Impact, Design and Technology: Supporting the Lived Experience of the LGBTQ Community

My guest for this Inclusive Show interview is Jaron Soh . Jaron is the Chief Executive of an app called Voda: The LGBTQIA+ Mental Health App which is making an impact within the LGBTQIA+ space by providing mental health support to empower individuals.

Diving straight in, I asked Jaron, ‘As the Chief Executive of Voda, can you tell us more about this innovative LGBTQIA+ mental health app?’

Jaron responded, ‘Voda is a mental health app designed for and by the LGBT community. We cover topics tailored to the LGBT lived experience such as: coming out, gender dysphoria, dealing with shame, stigma and discrimination, but also everyday life from a queer lens. In addition to that, we have a series of guided therapy programs on subjects, like queer relationships, that other apps wouldn’t have.

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We look at relationships and dating through many different lenses, such as exploring jealousy in open relationships, exploring polyamory, the challenges of dating as a gay, lesbian, bisexual or a trans and gender nonconforming person. We all face issues when we’re dating that are very different from cisnormative and heteronormative relationships.

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We provide mental health support for LGBT people, created by LGBT therapists. All of our programs are evidence-based and intersectional in nature. We have programs that teach you therapeutic skills that you would have learned in therapy, but we don’t aim to replace a professional therapeutic relationship.’

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I wanted to know how Jaron arrived in this space and why he chose this path.

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Jaron replied, ‘I was really frustrated with the lack of options in the mental health space for people like me, which is why I found Voda. I’ve lived in London for the last 10 years, but I grew up in sunny, conservative Singapore. I knew I was gay from a young age and was bullied in school for my femininity. I struggled a lot with queer shame and my identity. When I came to London, I had my first taste of not having to look over my shoulder or being worried about being found out. I started attending queer venues and stepping into who I was.

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In my mid to late 20s, I started going to therapy because I found a lot of dysfunction in my relationships at work, romantically, and also internally. When I was wrapping up therapy, I wanted to shift towards using a mental health app. I quickly realised all of the apps out there didn’t understand who I was. I was using apps like Calm and Headspace, but they assume you are cis and heteronormative. The examples that they use in their guided meditations or in their cognitive exercises I found were often tailored for people different to myself. I couldn’t resonate with them at all.

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I saw my friends struggle with the same things, so I built something that I thought people in my community needed. I think we tend to distract ourselves when we have unhealed trauma. That could be through alcohol, substances, work, relationships, friendships, and so on. I wanted to build a more accessible alternative for people like me in the UK and beyond.’

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What Nathan said resonated with me because I’m a gay man as well. A lot of the mainstream therapies and apps aren’t tailored to the experience of LGBTQ people, so it’s great that Voda can provide that tailored expertise. I wish the app was around when I came out because it would have been really helpful.

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I’ve heard Nathan previously say that he’s passionate about when design and impact meet technology. So, my next question for Nathan was, ‘Could you explain to us a bit about why design, impact and technology is so important to you?’

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Jaron believes design, impact and tech all need to come together. ‘There’s this Japanese concept of ikigai. There are four circles: doing something you love, that you’re good at, something you can make money with, and what the world needs. That’s why Voda is not just something that can help the world, but it’s also something that fulfills me and I have the right experience to build it.

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I come from a consumer design background, so this is my third company. My first company was artisan goods. I would design products with handcraft makers across the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I have the design lens to build something beautiful that people can identify with. With consumer apps, it’s important to build something that’s not just powerful, but also aesthetically pleasing so it resonates with the users using it and appeals to them to want to start using it in the first place.

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It’s important to be intentional. We carefully approached the way we designed Voda. We weren’t going to put rainbows everywhere on the app just because it’s an LGBT app. We wanted Voda to sit elegantly and discreetly on your phone and to not raise eyebrows. If someone saw an app called Voda, they’re not going to go, “Oh, are you LGBT? Are you gay?”

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I went through so much of that in my younger years. I was averting my eyes from looking at men and careful not to follow anyone that was LGBT. I remember when we used to use Facebook, I would ask some of my LGBT friends, “Can you not wish me happy birthday, please?” because I didn’t want it on my profile.

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Once we combine all three angles of design, impact and tech, we can then build meaningful technology to understand the lived experienced of people.? I know that from speaking to users of Voda, they are often exploring who they are for the first time, and they’re delving into issues that they might not feel comfortable to bring up in therapy. They might not even be able to afford therapy. Many queer people still live at home with their families. You can’t do a Zoom call with a therapist to explore who you are because someone might overhear you.’

