Will be interesting to see if Luca can make a splash in the market. Lumen certainly has not and when inspecting revenue for the company over the past few annum it shows nothing over 100k, and even with current annual expense run of 1.5M that is not anywhere near profitable, let alone break-even. Luca could fill this void.
Luca is entering the consumer market and this should prove to be an even more difficult test. "Mental health-related self-help apps now number somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000" estimates Stephen Schueller, PhD, executive director of One Mind PsyberGuide, a nonprofit organization offering accurate, unbiased information about such apps. This is a very crowded field most certainly and Luca will need to find a way to build a presence, something that is already underway through a PR firm. Also, Phelps already represents one app/platform (talkspace) - can we assume he has exclusivity there, which is why we have another spokesperson on board (Lombardo). Unfortunately, the reach isn't even comparable, for example, on Instagram Phelps has 3.5M followers, Lombardo 5.1k. Phelps has amplified talkspace on his channel, never Medibio and may never - as a board member and shareholder, this may be a conflict of interest.
Many of these apps are free/public service or survive on ad revenue or are part of a larger offering. Luca intends to gain $46/annum from users and it appears that many of the features will depend upon the user adding the Apple Watch or Garmin device, which either decreases the addressable market to users of these devices or increases the cost to the user by several hundred dollars at a minimum. All of this straight out of the pocket of the user. Luca will need hundreds of thousands or millions of users to convert to paid users to reach the 28k+ paid annual users to reach the breakeven with a 1.5M run. Typical conversion rates from free to paid users in the app marketplace are .5-2% and even more difficult as the price goes up. Even with an optimistic conversion of 1%, that is 2.8M registered users. Now look at app download rates for those 10-20k mental health apps on the market and see how many have reached 2.8M downloads - this is a very exclusive group that Luca is considering to enter.
With launch only days away, we can all do our own investigation to determine if we see value in the paid subscriptions. Interested to hear if anyone on HC would actually put up the cash to get a sub or at least a review during the 14 day trial.
Interesting days ahead - DYOR
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