business. One of our major clients that we ran alongside for almost four years was a large global healthcare and life sciences company. And were doing a lot of research in health, behavior change and wellness. And it just struck me at the time, most health behavior change programs don’t work. They’re not effective. I’m kind of generalizing, and this would be true for chronic disease management or for weight loss or for stress management. And we started to research, well, why is it the simplest example or the easiest example to point to is weight loss? Right? So even the best Science backed commercial weight loss programs, if 100 people start today, some will lose weight in the near term.

Keith
But a year from now, 95% of those people will have gained back all of the weight, and some of them will even have gained more. And it’s like, well, why the science is there? There’s no question that the research on what should work is part of those programs. They’re very well researched as well. And so we just started looking at, why is that? And what might be a different approach. And because of my brand management background, I’m big in looking at frames of reference. So if you participate in a program that feels clinical, it has a frame of reference of, oh, this is a clinical thing. I have to do it for my health.

Keith
I started looking at, are there other things that can feel maybe less clinical, less formal, less corporate, that might be frameworks to help people look at their health behavior change differently? And today that number, and actually, this was several years ago, so the number wasn’t quite this big, but we can see it going in this direction. So, gameplay, video gameplay is the largest existing framework on the planet that can be repurposed to help people in all of life to accomplish their goals or change behavior. Today the number is 3 billion people plus are playing video games on a regular basis. That’s 40% of the world’s population. So I got just really interested in that. How do we do something around bringing the science and psychology of gameplay to all of life at the same time? We’re kind of on a parallel path chain.

Keith
And some folks in entrepreneurs in San Francisco created the original super better company. I knew one of Jane’s co founders in that business. He’s a dear friend that I’ve known for 20 or 30 years now. I was watching and helping as friends do. That company did some great things. They also ran out of cash within six months of launching the app and were dissolved. So I just saw the opportunity, kind of, to bring the insight around, kind of how do we maybe use Superbetter to shift the frame of reference for people to be a platform or a framework to be stronger in all areas of life. Plus the opportunity to say, the original superbetter company no longer exists. So let’s move it into a new company that I co founded with Jane and take it to the next level.

Ben
It would be fantastic for you to give a walkthrough of a user experience of.

Keith
So, at the heart of super better, it’s a framework. So we talk about it as using the psychology of gameplay in all of. So, Superbetter is not a different way of looking at the world. It’s not a video game that you’re going to immerse and kind of step out of the world for a while. So it’s not that kind of an app. It’s more of a framework for looking at the overall world. For therapist that might be in the audience, it’s a psychological framework. And so the way that it works is there are seven rules to playing super better. You set your epic win, which is your goal. You recruit allies, you take on a secret identity.

Keith
And all of these rules that I’m sharing have great psychology and science underneath them, even though they feel very simple and gameful and very intuitive for the 3 billion people around the world that play games. So the other rules, every day, you’re going to complete a quest, which is a step towards your goal. You’re going to battle a bad guy. A bad guy is an obstacle that’s getting in the way of your goal. Naming that bad guy is very powerful because it creates awareness. Usually in superbetter, we name it something a little bit frivolous to kind of take it down a notch, and then once you’re aware of it, you can try different strategies to defeat that bad guy. The other rules are to activate power ups. Power ups are quick, simple activities that give you positive energy or positive energy boost.

Keith
Usually they evoke positive emotions. And there’s great research that says that when we can shift that ratio of positive to negative emotions in our life, it does good things for our emotional regulation and well being as well. And then kind of the overarching goal is to take on a challenge mindset, which is just that mindset. The challenge mindset is the mindset that we naturally take on. When we play games, anything is possible. We’re focused, we’re determined, we have a goal, we’re open to collaboration. Over half of video gameplay is social now. And so the challenge mindset is kind of an overall mindset of just how we kind of can use the framework to take on the world. So that’s the framework. Everything in superbetter is quick and short and easy. It’s the tiny steps model which has been shown to be very effective.

Keith
So playing super better typically takes about ten minutes a day. You can play longer if you choose, and then later I’ll talk about some of the research. But the research shows that if you’re playing super better on a somewhat regular basis for ten minutes or less a day, you’re seeing the positive impacts around resilience and mental health.