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I like how Jaron has prioritised sensitivity in the design of the app and has taken into account how people are using it and their privacy. If somebody is exploring their sexuality and their identity, it can be a tricky time for them, and you don’t want somebody flicking through your phone and then questioning why you’ve got this app that’s covered in the LGBTQ+ colors. That could out you in a very uncomfortable way.

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I was curious as to the impacts Jaron has noticed Voda having.

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‘We serve around 13,000 LGBT people around the world who use Voda regularly. The impact we’ve seen is mostly in the UK and US. We get a lot of qualitative feedback from users because after you do a program on Voda, it gives you an option to send feedback to us. That comes straight to our company communications platform. It’s heart warming to hear from users how Voda has helped them feel better, navigate heartbreak or difficult headlines, especially for trans and gender nonconforming people because it’s such a difficult climate.

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I think a lot of us in the queer community try to brush things off when they happen to us. For example, we’re on the street, holding hands with a date and then some young lads may shout at us or make offhand comments. Most of us try to brush it off. If you’re trans, non-binary and you’re reading all of these different news headlines, you begin to think, “Oh yeah, they’re just being transphobic again.” Realistically, it affects us so much. If we don’t proactively work on our mental health, it can get us down into a very low mood without us realising over time. For Voda to be able to provide that support for our community has been great to see.

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Apart from the qualitative feedback, we’ve also had good results from the initial small study. We had some users opt in to a small study where they used Voda regularly for four weeks and each week we asked them different questions based on the clinical indicators for depression and anxiety, the GAD-7 and PHQ-9. We saw there was a clear trend in the reduction of symptoms of anxiety and depression.

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Equally heartening, we’ve closed our first investment round just last month. The funding news was picked up by a lot of the LGBT press like Attitude Magazine and PinkNews wanting to write something about us. I’m glad that our investors are representative of our community. We had sixteen investors in our recent round, who are either gay, lesbian, bi, asexual, trans or neurodivergent. It makes me happy to see that the community is supporting the community.

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I think it helps set up for success in the long term as well. The company can continue to be impact-focused because our backers align with the mission of what we’re trying to do in the first place. A lot of our investors, like ourselves. grew up with shame and felt lonely at times. That’s why they came on board with Voda.’

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I thought it was fantastic that Jaron got a round of founding, so I asked about his other aspirations and objectives for the future for Voda.

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Jaron’s main goal is to reach 7 million queer people in the next five years. ‘We want to continue to provide them with tailored mental health support that understands who they are, but in a way that is discrete and affordable. Our hope is to reach all of our audience, but also being mindful of safety and privacy concerns in regions where being LGBT is criminalised.

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Currently, most of our users are based in the US, the UK, and in some other English-speaking countries. We’re mindful that there’s a lot of people here requiring mental health support. Even though things are supposedly better in our cities, I think the greatest need for Voda is in places where being LGBT is criminalised. We want to understand how we can create a version of the app to invest in the mental well-being of people in those regions while being mindful of safety, privacy and human rights concerns.

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Alongside our aim of reaching more queer people in the next five years, we also want to invest our profits in activism. We want to help legalise homosexuality by investing in activists that push for marriage equality and support the fight against transphobia.

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There is a current rising tide of transphobia. A lot of the funding comes from Christian fundamentalism organisations that make lives for our trans communities and siblings challenging. We want to be the opposing force to that. One thing that I found unfair with the whole ecosystem of mental health and capitalism, is that the mental health industry makes more money, the more unwell you are. That doesn’t sit well with me.

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Secondly, why are we always making queer people and women in general self-regulate, heal, and practice self-care? Can we reduce and remove the sources of trauma and stigma that are causing us to need to self-regulate in the first place? That is something that we want to balance and aligns with the impact that we want to have.

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Our aim is to be your digital mental health companion that everyone thinks of. Our aim isn’t to replace social connections by giving you a fake therapist, boyfriend or girlfriend, and trying to make you stick to the app by having this forced loving and trusting relationship with AI. We do use AI in the app, but we use it in controlled ways. It’s a one in, one out system, in a sense that you enter what you’re going through and you get a therapeutic exercise only. You don’t get to have a chitchat with Voda. Have your chitchats with your friends because real social connections are important for mental health.

