The hard part is not finding a therapist. It is sending the first message.
Directories hand people a list and leave them there. FindSupport takes a description of what is going on, matches it to specialists who fit, and carries the first message through the platform — so the step people actually stall on is the one the product is built around.
- Directory
- 2,748 therapist profiles · 147 US cities
- Paid step
- Contacting a specialist, not browsing
- Peer support
- Free for the person seeking help
Founder — Dmitry Kotov. Status: Live · peer support in rollout.
Everybody has built the list. Nobody has built the first step
Someone who needs help opens Google or a directory, gets a hundred faces and forty filters, and has no way to tell which of them is right. Then comes the part nobody talks about: writing to a stranger about the worst thing in your life. Most people close the tab there, and the market counts that as a successful search.
The supply side loses the same customer. A therapist with an empty slot is not short of listings — they are short of people who got far enough to write. Every player in the category is competing on the size of the list, which is the one thing that was never the bottleneck.
What the platform does
The product is the layer between a person and a specialist, not the catalogue. Every part of it exists to move someone from a description to a sent message.
You describe the situation, not the filters
The entry point is a few sentences in your own words — a separation, burnout, a child who stopped talking. The system asks what it still needs to know instead of making someone translate their life into checkboxes.
The first message goes through the platform
Emails and phone numbers are not published. The person writes inside the product and the platform delivers it — which makes the moment of contact easier for them, and measurable and chargeable for the platform.
Peer support for the people not ready for therapy
A free, moderated conversation with someone who has lived through the same thing — divorce, burnout, relocation. It is clearly labelled as not therapy, and it catches the large group who would otherwise have done nothing at all.
Acquisition through the situation, not the brand
City hubs and topic pages answer the questions people actually type — support for anxiety in a specific city — and each one opens onto the same describe-and-contact flow rather than a dead-end list.
The model follows the bottleneck
The catalogue is free because a catalogue is not scarce. What is scarce is a person who has decided to reach out, and that is where the product charges.
Paid access to contact
Browsing and matching cost nothing; sending costs. Revenue lands exactly at the moment the platform created value, which keeps the incentive to make that moment easier rather than to inflate the listing count.
Supply joins for free
Specialists list and claim their profile at no cost and go through moderation before they appear. Growing the directory does not require a sales team, and quality is a review step rather than a promise.
A demand side worth paying for
When inbound consists of people who have described their situation and chosen to write, paid placement and qualified leads become a natural second revenue line — priced against booked conversations, not impressions.
A discovery layer, not a clinic
The platform helps people find and contact support; it does not diagnose or treat. That boundary is what keeps it software rather than a regulated healthcare provider — a deliberate limit on the product that also limits the risk.
Why language and situation beat geography
The directory already covers 2,748 licensed US therapist profiles across 147 cities, but the useful axis is not the map. People want someone who understands the specific thing — the immigration, the language, the culture they grew up in — and that is a matching problem the incumbents treat as a filter footnote.
The flow generalises the same way. A topic, a city, and a language are parameters of one flow; adding a market means adding supply and copy, not building a second product.
Questions investors ask first
- What does FindSupport.ai do?
- It takes a plain-language description of what someone is going through instead of a filter query, matches it to specialists who fit that situation, and delivers the first message through the platform. The directory covers 2,748 licensed US therapist profiles across 147 cities.
- Why not just build a better directory?
- Because finding a therapist was never the bottleneck. People get a list and then stall at writing to a stranger about the worst thing in their life. Competitors optimise the search step; the drop-off is at the message, which is the step this product is built around.
- How does it make money?
- Browsing and matching are free; access to contact is not. Emails and phone numbers are never published, so the conversation stays on the platform — which makes the moment of contact measurable, moderated, and the natural place to charge. Specialists list and claim profiles free, subject to moderation.
- What is peer support, and is it therapy?
- Peer support is a free, moderated conversation with someone who has lived through a similar situation — divorce, burnout, relocation. It is not therapy: peers are screened and trained on listening, boundaries, and safety, and are explicitly not licensed therapists. It exists for the large group of people not ready to book clinical care.
- FindSupport — system overviewHow the matching, messaging, and moderated supply pipeline are built.
- Mental-health matching platformThe case study, with the directory's real coverage.
- Investors & partnersThe thesis across the company and the products beside it, what is shared privately, and how a conversation starts.
Talk to the founder
For investors, partners, and operators who want the detail behind the summary — unit economics, architecture, and where the platform is going next.