Pete
I agree with that, particularly the mini challenges and how actually fast they are. For years, I’ve actually been using super better. As an example, at the end of my workshops, getting the people in the audience to do two or three of the exercises in like two minutes and then saying, commit to that for a while and better.

Keith
I love that.

Pete
Yeah, spot on.

Ben
Following on for that. Keith, about the research supervisor around for so long now, you’ve got a fair amount of research. What have you learned with the data, the information? Were there any surprises in what you found in the data as well?

Keith
We’ve learned a lot with Superbetter. There are over a dozen articles published in peer reviewed journals. Some are primary studies of superbetter, evaluating superbetter in certain cohorts. Some are evaluative. Some were at least at arm’s length involved in. Some were pleasant surprises that researchers got excited about superbetter and did studies and published them and let us know after the fact. And we love it all. It’s all great. So some of the findings, some of the things that were just fascinating. So we are in that relatively small group of mental wellbeing, mental health related apps that are backed by published randomized control and clinical trials. One of our studies is a randomized controlled trial at the University of Pennsylvania. It showed that playing super better for 30 days significantly reduces anxiety and depression, and that it builds resilience.

Keith
And we have a certain way that we look at resilience and the social, mental and emotional metrics that are tied to higher resilience. What was interesting at first, it was like, because this was one of the first studies, it was, wow. This gameful approach, it is evidence based. What Jane built was brilliant, but it actually worked. So the confirmation of, even though it feels very gainful and it’s tiny steps, and it kind of feels like, maybe, don’t we need to be doing more than just tiny steps, or can a gainful approach work? So one is at work. And then as the field of research around smartphone apps for mental health, and especially anxiety and depression, continued to develop, and there were more and more randomized control trials, so other researchers started to do meta analysis.

Keith
So there have been a number of meta analysis in this space. In the very first meta analysis, and there were two of them, one looked at randomized control trials for smartphone apps for depression and the other for anxiety. Superbetter actually had the number one greatest effect size of all the randomized control trials included in that. So we’re like, wow, this is mega impressive. This is amazing, this gameful approach. As more and more come out, metaanalysis look at things in different ways. There have been more apps introduced that have now. Randomized control trial, it’s still a very small site, so we’re not always number one, nor is that our goal. We just want to be helpful. Right. And effective as well. But we generally are in kind of the top tier of groups.

Keith
Before I leave the randomized control trial from Upenn, the degree of change in depression and anxiety symptoms was also a very pleasant surprise. So it’s all significant. But when we looked at the way that depression and anxiety is measured in studies is it’s the number of symptoms that you experience. So there’s a depression scale that says, these are the symptoms, and it’s pre and post the same as happens as a different scale for anxiety. And so kind of the degree of, among a test population of mild and moderate depression, the degree of the declines in symptoms in that 30 day period for depression was a 49% decline in symptoms and in anxiety, 61% as well. So the degree, kind of how quickly they’re playing super better can have an association with reducing symptoms was also a very pleasant surprise.

Keith
The last thing I’ll share, we love how researchers have looked at superbedder and said, wow, this is a really versatile platform. What else can we study it around? So again, there have been a number of studies that have been published, things like in the British Journal of Counseling and guidance, a researcher published an article that said, well, maybe a game framework can be a useful tool for career planning and career transition. And then it was basically, they used the superbetter model, the methodology and framework to justify the article as well. So things like that were interesting. We’ve been evaluated for chronic pain in terms of having the best practices for chronic pain in evaluative apps. And even though this wasn’t designed as a chronic pain app, people use it to manage kind of the challenges of waking every day with persistent pain.

Keith
And so there’s a study that showed of 19 apps evaluated, super was one of three that had the highest marks for having best practices for chronic pain. So the versatility is the other one, kind of the ways that superbetter is used, and then researchers actually doing studies to either evaluate how superbetter might compare to other apps that are in the market for certain types of need states.

Pete
Now, superbetter originally, if I remember correctly, came out with the fact that Jane was recovering from concussion. And what a tool to help with that. Do you think that having someone on board who’s designing it, who is suffering from one of the illnesses, makes a difference to how fast it’s developed or how well it’s.

