Making Art Therapy Accessible for Everyone. The Founder Story Of LINA
Interview with the founder, Palina Chernavtseva
Your mental health is just as important as your physical health. It plays a crucial role in your general well-being and affects different aspects of your life, such as personal relationships, work, and even physical health.
As a result, the state of your mental health heavily influences the overall quality of your life.
This is exactly the issue that LINA Art Therapy app is trying to solve — they have created a place where people can express and explore their feelings, gain positive self-esteem, and get insights to increase their self awareness through art.
We had a chance to interview the Founder of LINA Art Therapy App, Palina Chernavtseva. The conversation was very interesting — we spoke about their product, founder story, and key factors of growing a company at scale.
Here’s what we talked about.
Tell Us About Lina — How Would You Describe Your Solution in the Simplest Way Possible?
LINA is an Art therapy app that allows you to engage in the Art therapy process by giving you a specific task, asking you to make a drawing, and providing you with an AI-powered in-depth analysis of your mental health.
This way, the app assists users in getting anxiety relief, improving self-confidence, and understanding insights into their Mental health based on the art pieces that they have created.
What Are the Biggest Problems That Your App Is Solving and for Whom?
Demand for mental health services has never been higher, and we deeply believe that it’s a great trend for the future of our society — this belief is what pushed us to create innovation and address the gap within the art therapy niche.
It is mindblowing to see that the demand on this method has been rising 3755% over the past couple of years among Millenials and Gen-Zs.
Our team is extremely motivated to revolutionize an Art therapy market by creating a digital AI-powered solution and giving people proper tools they need to improve their state of mental health.
Let’s Talk About the Founder Story — How Did You Start Working on the Lina Art Therapy App?
I have always been an entrepreneur by nature, with a penchant for creating something unique.
Working as a Mobile app Product & Project manager in outsource agencies for 5+ years gave me an important experience in this field. However, I wanted to find a deeper meaning and use my experience to build solutions that would have a higher impact on society.
So, I decided to quit my job and start discovering other fields like psychology. As I went deeper into my explorations, I understood all about the importance of mental health and how it harmonizes our lives on different levels. Our mental well-being is what we transfer to others, making the overall society and future generations healthier and happier.
After my research, I realized that I wanted to make a difference in this field and create mental health solutions that would be more accessible to people.
The art therapy niche looked promising, easy, and an enjoyable direction of self-therapy that could be practiced by anyone.
However, there were not many digital solutions on the market in this direction, which gave me this light-bulb moment that maybe I should be the person building this kind of product — so I sold my brand new car and started building.
Looking back, I can see how blindly optimistic I was to think that it would be easy, but this kind of optimism is what gave me the energy and drive to keep going even when the times were tough.
I think throughout this 2-year journey, I have learned 10 times more than I did in my 5-year corporate career, and of course, I have never regretted that I chose this path, regardless of what possible outcome could have been.
What Were the Challenges You’ve Had to Overcome to Grow the Company Until Now?
The first challenge came in the initial product development phase — I didn’t know what steps I had to take to bring a product to the market.
It was quite painful to realize that developing a product solely based on my vision was wrong — I had to understand and get familiar with these new terms like product market fit, custdev, user interviews, etc.
There were many lessons and learnings that seem obvious today, but back then, it came as a surprise that bringing a product to the market doesn’t necessarily mean delivering it, especially when you don’t have a marketing budget.
Another surprising learning throughout the journey was understanding that it is possible to market an app with ASO, SEO, and Social Media, but certainly not as quickly and effectively as with Paid Advertising.
Tell Us About the Future Milestones and Objectives You Are Trying to Reach With Your Solution?
At the moment we focus on tactical objectives — having learned how to acquire users, we are now at the stage where we need to learn how to convert them into subscribers more effectively and get them to stay with us longer.
To achieve this, we are now building a cool new feature that hopefully will stick users to our app.
What Would Be Your Advice to Every Up-And-Coming Founder Who Wants to Start Their Journey in the Startup World?
Start with the proper research and be sure that there is a market need for the product you are building. Then, take your time to talk to your potential users and ask them for feedback on your idea before creating an MVP, not the other way around.
At the same time, launch and test your idea as quickly as possible to validate the direction you are going with. Take the iterative approach — put the MVP out, ask for feedback, improve — and keep this process in a loop.
It would also help if you focused on one core feature and made it perfect for your customer. Don’t waste your time and resources on creating an average all-in-one solution that your customers can’t benefit from.
To Sum Up
I’d like to say thanks to LINA’s founder, Palina Chernavtseva, for finding time and giving us insights into her fascinating startup journey.
The challenge that the whole team is tackling is very interesting, yet important to be solved for society, and I’m very excited to see how their solution develops over time. Thank you!
