. But what's more, it became the poster child for a vulnerable business strategy.
"We grew in a way that was not sustainable, aka was not profitable," Jessica Muse, Cerebral's president,staff at the time, per virtual-meeting audio reviewed by Insider."We were paying more with advertising dollars to bring someone in than we could recoup from them staying with us and paying us fees for the service."
"Right now, I'm pretty bearish on companies that are just pure direct-to-consumer for both acquisition and payment," Aike Ho, a partner at ACME Capital, told Insider."Because the reality is that most patients in the US are not motivated to pay out-of-pocket for care." Last November, Talkspace, a public mental-health company, could spend $800 or more on each new customer, a big increase from the year prior, a former manager told Insider. The company could lose hundreds of dollars per patient.