Good point and thought. I started this because of my ADHD built the product with a community of 50 ADHD-ers alongside us (not including the coaches and experts). We also do a lot of work in advocacy for adult ADHD, women x ADHD, BIPOC x ADHD, and more. Our mission is rooted in helping people with ADHD succeed, however if we happen to help others that's even better! I guess we're choosing the harder route.
We have a community of ADHD, Autism, and generally mental health founders that we build alongside of. Starting a startup is hard, especially when you're mission-driven, so we love helping wherever we can and will take the help we can get to! It's a big, interrelated problem we're solving and we need to work together to get us closer (because we are VERY far off).
Yes, definitely! Would love to chat and hear more about what you're building, and share whatever we can to help. Email us directly at hi@shimmer.care, both Vikram & I get emails from there!
I've seen the same ads, and we definitely don't advertise to "cure" ADHD in any way. We actually don't even do a free trial, as we want our members to be committing to the coaching process intentionally. We try to make our processes the opposite of predatory—e.g. if a member is inactive for 40+ days, we check with their coach and automatically cancel them. If they forget and tell us when the bill comes, we refund them.
Unfortunately ADHD-specialized therapists are few and far between, especially once you layer in insurance. We are working on creating recommendations & databases of other ADHD-specialized helping professions like therapists to informally connect our members to when they need that!
I love this question! This is the exact problem (or one of them) that we're solving. All the info is out there, but it's about practice. With your coach, you'll be experimenting each week with different skills or habits and trying to arrive at the system that works best for you. Your coach will help you prioritize & keep you accountable, but also help you remove roadblocks and learn from reflections. There are also "hacks" as well that our coaches and members share with each other, for sure.
Thank you—we have received this feedback a few times, and will definitely be decreasing the size and amount of text on our homepage. With 2 FTE (me and my co-founder & CTO Vikram), we haven't gotten around to it yet (but it's high on our list!). I think right now the website reflects a bit of my writing/speaking style, which is a bit of "oversharer" but working on changing that.
The biggest difference between Shimmer & e-therapy is that we offer Coaching. Coaching is a partnership for action—for goal-oriented action. You partner with your coach and make changes in your life to reach those goals: e.g. you may be perfecting your morning routine or working on your habits for work-from-home, whatever it may be. For e-therapy, or therapy, it's more about unpacking past to present, talking, processing, etc.
Lastly, for Typeform, we are also working on moving off of it, bad reason but also because we are a lean team and test each part of our flow first (with 3rd party services) and have slowly been migrating to build in house for parts most important. Right now many of our priority features are focused on member experience with coaching for building in-house.
Thank you, anonymous person! I appreciate the recognition a lot. I have personally gone through many routes as well, in support of my ADHD, and I hope to be able to continue creating & working on a piece of the solution that is beneficial to the community! My favorite part about work is hearing success stories or members working through challenges. It's an honor to be a part of their ADHD journey!
Thank you for sharing your thought process & feedback taken on the wording. I'll go back to this one. And I really do appreciate you sharing your personal story. Especially the last part where you acknowledge that we wouldn't have kept coaching if you weren't in the right space. This is true in that we have gently recommended pauses to several members when they weren't in the right headspace to continue with coaching and weren't in a space to benefit. This is true across most coaching modalities, in terms of the focus on forward movement and the need for the capacity to support this. I personally have both a founder coach and an ADHD coach, and can attest to the amount of work necessary outside of sessions to create sustainable results. Once again, thank you for sharing your story, and wholeheartedly agree that it's not about "fault", just about fit!
Thank you for sharing your experiences - neurofeedback/ neurostimulation is indeed a novel and promising pathway to, ultimately, improving quality of life for those who has ADHD. While we can't talk about all of coaching since it differs, our coaching offer which is informed by the 3rd wave cognitive and behavioural psychological approaches, is situated firmly within the practices that were demonstrated to be useful and helpful to those with ADHD. This is supported by the ongoing research in coaching and psychotherapy. In addition, our view is that it is a combination of different types of interventions which really makes a difference for those with ADHD. I am eagerly watching the progression of Neurode though, and the trials!