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We don’t want to emulate a social connection within the app because we don’t want people to become dependent on it. We want to give you the tools and the skills so you can engage in the communities of your choice.’

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It struck me that Jaron has a great tool to support LGBTQ people within businesses. The vast majority of people that listen to this podcast work in HR, or they’re diversity and inclusion practitioners. A lot of employers have LGBTQ+ employee resource groups, or they provide support to employees through employee assistance programs. This led me to my next question for Jaron, ‘Have you got any plans to form partnerships with companies and employers?’

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Jaron responded, ‘This aligns with our short-term goals actually. We are yet to start working on the business-to-business side, but we have had quite a few inbounds. Ogilvy is a PR marketing company and one of their leads reached out, asking to buy some codes for their employees. We also had City last year reach out after we threw a party event with them.

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We’re definitely keen to collaborate with corporates and employers so they can better support their employees. We have a private work series, which is about helping people cope with stress at work. A lot of topics are covered, for example, overthinking at work and so on, but also how to find an alignment between your identity and the workspace.

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A lot of people will go back into the closet after they start work. Not necessarily because there’s a homophobic or queerphobic culture, but people question whether it might hurt their career if they discuss it. It’s necessary to show up as our true selves at work, and that’s why we have a therapeutic series that explores that. Ultimately, I found that the decision to come out, whether you wish to or not, is yours.

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For example, in my previous funded company, people mis-assumed that I had a girlfriend or a wife because I wore a shirt that said ‘Dad to Work’ as a joke. They started asking me about my kids and my wife. I didn’t correct people for a while and just went on. It was awkward for some time when they found out I was actually gay.

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We’re starting to do a lot of collaborations with charities because we want to make the brand and Voda feel more intersectional. We’re about to announce that we’re providing free monthly group therapy at Queer Britain, which is the UK’s national LGBT Museum. We’re doing it for different communities, starting with East and Southeast Asian. We also want to start working with the Black community, people from working class backgrounds, migrant communities, people who are neurodivergent, differently abled and so on.

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We can hold reflective spaces and intersectional spaces, because even though a lot of us in the LGBT community are linked by the common trap of shame, we still experience different experiences within the intersecting spheres of identities. That’s what we want to do by collaborating with organisations.’

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I thought what Jaron said was powerful. The last question I had for Jaron was, ‘What does inclusive growth mean to you?’

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Inclusive growth, to me, means growth that aligns with your company values. It’s important early on to identify what your company values are. When we started, we knew we wanted to be a company that gives back to the community, based on intersectionality and impact. That guides all of our decision-making processes, even from raising investments. We’ve stopped conversations with investors early on because we saw that they were purely profit-focused. We’re not in the business of running ads on Voda. We’re not in the business of trying to get user data and sell it.

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We’re in the business of creating mental health support that people want to pay for, which is created by people like them. It’s important to have that value schema early on, so you know what you can say no to. A lot of organisations in the pursuit of profit during growth, forget what the values of the company might be or what mission it’s supposed to have. When you have your values out and proud, you attract the right kind of investors on board. Our investors include an impact investor, Ultra, and also a trust that invests in companies that improve the health and well-being of people in the UK, but also improve education outcomes in the UK.

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There are investors out there that will be aligned with what you want to do. You don’t have to get money from wherever and whichever sources. You can be a bit more selective, although it does take more time.

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For us, it’s the founding team’s values. That’s because all three of us in the founding team are queer. We all had different experiences growing up. I grew up in Singapore, my cofounder is Scottish and grew up under Section 28. Our lead therapist is trans non-binary and had to come out twice. While working at the NHS as a therapist, he decided to leave and start a practice so that he could improve the entire system. To be inclusive, growth needs to align with your company values and your cofounders should have similar values and ending aspirations for the company.’

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I thought what Jaron had to say was really cool. I love how he linked it back to the core values and how they’re actually growing their business in line with their own personal values. If an investor doesn’t align, then that’s not a good partnership for you.

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Voda is available on both iOS and Android. It’s a freemium app, so they have a bunch of features for free, but do charge a small fee for some features which helps their small team. Jaron recommends you write in to them at [email protected] if you need financial help for the paid features where they can provide you with access for free.

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If you need any support to develop your organisation’s inclusive culture, then feel free to reach out to Toby and his team. The best place to start is either through their website at mildon.co.uk or just drop the team a line on LinkedIn.