Dr. Willard is a mental health tech entrepreneur, licensed psychologist, national certified school psychologist, and published author. Dr. Willard has experience as a psychologist, conducting diagnostic assessments at local clinics and as a fellow at JFK partnership with the Children’s Hospital.
She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder, a Master’s Degree in psychology from Pepperdine, and a Ph.D. in Child, Family, and School Psychology from the University of Denver. Before starting Cadey, she worked as a clinical psychologist and school psychologist for more than a decade, providing training, assessment, and consultation.
Please tell us a little bit about your business – what is Cadey all about?
Cadey is a child psychology assessment and intervention platform to help parents in distress. The app provides valid and immediate recommendations for parents of children struggling with mental health, behavior, or development. Parents can take a free assessment online and get a roadmap to improve their child’s trajectory and their family’s life.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company.
My co-founder and I are psychologists who had been working in the field of assessment for a long time. We kept hearing a familiar refrain from the families we were working with – they would say, “Oh, this is so helpful. You’ve helped me find a much-needed path for my family. But where were you four years ago when my kiddo was getting kicked out of kindergarten or when I was getting calls every day to go pick them up from school?”
Access to care and finding the right clinician is a real problem for families. They end up wasting a lot of time going down wrong paths or being told by well-meaning teachers and pediatricians to be patient, to give kids time to outgrow phases. Unfortunately, although well intended, advice like this really sets families back. They end up missing out on interventions that could have changed their lives. So, we came together to develop Cadey so that we could use technology to reach families more quickly. We put decades of information from our brains into an app with the goal to reach 1 million families through technology.
Right before I came to psychology, I was actually in the technology field. I was an enterprise software sales representative. So, I had lots of exposure to technology and always enjoyed it. My dad is actually fairly famous in the technology world as a methodologist in the agile approach. I always thought we would figure out a way to develop a software tool that would enable psychology.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- First of all, you have to have passion. Passion is what drives the confidence to really believe in your success and to know that it will all be worth it in the end.
- It’s also important to be authentic and genuine with your customers and employees because startups are very uncertain. There are no guarantees, there’s no job security, no such thing as that. And so you have to be really clear with your team. “Listen, if the ship goes down, you’re gonna have a heads up and that’s all I can provide to you.” So authenticity is key.
- Something that’s been super important in every aspect of our business is empathy. We really focus on having empathy for our customer and building the tools based on what the customers say they need, and really listening to how our tools are, or are not helping with certain situations that come up for their family. We always ask, how can we be better? How can we make it more accessible and more helpful? In terms of our team, it’s really important to me that they feel understood and cared about, that they are surrounded by people who are really and truly on their team.
Passion, authenticity, and empathy are all key.
What are your plans for the future and how do you plan to grow the company?
This is a really exciting time for our business. We feel like we have landed on a gold mine in that we uncovered this clinical breakthrough where we can use a survey method with parents and get really close to what a clinician would’ve said. Now that we know we can do that, we can begin to build out those tools, to make them more and more accessible for families. Our users can actually get a lot of the same skills, information, and tools that they would get in a psychologist’s office out of an app. We’ve proven that it is possible and the product is starting to produce those kinds of results. That’s really exciting. From a business perspective, we are learning about the different ways that we can reach customers and monetize the platform. The app will always be free. The assessment will always be free, and that is really, really important to us because we want to reach as many families as we can.
As far as monetizing goes, we are pursuing two primary paths. We are able to provide immediate answers with our Q&A feature. This is AI enabled and then supported and gives ready access to a psychologist as needed. The other feature is our courses, which are brief 20-minute classes on how to implement our recommendations at home. We are starting to see that although some of our users want quick answers, other users want more in-depth and detailed information once they are ready to take action on the recommendations. The growth is going through the roof, which has been fantastic. We’re continually building out these tools to be more effective for the families.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
The most exciting thing that we’ve been able to do is to leverage this huge body of content that we wrote. Anna, my co-founder, and I literally took a decade of psychology research and put it into these articles. The goal was that we wanted families who were searching for specific topics to find good information right away. Again, that is free. It will always be free. We don’t advertise the heck out of you when you’re in those articles. We really wanted it to be something reputable and that’s working. We have over three hundred key words that are populating on page one in Google. So, when people search for certain topics, we pop up. That has been a super successful tactic for us. The other big tactic is posting videos on TikTok and YouTube every single day. We utilize those tactics and SEO strategies in concert with Google ads. The proliferation of new and evolving content along with associated Google ads has been very effective for the brand.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
All startups are a race against time. How fast can you get these really important features in there and get them delivered to the customer? With agile, they say that you want the shortest possible lead time and the highest quality to the consumer. So you’re constantly trying to have continual release of value – that’s the hardest part. We’re really good at quickly iterating and providing more and more value to the customer. But that’s going to continue to be the challenge, this race against time. When you’re venture funded, you do not have inexhaustible resources and those development resources are very expensive.