Thanks and agree on protecting our members and their private conversations. Right now, we use Google Meet videos for the video sessions with a coach and so they are encrypted end-to-end and not recorded. We also don’t store any information from the google meet session in our platform. We can definitely include this in our privacy policy and will look into how to make this more transparent with regards to our data policies. We will be building out video functionality in the near future and our privacy policies including opt-out etc will be included.
We hope to stay in this good faith category, and unfortunately are not able to offer "rock bottom app store prices". We believe in the power of human connection (with others, with coach) so we will not be replacing humans with AI. However, I will say, we already have AI components (on the back end to help with coach efficiency—e.g. helping coaches summarize notes, helping them schedule sessions, prioritize their messages, etc.) so hopefully it's not a surprise when we say AI!
Thanks for having us in the "assume good faith" category—we are committed to staying there! And I appreciate your sentiment. We have already made changes to the website, communication, flows, and processes based on this megathread, so I'm very grateful (even if emotionally hard)!
And re: auto-cancel, we've also debated this internally at length. We believe that the worst "startup poison" is not adhering to your customers, so we definitely don't mind shutting off subscriptions and have done it numerous times.
Currently I will admit it's not automated fully yet but my co-founder & CTO tracks whether members have been inactive 40 days (since some users might be paused for a month) and then he goes through this every week or so and double check their meeting with their coach (and if needed, check if there's a pre-agreed situation with their coach) and then will unsubscribe them. We are already in the processes of solidifying the protocol here to make it fully automated. A bit of context on why we don't cancel right away: holding the member's spot with their coach and ensuring the coach has the time/capacity to serve them is important, and sometimes members just don't show up for 1-2 weeks and when they come back, their coaches work with them to either catch up or sort something else out. If we were to just take their spot away, it can be really jarring (especially in harder times for our members) to not have their spot with their coach anymore (e.g. recurring time in calendar held) or support with that coach all together (e.g. coach capacity). Thinking more about it, one of the options we threw around was to have members be able to set this up early on: e.g. "If I don't do X for 30 days, please pause my account, I acknowledge I may not be able to access the same coach after", something along those lines. Very open to ideas.
None of them are our own in-house certifications. We haven't designed that yet, however we are considering it. Not meant to replace incoming certifications in the short- or medium-term, but to reward coaches for their learning and work and for common language. Example credentials of our coaches are: ICF, NB-HWC, MSW, PhD, EMCC, PsyD, LCSW, LMFT. Not all coaches have all of those credentials—it'll differ by coach.
I'm super sorry to hear about your ex wife. I have someone close to me in the same situation and we've also been battling it for our whole lives. No need to apologize for the rant, I'm also here being mad for you (for us)!!
We thought about this a lot and asked many potential members and members. The purpose of this question is to get a sense of the most pressing challenges (such that if they begin, the coach knows them) so we don't want folks to answer "all of the above". Also, in coaching often only a few can be tackled at the same time. It also forces some reflection of prioritization (which in itself can be super hard for people with ADHD, we acknowledge) which hopefully is helpful to folks. There's some tradeoffs here, we acknowledge. We try to balance the purpose (for us, Shimmer, and for the member) and the logistics of it, but are always open to suggestions!
Thank you for this. Many of our members have the exact experience you're talking about here. Many therapists go as far as saying they specialize with ADHD when they in fact don't. For those who do specialize in ADHD, it's far and few between—with waitlists out the door. Additionally, therapy is addressing different but sometimes overlapping space we are—we are forward-looking, action-oriented coaching (e.g. reaching goals and how you set up your life for it) and we don't do therapy (more backwards looking, unpacking, talking, etc.)
