Therapify — Co-founder & CTO of a Digital Mental Health Platform

Problem

The platform had to coordinate groups with very different needs: patients searching for and attending care, therapists managing appointments and therapeutic work, business customers funding access to services, internal teams operating the platform, and financial partners processing payments and settlements.

It also had to support a changing business model. The product began primarily as a consumer marketplace with individual payments and later expanded towards employer-funded and partner-funded services. That transition changed the required data model, financial flows, reporting, eligibility logic, and operational processes.

What I did

As co-founder and CTO, I led the technical development of the platform through multiple stages of product and company growth.

The product included therapist discovery and matching, appointment scheduling, online video consultations, patient–therapist communication, therapeutic notes and exercises, payment processing, e-commerce backend services, and administrative and operational tooling.

As the business expanded from B2C towards B2B, we developed additional capabilities for:

managing organisations and eligible participants,
tracking funded service usage,
supporting different benefit and payment arrangements,
automated invoicing,
settlement with therapists and business partners,
operational and financial reporting.

Data and platform evolution

The transition from individual consumer purchases to business-funded care required more than adding new screens.

The underlying platform needed to represent relationships between patients, therapists, employers and business partners, appointments, entitlements, payments, invoices, settlements, and service usage. The same clinical service could be paid for and reported differently depending on the customer arrangement.

The data model and backend workflows had to support multiple commercial models without duplicating the entire platform.

Technical and organisational leadership

I was responsible for architecture, engineering execution, team management, hiring decisions, product collaboration, and the operational reliability of the platform.

I introduced development practices appropriate to the company’s current stage rather than importing heavyweight processes prematurely. As the system and team became more complex, we added stronger delivery, ownership, and quality practices while preserving the ability to move quickly.

Key challenge

The technology had to remain adaptable while the company continued to test its product and commercial assumptions.

Premature standardisation would have slowed the organisation down. Insufficient structure would have made the platform increasingly difficult to operate and extend. The same balance applied to data: models needed to be flexible enough to support changing services while remaining reliable for billing, settlement, patient operations, and business reporting.

Impact

The platform supported the company across its consumer and business phases and provided a technical foundation for testing several healthcare service models.

The work shaped my approach to fractional CTO engagements: architecture, delivery practices, data structures, and team processes should be introduced in proportion to the company’s current complexity while anticipating the next stage of growth.

What it demonstrates

Early-stage technology leadership is the management of changing constraints. The architecture, data model, and engineering organisation must evolve together. Decisions need to support the current business without closing off credible future directions or creating operational complexity faster than the company can absorb it.

Concepts: Digital healthcare · SaaS platforms · Data modelling · B2C and B2B systems · Payments · Invoicing · Product engineering · Technical leadership

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