A tool for remote EMDR Therapy
Or: my side profitable side project.
When the COVID pandemic started in 2020 the whole world was suddenly locked down at home.
As a side project I built a tool for psychotherapists to conduct EMDR therapy remotely. EMDR is an evidence-based way to treat PTSD and other conditions, in which the client will think about emotionally disturbing material while simultaneously focussing on external stimuli, for example eye movement and sounds. CloudEMDR enables therapists to control those stimuli on the screen and speakers of their clients, while they are on a video call. You can find the tool at CloudEMDR.com.
This has been one of the most rewarding projects I've ever done. CloudEMDR is the leading company in the remote EMDR space: over 2000 therapies use the tool every week. Our users come from all over the world. To keep it accessible most of the tool is available for free. There's a paid plan for people that want more advanced features (100+ subscribers)
Building this tool has been very interesting, because the user and the use cases are very clear, making it relatively easy to prioritize what to build. The big design challenges lie in making it very easy to set up the sessions, because both therapists and their clients aren't the most tech savvy people. The other big challenge is keeping the tool safe and secure: e-health is heavily regulated, which is why the tool is built in a way where it saves no patient data at all.
Therapists find the tool in three ways:
- Through Google → We have great SEO because of our documentation website, which contains a lot of tutorials.
- Word of Mouth → A lot of therapists know about the tool, because I have a big network in the space.
- Trainings → I work with a group of selected EMDR trainers that give webinars about remote EMDR therapy. In their examples they use video tutorials that I produced.
If you wanna chat more about this project, please send me an e-mail, I love talking about it.
I occasionally post stats on CloudEMDR on Twitter.