Keith
Invented? Jane was working on her first book, reality is Broken, a book that all of your audience should read around the topic of gamification in general. It’s one of the go to books in the standards, was one of the first that really talked about the science behind what the industry now calls his her head. She was in her kitchen, the cabinet door was open. She didn’t notice. She stood up too fast, got a concussion. At that time, Jane had spent about a decade. She has a phd from Berkeley in essentially game science. It had a fancier name than that, but she’d been studying that. She was very well versed in positive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy. She has a twin sister, Kelly, who is a psychologist at Stanford as well. So when she hit her head and got a concussion, it didn’t heal properly.

Keith
She was under doctor’s care. As a few months went by, she was experiencing anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation. Jane’s damaged brain was saying, jane, you just have no reason to live. And she got to the point that she said, I’m going to either create a game to help myself heal, or I’m going to kill myself. Unfortunately, she created a game that’s now super veteran has helped over a million people overcome obstacles in their own lives. Now, the role of Jane was this was a brilliant, correct person at the correct time in the correct situation, because to create a game to help herself heal from concussion, I couldn’t have done that, right? Most people can’t do that.

Keith
But she understood the psychology and the science of not only games, but the positive psychology and the other elements of the other major areas that she was actually to created something for herself that was really effective and then was able to bring that into the world. So it did matter. We do have people that will play super better to help with concussion. The platform is much more versatile than that, so it can be used for all kinds of different purposes. Mental health are two of the top three reasons people play superbedder are for depression, anxiety. So we do have a mental health element, which is fantastic given the challenges and needs in the world today around having evidence based tools to approach and address mental health.

Pete
That was cool. That was a really nice insight into how it came about. I need to tell the audience, of course, I’m a Jamie McGonagall fanboy. Having read realities broken in the start and the book super better, of course, which took me ages to read because she references so many games in it, I kept having to stop and play them. And even now, actually, I recently read her latest book, imaginable, and I’ve been taking part in gamified future simulations in urgent Optimists group, which is like building mental resilience for the future through a game as well. So I can see the game progression in all her work, but super better is the one, I think, so far seems for me have reached the masses most in terms of.

Keith
See, we’ll see. Yeah. Jane is brilliant. She’s continuing to kind of push, push around, kind of being the leading a real thought leader in the area of how we can use game science. Her latest book, Imaginable, combines game science plus futures thinking. She’s a director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. So those are the two areas that she has great expertise in. And so we love kind of the excitement around imaginal book as well. We also love that she wrote Superbetter. Right? So Superbetter is a book that was written a few years after the initial app was developed. And so it was a great time, because in Superbetter, she talks about, it’s a little bit of a continuation of reality is broken, like how games can change the world.

Keith
So the first third of the book is kind of what’s new in the world of games and science and how that can be impactful. But the last two thirds of the book, there’s a chapter on each of the seven rules of playing Superbetter that I talked about. There’s Pete, as you talked about, there’s great discussion of the science, a couple hundred scientific citations in the back. Right? So this is all, again, it feels gameful, and it kind of may even seem od to be like, well, games and science. How does that work? But Jane is just so thoughtful about making sure that everything she’s writing about is based on science. And then Superbetter has a lot of practical ideas and ways to use Superbetter. And one of the things that was actually a learning for us was Superbetter. We’re an evidence based app, right?

Keith
So we push evidence based content in the new version of Superbetter. We call them challenges. They used to be called power packs. So the content, but the secret sauce, or what’s magic about Superbetter is the framework, and the framework itself is evidence based as well. And the framework does not require the app. We love when people use the app, but what were finding, and I’ll talk about what we are just introducing in the market now in a few minutes. But for many years, Superwatter was a self help app, but also it had this gameful element, had great science. And so a lot of teachers and therapists and universities, they wanted to figure out how to use the framework, but the app, other than recommending the app, and we’re off. Schools, universities, counseling offices, they recommend us to better all the time.

Keith
We see it on their resources pages and things, and we love that. But they’re like, what else can we do? So we started to see teachers start to read the book and kind of say, I can’t really use the app in my classroom, but I can use the framework in my classroom. So we started to see teachers really adopting the framework to build resilience, social motion, learning to help with mental health. Right? So kind of these needs, as the incidence and prevalence of challenges of mental health started to increase among youth and young adults, and that was really the incentive when we started to see that, it’s like, wow, what if we actually made that easy for the teachers or therapists or the universities to actually have a digital platform that could be scalable.

