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Providing the technical skills and resources to develop a Minimal Viable Product
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Written by Guy Robertson, co-founder & CEO of Dittolo
In 2020, my brother Duncan and I both went through a life changing experience. A mix of PTSD, other mental health challenges, and redundancy thrown in for good measure. Going through this together however, set the stage for what was to follow.
The entire experience left us with more questions than answers and we started researching the impact mental health was having in the workplace. What we uncovered was alarming. The first thing we learned was we are not alone. More than 25% of people in the UK experience a mental health problem of some kind and mental health costs UK employers more than £56b every year. That is an average of £1,800 per employee. While COVID has exacerbated the situation, these figures have been increasing year on year. This simply didn’t sit well with us, and we were compelled by our own experience to do something about it.
There were two major challenges we needed to address. The first is people’s reluctance to openly discuss their mental health in the workplace, and the second is the lack of any formal mental health strategies in the workplace. Yes, organisations are aware of mental health and have prioritised this more over recent years, but unfortunately most are simply “shooting in the dark” without any real insights to help them make informed decisions that support the business case for investing in mental health, and address this issue in a meaningful way.
We now found our purpose, and Duncan and I scraped every penny we could find and started to bootstrap Dittolo. Dittolo is going to help employees manage their mental health in a safe and confidential space while providing employers with actionable insights they can use to design and implement sustainable mental health strategies. What we had though was two old blokes – one with extensive experience in the airline industry, and the other with a change management background on a mission to build a technology for good platform. We needed some help.
Digital Pathfinders provided access to technical skills and resources that helped us design and develop our MVP (Minimal Viable Product). Digital Pathfinders became our technology partner and helped us translate our vision into a solution we could commercialise and develop further. Thanks to the hard work of the team involved, we were able to rapidly scale our development and in January of this year, we launched our MVP. We have now secured our first contract in the education sector and have grown to ten schools and over 400 employees.
If you would like to learn more about the Digital Pathfinders programme and how our Digital Adoption Specialists can help your organisation, please get in touch at: hello@digitalpathfinders.uk
"My advice to any founders who have a great idea but maybe don’t have the technical background is talk to the team at Digital Pathfinders. They will help realise an ambition which you might otherwise not have been able to deliver on your own. That’s what they’re there for: to help people with vision, commitment and drive but without a technical background to start a business and get it off the ground."