In terms of how do you overcome a challenge like that, the answer is to run lots of experiments. Because startups live in a world of extreme uncertainty, the only way to reduce your risk is to learn fast. We would much rather try a small test, even a super basic one, and fail; than put together something clean and beautiful that may succeed or crash and burn. We are constantly asking ourselves, “What do we need to know? How can we know that sooner?” And given that all of that hard work helps, speed will always be the biggest challenge in a startup.
What are you learning now and why is that important?
On a really deep level, I’m learning to go all in at each moment and not worry about everything else. I’m learning not to berate ourselves over mistakes that we’ve made and learnings that have happened. I’m learning not to fall into that sunk cost fallacy, you know, you make a mistake, don’t keep making it, let it go. And, the same thing goes for the future, with the startup, it’s very uncertain, so I’ve learned to just say, whatever we do at that point, I’m going to go in, do my best with it. And today, and every day I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to give my very best and then let the rest go.
Is this your first business idea or have you tried to launch other businesses?
I’ve definitely had lots of ideas, my whole life. I’ve always been an entrepreneur. In kindergarten when they asked what I wanted to be I said entrepreneur. Pretty funny for a little kid, right? So I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to open a business that was psychology related. In our private practice we’ve had multiple application ideas that we’ve tinkered with. Our original product was something called Cleape which was an article library that was intended to be a consulting tool. People could go to the articles and then sign up for consulting through those articles. This concept is much more evolved than that, but that’s actually where we started.
If you were to start your business again, what would you do differently?
I would say be bold, run fast. You can always change your mind. I think I would be less cautious at every turn and just go for it. Anytime when I’ve kind of hesitated due to uncertainty, the best way to alleviate that uncertainty is to try something. So, I would’ve run more user experience experiments and I would’ve been more bold with those experiments.
I think what I believed at the time was that I didn’t want to spend money on things that either hadn’t been thoroughly tested or, like in terms of marketing, I didn’t want to spend marketing dollars on something that wasn’t totally fleshed out. But you learn that, well, you can spend a little money and see how it goes, and then you can always pull it back. I would’ve done that from the beginning, if I had to do that over again. I have these two really rambunctious kids and I remember them always challenging themselves to jump off of higher places and do more daring stunts. I see now how genius that was. Be brave, go all-in.
What productivity tip do you swear by?
This is very unique to me, but I have something called power moves and I have a list of three power moves that I write out the day before. And then each morning I knock them out before our nine o’clock call.
Power moves are anything that’s a little bold, a little out of my comfort zone that I need to do for the business. So, it might be a fundraising call to an investor that I’m a little hesitant to reach out to. It might be making some changes to my pitch deck or re-recording it. Or it could be a follow up with an investor that showed interest and disappeared. These are things that it’s easy to let slip in the course of the day. The power moves prevent me from letting it slip. That’s been absolutely huge. I have a task list like everybody else, but the task list goes on the bottom and the power moves go on the top and I make sure I do those first.
What helps you stay motivated to keep going?
I have such a good time. I absolutely love what I’m doing. I know that at the end of the day, if I succeed or if I fail, I will have been doing exactly what I wanted to do. I really want to make psychology accessible to everyone, and I know it’s possible and, you know, our app might be the thing that does that, and it might not. We might not be able to sort out all of this in time, right. To raise enough money so that we can get big enough to prove that and make it a viable opportunity. If that happens and I turn around and say, I tried it and I failed, well alright I would be okay. It would be so worth it because what we’re doing is just so important.
What’s your definition of success?
I define personal success as having the freedom to do what you really think matters the most. I feel like if you are in a place in your life where you can choose where you’re going to put your energy and time, that’s the best success. I think business success is when you are producing incredible value to your customer that another company couldn’t – maybe they can’t do it in the same way, or maybe they can’t do it at all. I know I am a success when I give people something that they could have never gotten quite the same way from somewhere else. In that major respect, we have already won.
How do you overcome fear?
I ask myself, okay, what’s the worst thing that can happen? The worst thing that can happen as an entrepreneur is that you have to close your doors. In that case, I ask myself, well, could I be okay? As I mentioned earlier, I could totally be okay because I can look back and say this is the coolest thing I could have ever done with my life. Because of that, there’s really no reason to be afraid. And so I lean back on that. I also try to look at the really big picture. What’s kind of funny is that over the last year I’ve been focused on the fact that we are on a planet that is spinning in a galaxy in the middle of nowhere. Right. And so we all need to lighten up because, all these things that we stress over are, are just a minute when you look at the big context, of where we all live. We’re all just so lucky to be here at the end of the day.
What is your favorite quote?
“Just work hard and be nice to people.”
– Michael Franti.
My dad and I love his music and that quote comes from one of his album covers. He is such a positive and inspirational songwriter.
Do you have any books or podcasts that you would recommend?
- One of my dad’s books, of course: Scaling Software – Agility, Best Practices for Large Enterprises by Dean Leffingwell. I’m so fortunate to have the support of somebody who has been there, done that and just stands by your side through thick and thin. His guidance got me where I am today.
- And then, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is kind of our Bible.
- I’d also recommend Greg McKeown’s books. Effortless and Essentialism.
How can readers get in touch with you?
The best way is to just email me at Marcy@cadey.co.