Keith
They wouldn’t have to kind of read the book and figure out on their own kind of how to bring super better to groups and make it more of a tool again, versus something that you just recommend to somebody else.

Pete
That’s fantastic. So that basically sounds to me like your latest update to the app, which is called squad play. So is that around supporting that? What is it? What difference does it make to the gameplay and what do you hope for from it?

Keith
Yeah, so squad play is the new innovation, so we just introduced. It’s a completely new, refreshed version of super better. So we’ve learned a lot from having over a million people play. So we optimize the overall experience. It’s much more contemporary than the version that we replaced, but the exciting new feature is squad play. So now we have solo play mode, which is kind of like the old self help app. Right? So you’re playing on your own. In solo play, there’s a library of challenges. There are over 40, and so you can select one. It’s a great library. It has even things like one of the challenges that was validated in the randomized control trial at Upenn that I mentioned, or there’s others around stress and mood and anxiety and reducing anxious thoughts as well.

Keith
And then there’s social, emotional learning and skill building and others as well. So it’s a great library as well. So that’s in solo play mode. And then in squad play mode, what we allow here, squad play. So one of the products for squad play is a host account. So we’re inspired a bit by the cahoots of the world that allow teachers organizations or universities or employers or in our case, therapists also to go right to the website and subscribe. Of course, we’ll also sell bulk licenses to organizations, more b to b. But we really like, because of Superwood being a grassroots business that we’ve attracted over a million people to play. We’ve never spent a penny on advertising. Right. So we love kind of being at the grassroots. We think change happens, starts at the grassroots. So we love being that.

Keith
So a teacher, for example, can go right to our website and subscribe to a host account. We’re trying to make everything very affordable because we’re about impact. First, of course, we’re a business and we need to make money, too. So there is a subscription, but we try to make it very affordable. So for $99 us a year, a teacher can create a host account and host squad challenges for up to 30 players or up to 30 students. So a teacher with one class less than $100, they’re set for the year. So very accessible price points. If they have more students, there are other plans that allow them to host for more players there as well. What a teacher can do now with squad play is they can create squads, which is, we made it very easy.

Keith
So it’s uploading players into your host portal, creating squads and selecting which players you want to be in what squads. So very simple. Again, inspired by the easiness of tools like Kahoot, you can create a cahoot account and within five minutes you’re hosting cahoots. We were inspired by that. So all of this is very intuitive and simple. I’m going to stay with the teacher example. So they create their squad and then they can start hosting squad challenges. Squad challenges are there are five days of activities in every challenge. So it’s designed to kind of meet the rhythm of weekly school, if it’s a therapist using it, kind of what happens between sessions that often can be weekly. There are five days of activities the teacher can actually select.

Keith
They select a start date and they can select any end date up to 30 days later. So even though it’s five days later, if they want to give their students two weeks to complete the five days of activities, there’s flexibility to do that. The teachers select from a squad challenge library. There are almost 100 challenges to select from. If they select one from the library, they literally select. They choose the challenge. They can review it and see what the activities are. If they want to kind of review everything before it’s sent off, but it’s literally click a button, select the challenge, select that you want to host it, select what squad you want to host it for, and then send the invitation. You can either send the invitation now or schedule it to be sent later. So it’s very turnkey. On the other side.

Keith
The student in this example, or whoever’s part of the squad, they receive an invitation to play. If they have an account, they’re going to see that invitation in their superbetter account. If they don’t, they’re going to get an email saying, you’ve been invited to play. Here’s where to go to create your account. They can play on a free player account so they can download it. They can play on a web or a mobile app. It’s available on Android or iOS as well as the web version. They accept the challenge to play and then they play. I described the methodology earlier. So every day they’re going for, there’s an epic win for the week or for the five days, and then every day their goal is to win the day.

Keith
So winning the day means activating three power ups, battling a bad guy, completing a quest and doing a 62nd ally check in. And all of that takes less than ten minutes a day. For schools or other busy young people. It works kind of. The time commitment is very appropriate and we know from the studies that ten minutes a day is enough to have very strong outcome impact there as well. So that’s the overall, there’s also the ability, again, inspired by cahoot. Teachers or therapists or whoever wants to use this platform can also create their own challenges. And we made it just really easy to do that as well. It’s a very simple turnkey. It’s essentially adding a quest for every day and two bad guys to span the five days.

