Founded in 2018 with a mission to help people flourish in life, particularly around mental health, CredibleMind provides a complete population-based mental health ecosystem to insurers, communities, universities and large businesses.

It offers its customers’ members and employees crucial mental well-being content, online assessments, exercises and thousands of healthcare-vetted resources and analytics, as well as pointing them to the services and supports that can help them overcome their challenges.

Since its inception, CredibleMind has experienced spectacular success. In just the last year the company doubled its revenue, and it is fast approaching the one-million-user mark. Today, more than 35 million people across the U.S. have access to its platform through their community, insurer or employer health plan.

CredibleMind co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Marcos Athanasoulis attributes much of that success to his product’s strong search and discovery capabilities.

The Challenge

Helping users find the health resources they need when they need them

As one might expect from a company sharing mental health resources, CredibleMind has sophisticated search requirements.

With more than 20,000 resources covering a wide variety of mental wellness topics, and over 37 languages supported, CredibleMind needed a foolproof way of quickly providing users with the right content at the right time.

“I think our biggest challenge is that we have so many resources and we need to get people to the resources they want,” Athanasoulis says. “People love to have choices, but if they have too many choices, they get overwhelmed.”

Building an in-house solution that handles the scale and complexity of the CredibleMind product would be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive so the company investigated several search solutions that might meet its needs for high performance, solid uptime and cost-effectiveness.

It ultimately selected Algolia because of its search performance, speed of implementation, clear documentation and UI console. As well, other platforms, like Elasticsearch, required the company to use its servers for search, which ran counter to its technology strategy. 

“I’m proud to say we’re 100 percent serverless because we’re using tools like Algolia, Contentful and Google Firebase.”

The Solution

High-performance search and development ease

Algolia is being used for instant search and filtering as well as carousels on content pages. Implementation took less than a week and has been refined as resources have grown.

On the backend, CredibleMind has integrated Algolia with Contentful, with Algolia pulling content to display from the headless content management system. The search solution also supports the company’s need to provide resources in multiple languages with high performance and zero downtime.

Athanasoulis says how easy it was to add custom search attributes to content — and still have blazingly fast responses — was, in fact, one of his favorite elements of the solution.

“We love how fast it is. Search results just pop right up,” he says. He adds that the company website hasn’t gone down, nor has Algolia, since its inception.

In addition to the Search API, CredibleMind has implemented ReleventSort, Multi-Query and Custom Ranking, as well as standard Replica Indices and optional Filters and Facets.

Algolia meets CredibleMind’s need for a very sophisticated solution. For example, if a user completes an online assessment on a specific aspect of well-being, Algolia generates personalized carousels with resources and additional content based on their responses.

“It's cool. And, honestly, if we were trying to code this ourselves, it would be a lot of work and slow,” Athanasoulis says. “Obviously, we have some coding to wrap around it, but we can have all our 20 to 30 thousand resources in Algolia, all tagged into different topics or factors, and can quickly use the Algolia API to populate the page.”

“Algolia is nice and fast, and our developers love working with it.”

The Result

Personalized user-specific content fuels business growth

Algolia is allowing CredibleMind to customize and provide personalized content specific to its individual users.

“We can look at their previous activity and then query Algolia based on that. For example, if we know that all someone’s ever done is watch videos, we can provide specific videos around the topics they are interested in.”

“That’s the key business problem that it solves throughout the site.”

Algolia is also helping the company continue to find innovative ways to support its users’ well-being. For instance, the company will soon release a feature based on high-risk keywords and phrases that show an individual is in crisis. If a user types in phrases like “life is meaningless” or “I want to die” they are automatically funneled to crisis hotlines and suicide resources.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” Athanasoulis says. “Initially, we're going to develop this feature from scratch. But then we learned from the documentation that there's already a feature in Algolia where we can list keywords that trigger a special response in the payload.” 

“With Algolia, we were able to create this feature quickly, in only about a week.”

The company has seen an increase in traffic year-over-year, and customers are always impressed with the speed and accuracy of the website’s search capabilities, Athanasoulis says. “It really helps us in our sales process.”

CredibleMind’s impact is already measurable—and impressive. Since adopting Algolia’s AI Search, the mental-health platform has expanded coverage to 40 million+ lives while delivering a smoother path to care. Inside the SmartScreen experience, 60% of users quickly discover services they’re eligible for, and the outcomes speak for themselves: 71% feel better about their mental well-being, 61% have learned a new skill or practice, and 57% report making a positive behavior change.

 The company raised $7.5 million in Series A financing, and Athanasoulis says as a crucial part of its product Algolia played a significant role in that.

Algolia is helping CredibleMind make a meaningful impact in people’s lives. In quarterly surveys, about 61 percent of users have changed behaviors or are feeling better about themselves due to the platform thanks in part to the content Algolia has helped them find.

Athanasoulis calls Algolia one of the core building blocks of the CredibleMind application. He adds that Algolia has scaled well with the company as its content resources have grown from a few thousand to tens of thousands.

In the future, the company is exploring using Algolia to implement more use of natural language. Algolia continues to evolve its features alongside CredibleMind’s needs.

“Whenever we're doing anything that has to do with how we retrieve relevant information for a user based on what we know about them, we always look at Algolia and see if there's something we can use there,” he says. “I think it's just continued to grow with us as we grow. And I'm not even sure we're using all the features we could be.”