Frenalytics | A Year In Review
Chris and I founded Think Group Holdings, the parent company for Frenalytics, with a simple goal in mind: to help others like my grandmother improve in their neurological rehabilitation. That goal has truly come to life in 2018, and we’re forever grateful for those who have helped us reach this point. Though we’re still very early on, we have some exciting “new” milestones to share:
New Name
Brainstorming one night in late 2017, Chris and I decided we need a new name for our program. After all, “Grey Matter Technology” had a striking resemblance to the infamous “Gray Matter Technologies”, despite Chris and I never having watched Breaking Bad. We knew this name for a healthcare technology product didn’t exactly gel with a show about crystal meth, however fictitious Walter White’s saga was. Ultimately, we wanted a shorter, more unique name that would be easily identifiable.
As such, we came up with a new name: Frenalytics. “Fren” is Latin for “mind” and “alytics” is the suffix of “analytics”. Put together, Frenalytics means “analytics of the mind”.
New People
Prior to 2018, Frenalytics was more or less a promising idea. When my grandmother suffered a stroke ten years ago, my seventh grade self was mastering clip art, animations, and slide transitions in PowerPoint, so it only made sense to leverage these skills in creating a “game” to help my grandmother recover.
Of course, PowerPoint is just that — glorified presentation software. We had to find a full-time developer to create the Frenalytics platform from scratch. We wanted those same bells-and-whistles that made the PowerPoint game a great experience, but we also had to build features for facility staff, family members, and ourselves — all while complying with HIPAA.
Enter Christian, our full-stack developer and first non-founder hire. Christian joined in June and helped us achieve a once unimaginable goal: having a working beta shipped by early August.
As the year went on and we continued to release new features and bug fixes, our strengths and weaknesses became more apparent. Chris and I continue to hold full-time jobs, which means that delegating tasks is a necessity. Two areas that we needed help with in particular were prioritizing tasks in a sprint cycle and preparing adequate specs for each task. Whether this meant wireframes and mockups or simply a description of what we had in mind, we knew a non-technical outsider, perhaps someone with a UI/UX focus, could be helpful in making this a strength of ours.
Enter Andrew, our UI/UX designer and newest hire. Andrew joined our team in early December and has already put together design specs for our next big features, due for release in early January.
New Product
As I mentioned above, “Grandma’s Ultimate Challenge” served as our initial PowerPoint proof-of-concept. In June, with Christian on our team, development of the program had officially begun.
By August, we had a running beta of the program. Of course, there was much left to do, but this version of Frenalytics had:
- Login functionality for facility admins, staff, family members, and patients
- Different dashboards for each of the roles above
- A Patient Profile page, with “General”, “Medical”, “Family”, and “Pre-Testing Survey” tabs that collected data about a patient
- Various categories of questions in the “Pre-Testing Survey” tab. This is where family members could answer questions about and upload media of their loved one (for example, “What is your favorite food?” and, “What is your spouse’s name?”).
- The ability to create accounts for a patient’s family members, either by staff or by other family members
- Our unique Therapy Session functionality, which took data entered by family members in the “Pre-Testing Survey” tab of the Patient Profile and created personalized games in the form of multiple-choice questions
New(s) Interest
As I was finishing spring semester of my senior year at Boston College, our student newspaper, The Heights, wrote about my accomplishments and challenges to date as a student entrepreneur, particularly with Frenalytics. This online and print article sparked conversations with professors and friends on campus, as well as those who liked and shared the article on Facebook (more below!).
As a senior in high school, I was named a national semi-finalist in Intel’s Science Talent Search competition for my research surrounding neurological rehabilitation utilizing personalized datasets (🤓). In mid-November, my local newspaper, Rockville Centre Herald, published a follow-up article on our company’s progress since their last article written in 2014. After sharing this article on our company’s Facebook page, it attracted over 400 likes and close to 200 comments by those who also shared the article across Facebook.
New Clients
As a direct result of the Heights and Herald articles being published and shared across social media, we started receiving messages and emails from people across the country — literally — expressing an interest in Frenalytics. In May, we began talks with our first client: an adult day health program in California that serves patients who suffer from stroke and dementia. The problem? We didn’t have a program to offer them. We had nothing. Nada!
This invigorated us to put together a working beta by early August. In what seemed like a surreal experience, I flew out to Palo Alto to meet the staff of this incredible facility and presented an early beta version of Frenalytics. They seemed impressed, but we had discovered some unanticipated obstacles along the way (more below).
In November, shortly after the Herald article was published, we received messages and emails from who are now our first clients. It’s incredible how ubiquitous cognitive impairments are across the country, and its humbling to see firsthand how the power of social media is helping us reach some of these people.
New Obstacles
After demonstrating our program in Palo Alto, the staff shared an apprehension we didn’t previously consider: “Why would family members want to use this? How do we explain the value in them using it?”
This shined a light on an underlying customer base: family members. This didn’t seem obvious to us, as they’re a non-paying customer who we thought would be as invested as possible in caring for their loved one. But, as our client in California explained to us, a patient’s main caretaker is often either: 1) the same age as the patient, and may have cognitive limitations of their own, 2) a working son or daughter who has limited time, or 3) a relative who enrolled their loved one in this program because they’re preoccupied with their own family. This made it clear to us that marketing to family members to demonstrate value is essential in making our current model successful.
In response to this, we launched a new website with content specifically for family members, and created an Account Setup Guide for family members when they login to Frenalytics for the first time. We also believe having a UI/UX designer on our team will ease any concerns from family members about the program being difficult to use or taking time out of their busy schedule.
New Goals
We’re incredibly fortunate for the abundance of support we’ve received so far, and we can’t wait to see what 2019 has in store for us as a company.
In sophomore year of college, right before being awarded a patent for Frenalytics, I noticed a poster hung outside our Campus Ministry office with a quote by Minor Meyers Jr. It reads: “Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.”
Thank you for helping us do good. Happy Holidays and best wishes to all for a prosperous 2019.
Please reach out with any questions, or just to stay in touch: matt@thinkgroupholdings.com