Keith
The system feeds in the power ups and the ally check in prompts as well. So we made it a very simple tool to also adapt superbetter for anything that the host wants to play. Now, I’ve used the teacher example and teachers were our design target because it gave us some really tight parameters, right? Security, privacy requirements of schools. If we check those boxes, it’s going to work in any setting. The classroom management and kind of the time constraints of teachers was a good target for us. So we knew we couldn’t make this something that was going to take the teacher a long time to set up or be very complicated. The privacy and security of what teachers actually can and can’t see it informed that as well. But anyone can come right to the website and host challenges.

Keith
It could be a college student that says, I just want to play with some friends, or maybe I’m in an academic club, or I’m really into climate change and I want to host challenges that encourage people to do things around climate change. We’ve been getting a lot of great excitement and interest from not only educators at the k through twelve levels, but at the university level. Therapists have been, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised how many therapists have been reaching out to say, to learn more and to be early adopters into the platform as well.

Pete
I’ve got a couple of questions from all of that. There’s a lot of information you gave us there about how it worked.

Keith
Sure.

Pete
First off, so do you see it as actually, more importantly, what sort of effect do you think it’s going to have? The fact that it’s no longer aimed at individuals, solo play and will there be a reinforcing effect by the fact, for instance, people in the same class will be playing it?

Keith
Yeah. So we’re going to learn a lot about that. So we’re very careful that we’re using the exact methodology, this exact framework that was validated in the studies and that Jane writes about and describes in the book. So it comes together in a different way, but it’s the same framework. And we know that when people can look at the world, what the framework does is it allows things. So let me give an example of. So one of my bad guys, like most people, I’ve got that little self critic, right? So I’ve got a self critic bad guy. It tells me it’s that little voice that says, keith, after this interview, I’ll probably do this. What did I say there? I shouldn’t have said that. That was stupid or they didn’t know. They’re not going to like me or whatever it is, right.

Keith
That little self critic voice. So for much of my life, I would go through and have that little self critic, and I wouldn’t even notice it, right. So I might notice that I’ve gotten quiet all of a sudden or that I’ve maybe kind of, all of a sudden, I have a really low energy or, like a little kind of a fuzzy feeling in my brain, right. I would notice it, but I’d be like, I don’t know what that is, and kind of just go on with life. But now that I’ve named the self critic and I have this framework of we all face bad guys, they get in the way, and one of mine is self critic, every time I feel that little energy drop, it’s like, okay, I know what that is. That’s the self critic bad guy.

Keith
And I have techniques that I use. I have a little toolkit of things that kind of, I can either find some examples to prove that bad guy is a liar or do some kind of slow down and do five minutes of meditation. So I can do that as well. So the framework, the same is true for power ups. The same is true for kind of this reaching out for ally support as well as kind of quests and epic wins. So the framework itself, it can be used. So we don’t know the. Obviously, we have to study the output, the outcomes of use in squad play. We have a pilot group that we’re setting up right now with at risk teens in Dallas, Texas, to start to collect that data. So we do have to validate it all.

Keith
But the evidence based, the premise is all very much this works. The framework works. The social component will actually help in many ways, right? Because self help apps, even the unicorns in our space, the big meditation apps, retention is terrible, right? So the very few people that sign up today will still be used mental wellbeing and mental health apps in 30 days. So this social component and having a context of, we’re doing this as a classroom. So all of a sudden, instead of very low retention, we get very high retention. Or if it’s a group of friends playing together, we’ve got social support. That happens in a very different way as well. So the social component, it’s different, it’s going to have benefits. It may also, again, we don’t know kind of what else we might see from that new aspect.

Pete
I mean, it sounds like we’re going to have you back on the show when you got the results.

Keith
I would love it. I would love it.

Ben
One thing, whenever giving lectures and talks and stuff, the one thing I kind of highlight is about the most successful apps on the planet are those that are social media apps, because it’s not about the relationship between the user and the app is what they focus on, the relationship between the user and the connections within that app, and that’s why they’re so successful. You reference Kahoot a lot in terms of examples out there in the field that you saw that as great features and functions to try and replicate. How did you get to the concept and idea of squadplay? What were the design process, the development process? Because it sounds what you created incredible. And I imagine it took quite a lot of time and effort. So how did you know that was the thing to develop and create?

