Info.: Richa Singh , Co-Founder , Yourdost.com .
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| Yourdost Team. |
Q1. What is YourDOST?
YourDOST is one of its kind online emotional wellness platform to get support from experts consisting of life coaches, career coaches, psychologists and other experienced individuals. YourDOST aims to reduce the stigma attached to seeking help for mental wellness in our country and with the use of technology, make expert help widely and instantly available to people looking for emotional and mental wellbeing.
However ironic it may sound but the word “mental” is associated with madness and insanity. As a result, seeking mental counseling is a huge taboo in our society. Seeking support is considered a sign of weakness. Most of the times we keep our problems to ourselves because we are not very comfortable accepting our vulnerabilities. There are issues of discovery and availability also present with searching for a relevant counselor nearby.
We believe technology is a potential contender for filling these gaps - especially anonymity and reach. This has helped us get some early acceptance of this solution from people.
Launched in December 2014, YourDOST is available to people via its web platform (www.yourdost.com) and also on mobile through its recently launched mobile app on android platform (bit.ly/YDandroid). It allows instant access to users to a team of 90+ experts to share through an online interface, be it a live chat or email query or even book one on one interaction with the expert of their choice. The key aspect of this venture is that people are kept completely anonymous throughout the platform.
Q2. How It All Started?
The idea took birth out of a personal experience and therefore it is not just a business for us.
When I was at IIT Guwahati, my hostel-mate committed suicide due to anticipation of bad placement. but none of us had any clue of her suffering before she took the drastic step. I think this could have been avoided. Even though we had counselors, psychologists in the campus but hardly any one was seeking their support/help.
When I started working, people around me were stressed due to job pressures and relationship issues. However again, most of these people were not willing to talk about their problems fearing social implications and for the fear of being called mentally ill.
Today, we have so many ways to connect but we feel lonely than ever before. We want to make sure we are connecting to connect and not just to upvote and like but share our emotions
Q3. What difficulties you faced and how you tackled them?
Culturally there is so much stigma in our society around discussing about mental health that it require a lot of psychoeducation for people to truly believe that seeking support is not a sign of weakness and mental well-being is as important as physical well-being.
Our approach has been to spread awareness, to tell people it is ok to be human, it is ok to be vulnerable. Seeking support is not a sign of weakness or mental illness. Through our hundreds of content, we try to share the stories of people who went through difficult times and a lot of psychoeducational content on various topics to spread awareness about mental well-being.
Today we have 90+ experts consisting of life coaches, psychologists, career coach, life coach and other experienced people, so our customer always have a rich list of people to select from based on their experience, speciality, language and other factors. We promise anonymity to customers, which encourages them to share their feelings with experts without the fear of being identified from anywhere and at any time of the day
Q4. What all services currently YourDost provides?
We have 90+ experts consisting of life coaches, psychologists, career coach, life coach and other experienced people. People can engage with them through an online interface, be it a live chat or email query or even book one on one interaction with the expert of their choice. It can be accessed through our web portal YourDOST.com or through our android app bit.ly/YDandroid. The key aspect of our venture is that people are kept completely anonymous throughout the platform.
The professionally trained counsellors and experts at YourDOST will help you with
- Healthy Personal Relationships
- A productive and satisfying work life balance
- A more focused approach towards achieving your goals
- A more confident self
- The ability to deal with pressure of all kinds and from many sources - personal, societal, peer.
On the other side, the experts are provided with a system to access the platform. This side is completely different than the user facing platform and gives experts access to experts community, a lot of reference material developed through intense research, training modules, ways to easily manage their interactions with clients.
Q5. How Yourdost is gonna Expand in future?
To start with we want to capture the virtual market. Everyone who wants to improve themselves should be a part of YourDOST. We want to start in India and then go beyond India. We want to be there for people across all strata, all age group.
Q6. What new services you gonna introduce after raising Rs 2.5 cr?
With 2.5 Cr raised our main focus is to increase awareness and make people aware of the importance of mental health. We shall also introduce a lot of premium services such that voice and video calls going forward.
Q7. What is exact role of YourDost in one's life?
It is exactly what the name says, 'YourDOST'. Self improvement is such a challenging task, that people have to constantly look out for information and guidance by 'Googling' them. Well, they need not spend time on searching anymore. YourDOST is a one stop platform to seek tips, guidance, information, for anyone, anywhere, on any device.
Q8. What is your company's ultimate goal?
If you want to conclude a lesson from your journey of YourDost then what'd that be.
We want to make this world a better place.
We have understood that a little help or guidance to people will go a long way to help them deal with oddities of life.
The sense of accomplishment when we help people is remarkable and it propels us to work harder and reach out to more people.
Today, we have so many ways to connect but we feel lonely than ever before. We want to make sure we are connecting to connect and not just to upvote and like but share our emotions. We want to be their emotional support who stands beside them and help them in their journey of self improvement.