Thanks for your comment and perspective. Our services, as mentioned, are not medical services for ADHD. It is forward-looking, goal-oriented coaching with a specialty in ADHD and executive functioning. The entire modality is represented by organizations like ACO https://www.adhdcoaches.org/ and recommended by top ADHD experts and doctors alike - specifically as a non-clinical, non-medical addition to support people with ADHD. We welcome anyone who wants to come and be coached on ADHD-related skills & goals. For example, if you want to work on your executive functions but you don't have an ADHD diagnosis, you're completely welcome here! This is also because certain cultures (or an array of different circumstances could put someone in this position) prevent folks from getting a timely diagnosis and/or they don't want to tell their parents, etc. But in this case they can still get coaching with less of the stigma.
This was an excerpt of a longer message; we did not claim all our coaches are licensed or certified mental health professionals.
Original wording:
All of our Shimmer ADHD Coaches are licensed or certified mental health professionals* or have extensive experience with ADHD & undergo our Shimmer Coach Training program
The most common certifications for ADHD coaches are from ICF and NB-HWC, although those generic coaching certifications are not just for ADHD. There are targeted training schools / credentials from organizations like iACT as well that are focused on ADHD Coaching. Many of our coaches are trained at iACT but some also have PhDs/masters in ADHD-related fields in addition to generic coaching.
I'm sorry nothing has worked for you so far—I had similar experiences when I was diagnosed. If you're willing to, I'd love to do a free consultation with you to see if we (or any other program our coaches know of) can help! chris@shimmer.care
We also would like this to be covered through reimbursement, however we're not there yet (with ADHD Coaching) and right now it's primarily out of pocket. The team at Well Coaches and other organizations (including ICF, ACO) are working hard to progress the modality.
In terms of cost, we do try our best to keep costs as affordable as possible and have a needs-based financial aid program. We also do a lot of scholarship sponsorships whenever we can with our community partners. We hope to do more in the future (and some are coming in October!)
We weren't advertising anything that isn't true. We do have qualified mental health professionals on our coaching team (many of them are), but we changed the language so it didn't seem like they were providing medical services at all. The threads here helped us understand how it was coming off (not in terms of true or not, but in terms of how it read/implied) so we switched the ordering. Happy to expand more or change anything that isn't true or is deceptive!
Agree that we want to bolster (1). Also we are not trying to prove we are medically improving symptoms, as that is not our service. We are helping members with ADHD reach future-oriented goals, and take ADHD-adapted approaches to coaching. So having them go through onerous testing etc., when we aren't a medical service, especially if it would suggest to others that we are, wouldn't make sense.
(2) I'm not saying that it takes 2 months. I'm saying we will begin enroling folks into the pilot in 2 months. We have been planning for a while now. Also, we are not trying to plan a randomized control trial nor prove medical outcomes, so our pilots are different.
Thank you for your advice! Would love to learn more about what you're building!
Re: "loose ends": we're currently conferring with adhd experts in academia and medicine to choose the right outcome metrics to study, make sure they have the right (recent) peer reviewed literature, incorporate them into our processes/tech such that the UI/UX is friendly for folks with ADHD, etc. The outcome metric(s) are the most challenging part right now because we want it to be aligned with existing body of knowledge (as you mentioned), yet reflect what we're working on (most aligned with Health & Wellness Coaching and Acceptance Commitment Training)—e.g. we're not looking for simply measuring symptoms, more so impairment and life quality. And for "data collection", we're also working with our clinical advisor on the minimum amount of data (and what variables) we'll need to ask from our members for the study. Happy to elaborate on any of the above and our process, where we're at, etc., offline! chris@shimmer.care
Thank you for this comment, we've changed the language to reflect this last point on formal medical accreditation, and clarified that even if they do have medical credentials, in Shimmer's capacity they will be practicing ADHD coaching
We've just changed our language with the support of our care team and the folks in this thread! Super open to more suggestions if it can better represent what we're doing (ADHD Coaching)
I made a few small changes to current, but not everything. And yes, I like that example of low-/high-noise. We're going to look into this in the coming weeks as we revamp our website.