Re-imagining how mental health care could be improved at scale — product discovery for a seed-stage platform, from founder vision to shipped product.
Engagement
Design & Research Sprint, Prototype, Startup Accelerator
Client
Dr. Katz, Inc. — mental health software for practitioners & patients
Duration
Design & research sprint · multi-phase
§01 · At a Glance
A discovery sprint that turned a founder's vision into a funded, shipped, and sold product.
Read time · 5 minutes Published 2026 · FutureProof
Engagement
Sprint
design & research sprint, end-to-end from interviews through prototype.
User Segments
02
distinct audiences — mental health practitioners and the patients they serve.
Milestones
03
seed round closed, mobile app launched, first enterprise contract signed.
Outcome
Funded.
seed round closed March 2021. App live September 2021. Enterprise July 2022.
§02 · The Challenge
A vision for mental health — in need of a product.
Nathaniel Hundt, founder of Dr. Katz, Inc., had a passion for mental health care. As the son of a clinical psychologist, he wanted to improve the delivery of services by developing software that increased access to educational resources, and tools for health care organizations, mental health practitioners, and their patients.
The challenge was translating that vision into a product — fast enough to reach a seed round, focused enough to avoid building the wrong thing, and credible enough that practitioners would adopt it and patients would use it.
What discovery needed to surface
Three questions the founder couldn't answer from a pitch deck alone.
01
What do mental health practitioners actually need from a platform like this — and what would make them switch from the tools they already use?
02
How do patient and practitioner jobs-to-be-done diverge? A product designed for one audience can quietly fail the other.
03
Which features mattered enough to build first? The vision was broad; the seed round demanded focus.
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Mental health platforms fail when they're designed for one audience at the expense of the other. The job was to understand both — and show the investor story without pretending we'd finished building the product.
FutureProof discovery thesis
§03 · The Approach
Three moves from vision to prototype, in sprint cadence.
Remote sprint · dual-audience interviews · Figma prototype built to carry the pitch
01
Move · Dual-Audience Interviews
Interview practitioners and patients separately.
User interviews with patients and practitioners to identify pain points, opportunities, and needs — treating them as distinct audiences with distinct jobs-to-be-done. We surfaced where their goals aligned and where they diverged, and what each audience would need to trust a new platform.
Compress weeks of iteration into a structured sprint.
Pain-point facilitation, low-fidelity scenarios, and rapid sketching — tested against users before committing to build. The sprint produced the shape of the product in days, not months, and gave the team something concrete to react to rather than a blank page.
Remote sprintLow-fi scenariosRapid sketching
03
Move · High-Fidelity Prototype
Ship a Figma prototype that could carry the investor story.
Worked with graphic and interaction designers to produce a high-fidelity Figma prototype demonstrating jobs-to-be-done for both audiences: practitioners signing up to continue their medical education and share resources with patients, patients accessing educational materials from a trusted provider. The prototype became the centerpiece of the seed-round pitch.
Seed round closed March 2021. The prototype carried the investor story and demonstrated real user validation.
Product outcome
Shipped.
Mobile app and early-adopter program launched September 2021. First signed enterprise customer July 2022.
What the engagement delivered
01
A deep understanding of practitioner and patient needs — validated through interviews, not assumed.
02
A Figma prototype demonstrating core jobs-to-be-done: practitioners signing up to continue medical education and share resources with patients, patients accessing educational materials from a trusted provider.
03
A list of best practices and opportunities, scoped to what the seed-stage team could actually ship in the first year.
04
Usability and effectiveness feedback collected from real users during and after the sprint — the basis for iteration once funding closed.
05
Seed round closed March 2021. Mobile app and early-adopter program launched September 2021. First enterprise contract signed July 2022.
§05 · Work With FutureProof
Building a product from a founder's vision?
Early-stage product discovery is about converting belief into evidence — fast. The wrong research wastes runway; the right research compresses months of assumption-testing into a few weeks of structured work.
We start with a $500 Discovery Audit. Five days. You'll come out with a clear view of who your users are, what they actually need, and what to build first.