Keith
Yeah, hopefully squad plays a big idea, so I’ll talk about it as it is. But a lot of times big ideas happen. It takes years and years. Right? And then it’s that Eureka superbetter. We think squad play may be that. That’s our hope and that’s what we build. So we’ve learned a lot over the time. We figured out that pretty early on that the big idea for superbetter was not to be just a self help app, but it’s like, where do you go from there? Do we just kind of go b to b and just start selling just to employers? There’s a lot of paths that kind of have been chosen, but we always look for kind of what’s going to make it work because we know the number.

Keith
I talk about the big meditation apps and retention, of course, supers in the wild, just from the App Store, we have the same headwinds as they do. So our retention also, our 30 day retention is very low as well because everybody says even if were in the big meditation apps have optimized, right. They’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve optimized. They’ve gotten improvements in retention, but it’s still very low. Right. So we’re not going to solve that, but through even the best techniques and the best. So just being a self help app was never kind of the big idea for superbetter. What led us to where we are, and I won’t go through the whole journey, but in 2020, were out of cash. We were like, wow, should we?

Keith
Even if were fiscally responsible to our families, we would have shut it all down, right? And were debating, or do we shut it all down? And we’re also in the middle of the pandemic. And all of a sudden, we’ve been watching, of course, the trends of youth mental health and young adult mental health. They started declining back in about 2011, 2012, and they’re pretty alarming rates. But the pandemic shined a light on it. It made it a lot worse, but it also gave it a lot of attention in the marketplace. So we’re like, wow, look at that. What a great application for superbedder to be a tool to help address the youth and young adult mental health crisis. And of course, the need was there, and we’re very much mission driven. So that’s a worthy need. We would love to be.

Keith
And I’m a father, a jane to mother. We have a heart for how do we help future generations? But the other thing that happened is all of a sudden, schools cared about mental health. Now, they always cared about mental health, but they weren’t going to put money into it, right? So there’s the caring and then caring with money behind it. So all of a sudden, universities, schools, therapists are now having, they can’t keep up with the demand for therapy overall, but especially youth and young adults, right? So things are changing. The employer market has changed to be much more mental health focused as well. So all of a sudden, and we anticipated and saw this starting to happen, like, okay, we’re not going to shut down the app. We’ll always be for everyone.

Keith
So we’re not saying we’re just for kids, but it’s like, how do we leverage everything that we’ve learning? And then the insight that I shared earlier around, people were reading the teachers and especially were reading the book and bringing superbedder to their classroom, it’s like, wow. So those kind of elements just came together and identified. If we can transform superbetter from not only a self help app, but also a practical and versatile tool for anyone who teaches or trains or coaches others, especially young youth and young adults, but not exclusively that there’s a business opportunity, because now instead of trying to get the young people that one of the things that’s unique about super better compared to meditation apps is we have a much younger audience. Right. So 80% of our users are under the age of 45. Right. It’s a very different dynamic.

Keith
I won’t share their demographic, but you can guess they’re older and their paying customers are more fluent than the folks that we reach and want to reach because of the age and kind of where we’ve sourced from, which is this exciting thing of, wow. I love video games. I can kind of play my life like a video game. We don’t have to worry about kind of price points and things for younger people that would price them out of the market as well as multicultural communities and others. Right. So again, our heart is how do we solve the youth mental health crisis for everybody or be a tool in that space? And so that was really the impetus and so the process was because I came out of leading innovation and have literally done it, led teams that led innovation process probably hundreds of times.

Keith
It’s much more entrepreneurial, but it’s the same process. Who’s the target? How would this be used? Lots of interviews. We especially talked a lot. Again, we needed a tight design target, so we picked teachers in school. So lots of interviews with schools and teachers and it helped some of the things we thought were going to build. Initially when we talked to teachers, they’re like, I like that, but I would never use it because whatever, it creates too much risk or too much work, a lot of just iteration through that as well. And then teachers were the design. And then we started talking, expand that and talk about what were building with therapists and folks in universities and others. And that kind of led us to what we’ve launched currently. Now what we’ve launched is kind of like a starting over.

