The Spanish mental health app market in 2021 was dominated by either expensive online therapy platforms (€70-150/session) or free self-help content with no personalization. The gap was clear: young Spaniards who knew they needed mental health support but could not afford weekly sessions and did not find generic meditation apps sufficient.
The UnRespiro founding team — two non-technical founders with backgrounds in psychology and marketing — spent 6 weeks conducting 43 user interviews before building anything. They found that their target users were acutely aware of their mental health needs, had already tried Headspace and Calm and found them insufficient, but were reluctant to commit to formal therapy due to cost and stigma.
Their validation process included a landing page test that achieved 8.3% email capture rate with €200 in Facebook ads, a concierge phase where founders personally matched users with psychologists via WhatsApp for 3 months, and a Wizard of Oz phase where they built a basic iOS interface while human psychologists handled all the "AI" recommendations behind the scenes.