⸺ was a mental health platform combining a marketplace and SaaS model for both people seeking support and professionals providing it.
The challenge was not only to create a distinctive product and brand, but to make support feel safer, easier to access, and more credible in a category shaped by stigma, emotional friction, and fragmented care.
⸺ I worked across the full system to align strategy, product, service logic, communication, and experience.
This meant reconciling tensions between accessibility and clinical nuance, empathy and operational efficiency, and product simplicity and human complexity.
⸺ was a platform whose credibility came from systemic coherence. Destigmatizing entry, improving guidance and matching, digitizing access and coordination, and supporting professionals more effectively all reinforced the same underlying logic.
The statistics were already there:
COVID moved the conversation forward, but it did not make the category easier to navigate. Mental health still sat at the intersection of stigma, vulnerability, fragmented care, and low digital maturity.
Vulnerability lowers tolerance for friction, while stigma increases hesitation and delay.
Fragmentation obscures the path to care, while uncertainty raises the cost of every next step.
When I joined, the project was called MyTherapy – a name and product frame that were too narrow for the challenge, especially given the planned horizontal growth.
The lack of direction showed in the pace: after 8 months of development, only around 35% of the initial idea had been completed.
The original strategy underestimated the complexity of the market and the challenge of acquisition, while reducing the problem to therapist discovery.
In reality, people were looking for care that felt effective, accessible, and less fragmented – and professionals needed better conditions to deliver care and build a sustainable practice.
That broader view exposed the need for strategic and operational realignment. The way the project was being built had to change with it.
I restructured the team and introduced agile workflows, OKRs, and a community-driven development approach. Over the next 5 months, we rebuilt with clearer priorities and stronger momentum, leading to the soft launch of a reimagined product: Sensly.
What began as a simple marketplace evolved into a platform with integrated SaaS modules for professionals – strengthening acquisition, opening new paths for growth and scalability, and making the company more legible to investors.
Six months after launch, more than 160 mental health professionals and 2,100 patients were actively using the platform
Seeking support on the path to a better quality of life – often uncertain where to begin, what kind of help they need, or how to trust the process enough to take the first step.
Professionals trying to deliver meaningful care while facing low visibility, admin burden, and the challenge of building a sustainable practice in a fragmented system.
Through Sensly – a platform built to improve access, strengthen matching, and create better conditions for care on both sides.
Sensly digitized and simplified mental health care
by bridging professionals and patients through:
Connecting individuals with the right specialists for faster, more effective care.
By combining education with engagement, we aimed to normalize conversations around mental health and make seeking support feel more approachable.
Sensly’s positioning, thought leadership, and marketing were designed to earn credibility with mental health professionals – a group often cautious about companies entering the space.
Because the strategy was co-developed with professionals, it stayed grounded in the realities of mental health care and the barriers different groups faced in accessing support.
The result? Nearly 48% of Sensly users were male, compared with just 17% in typical offline practices – suggesting that reframing the conversation and digitizing the service can shift behavior in a meaningful way.
The platform offered three ways to begin, designed around different levels of certainty, autonomy, and need for support.
This allowed us to validate the direction early and move the product closer to market alignment, grounded in real-world use.
On average, mental health professionals lose 8 hours a week to admin – scheduling, payments, and non-therapy-related paperwork. Sensly treated that not only as an efficiency problem, but as time pulled away from care.
In an industry where credibility is everything, we used community-led growth and a bottom-up acquisition model to build trust, validate decisions, and support organic adoption.
Early skepticism within the therapeutic community helped sharpen the product. It kept us cautious and forced us to build something credible enough to win over even those resistant to digital care.
At Sensly, brand wasn’t a layer of identity added on top. It shaped how the problem was framed, what kind of value the platform created, and what promises it could credibly make.
Because that logic was rooted in user reality and validated in practice, it strengthened relevance, supported the potential for long-term product stickiness, and directly shaped the roadmap through feedback.
Brand is ultimately the sum of experiences. In the business models we tested, making those experiences meaningful wasn’t a nice-to-have, but the foundation.
Because people don’t pay for access alone. They pay for value they can feel – through clarity, trust, fit, and the quality of the journey itself.
I shaped and led Sensly’s strategy from early concept through execution — translating vision into product decisions, team direction, investor conversations, and day-to-day trade-offs.
The role stretched across everything: vision, leading an 11-person remote team, working with mental health experts, designing the product, pitching investors, and holding the moving parts together.
Building a startup in the Polish mental health sector a complex, underfunded market brought a different kind of challenge, but also rare meaning.
Despite previous ventures, stepping into the CEO role meant learning in motion: switching hats daily, making decisions under pressure, and being shaped by realities no book could have prepared me for.
Some lessons only become real once you have to carry their weight.
A few stayed with me the most:
Knowing isn’t the same as living it.