Keith
So it’s kind of hard. We’re trying to do a soft launch right now. We’re about a week and a half into the launch, and it’s hard for superbetter to do a truly soft launch because people want to download it and play it, but we’re not marketing it in a big way or those kinds of things at the moment. And we’re going through that process, but we’ll learn, I mean, this is launching a whole new thing, and three months from now, it’ll be even better. In six months, we’ll also learn about a lot about who’s adopting super better. And that’s going to be fascinating. Right. Some of those groups that we think will be early adopters, maybe, like, that’s not really for me, and other groups that we haven’t even dreamt of would be like, well, that’s amazing. We’re going to adopt that.

Keith
So we’re going to learn a lot both on the product side as well as who’s going to adopt. And that’ll drive product development strategies and marketing and targeting strategies and all of that as well.

Pete
What I like about this approach you’ve got with helping the teachers, for instance, is that it should reach people it didn’t reach before. Yeah. Not just the people who go out look for it and find it, but the people probably more in need of it aren’t the ones that would necessarily go and find something like this. And actually, it reminds me, Ben, he’s a really big fan of this partnership approach in everything he does. And this strikes me as a good fit here. And I can see we might have to do a whole episode on partnerships.

Keith
I love that. I’ll do just a quick comment on that, because. That’s right, Pete. When we shifted towards kind of the aspiration of how do we play a role in impacting and addressing youth and young adult mental health, it’s like, okay, we’re not the only ones that care about that. We’re commercially a small company. We have a great reputation and lots of good things, but we’re commercially quite early stage, so we can’t do it all ourselves. But it’s like, who else cares about youth and young adult mental health? Who else is caring for our youth and mental health? So teachers. So the groups that I just talked about are the ones that they now share. If they didn’t before the pandemic they do now. They care about and need tools that are practical and engaging to help as well.

Keith
So the squad play, I mean, there’s a business component of a teacher or a school. Our pricing is low enough. Folks are going to pay for it, and they’re not going to feel. Usually the response when I talk to schools and teachers or therapists is like, that’s all you’re charging. That’s amazing. That’s not a barrier at all. Let’s talk about other things on how. Right. So we’re going to make it very accessible. But I’ll use in a university example, if an esports club at a university gets excited about this, if they have 100 members for about $3 per player per year, they can subscribe, right? So they could take up a little collection, a couple of bucks each. Host challenges all year long. College students all care about mental health. These sports folks are really into games, right? So it’s a great fit.

Keith
But for us as an entrepreneur around making the numbers work, it’s all about, in software models, it’s all about cost of customer acquisition because the incremental cost of adding one more user or player. I apologize for using the word user because we never use the word user. So that was a slip. So a player, because I think calling people users is not respectful to who they are as well, but for one player. And so for the case of the esports club example, we’re acquiring one customer who’s going to purchase the product. 100 esports college students are going to play. They can all play on a free account, but there’s also an upgrade feature.

Keith
Again, we’re making this very affordable for 24 99 a year, they can upgrade to a hero account and not only play in squad play mode, but that also unlocks solo play mode. So they can access the 40 plus challenges that I talked to customize their journey as well. $25 a year. Most college students can afford it. And almost every parent who cares about their kid and their kid’s mental health, if their kid can’t afford it, are going to pay for it, right? So it’s one of those, the price points. There will be some that can’t, right?

Keith
I don’t want to be too kind of bliss about how I’m phrasing that, but I know as a parent of college students now, I know I wouldn’t blink an eye to pay a $25 a year subscription if it helped my kid, one of my sons help with their mental well being. Again, one customer acquired 100 people are using our impact goals. It supports our impact goals of greater reach and greater impact. And then it also supports the revenue model, which lets us keep everything inexpensive. Right, because we can make a little bit of money on the host account, a little bit of money on some percent of people upgrading to the hero account.

Ben
Keith, it’s been absolutely fantastic to have you on the show today. Absolutely fascinating. The journey you’ve taken from the repurposing of gameplay as a framework, and then using the psychology of gameplays in everyday life, the business the innovation pricing strategies of super better, but also health gamification, product development as a whole. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been great to have you on and looking forward to having you back in the future.

Pete
I was just going to second that. It’s been really interesting and an engaging chat and learning about the journey of the app and development and how you target it. I think this is one of the first chats where a lot of the development and getting involved has come from the branding and market segment point of view as well, which I think is really interesting. So yes, thank you for coming.

Keith
You’re very welcome. I’m thrilled to be here.

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