Louis Zantema is a Doctor of Psychology and most likely the only specialist whose aim is to make himself dispensable as a therapist. His company Reducept unites his passion for gaming with his passion for improving his patients’ lives through evidence based psychological and educational interventions, redesigned for Virtual Reality.
What is Reducept and how was the idea born?
Reducept is a non-medical virtual reality therapy for people with chronic pain. I worked as a psychologist in hospitals for many years, mainly in chronic pain wards. I met my Co-Founder Margryt Fennema at The Medical Center Leeuwarden and we started out by identifying what type of patients are running into difficulties at the hospital. Margryt and I realised that if there’s a group that’s really hard to treat, it’s victims of chronic pain.
There are so many people who suffer from it and it’s not really a well-known issue in wider society. 40% of all loss of work worldwide is due to lower back pain. That’s huge! What we noticed when we spoke with patients is that a lot of them had a really similar disease pattern. Most people with chronic pain we spoke to didn’t have physical reasons for their pain. They found it really hard to grasp why they were hurting and how to move forward with their therapy because they were sort of at the last stop. In most cases, medication or surgery didn’t help anymore. Margryt and I saw this really big group of people with a problem that was hard to solve, so we decided to do something about it.
How did you come up with your approach?
Well, we did a lot of testing and experimented with offering therapeutic exercises and education on websites, in apps – and eventually in virtual reality too. The interesting thing about VR is that it captivates its users and we were quite astonished that this was the case even for chronic pain patients, who usually struggle with their attention span due to the medication they take. After noticing that it was much easier for them to learn and grasp things in VR we got really excited and other people got excited too, which is how we managed to raise our first round of funds and subsidies to create the prototype.
We had some ideas on what types of exercises to implement. I was treating patients with chronic pain at the hospital so I knew from experience what tactics worked especially well. But in-person treatment is an incredibly slow process. It would take me 15 or 20 hours to have one patient, well, up and running so to speak.
After a lot of positive feedback for our prototype from patients we started to raise more money through startup competitions, other subsidies and an investor. Our MVP was ready by September last year and Reducept launched as a B2B business in the Netherlands.
Could you walk us through one of the VR exercises?
We’re applying a lot of different mental strategies that could help patients to cope with their pain. All of our exercises have different theoretical backgrounds. There’s an exercise where you first choose the spot where you feel pain, enter your own nervous system and “shoot” at your own pain, the gamification aspect here is really important. This exercise will actually influence the part of your brain that is responsible for creating that pain in the first place. Just by doing this exercise and sort of “tricking” their brain, our patients’ pain scores drop and stay low for a long period of time. We also have relaxation and cognitive exercises and we’re working towards adding mindfulness activities to train patients to not focus on their pain all the time.
What is it like being a founder for you?
I think I’d describe myself as an “unintentional founder”. I was really happy with working as a psychologist but then this opportunity came along. Helping patients through Reducept gave me so much energy that I decided to just go with it. To be honest, I don’t think being a founder is more or less special than running a business or being a freelancer. I’m still doing something that is related to psychology, even though it is completely different from being a psychologist at a hospital. You can create an impact in so many different ways and it’s up to you to decide how you want to do it.
What were your biggest challenges and your best moments so far?
Biggest challenge… That’s a hard one. I think the biggest challenge was finding the right people to work with. We have a team of 14 and finding the right people doesn’t only mean finding somebody with the right skill set but also with the right focus and dedication. This also applies to investors and other stakeholders, everybody needs to have the same goal in mind.
In the long run, we wouldn’t want investors to conflict with our purpose for example. Investors are always looking to make money and money is nice, don’t get me wrong! But it shouldn’t be the biggest focus of your company.
The best moments are always when someone’s life improves by using your product after all. Luckily we have many of these moments. We sometimes get emails from patients, one even published a whole article in a patient magazine detailing how our technology helped them. Things like these are what drive us, it’s still sort of a surprise sometimes but it never gets old.
Do you have any habits that help you stay on top of things?
Yeah, I think it’s really important to prioritize tasks when you build your company. It’s really easy to get caught up in doing things that don’t actually benefit your end goal. So if you’re stuck and don’t have time to work on and improve your product anymore, you should take a look at your processes and find out what’s hindering you from moving forward. Focus is super important, you have to decide what has to be done and what your priorities are for example.
In my case, I often ask myself if what I’m doing helps someone with chronic pain or not in the long run. For example, I feel like writing blog posts is sort of a drag and it might be easier to put it off and call somebody from our team to discuss stuff about MailChimp instead. Think of what helps develop your purpose. In my case, it’s creating content so I’d be better off focusing on that.
Is this also something that’s reflected in your company culture?
Yes definitely, I think we’re really focused as a group. The most important aspect about our team is that everybody really wants to help our end-user – people with chronic pain. It’s the same for our clients too. They buy Reducept because they want to improve their own pain or want to treat their patients, not necessarily to make money fast. Of course, you can profit from Reducept but if you work in healthcare it’s primarily about improving the lives of people. All startups in this industry care about doing research and improving medical technology to some extent.
Where do you see yourself and Reducept in the next three years?
I hope that in a couple of years we’ll be known as the best online treatment for chronic pain worldwide. I also think that utilising VR definitely has its limits and I’m curious what the future is going to hold for our treatments’ integrations in augmented reality and smartphone devices.
Do you have any advice for founders that are at the very beginning of their journey?
I think the best advice is still to find a group that really has a need, you can read up on this in many books. Create something completely different and don’t just improve an existing product or service. Find a gap you can fill and identify your target audience. I would also advise everybody to really think about their organisational goals and make sure they are truly worth striving for. If you want to do something for many years you have to find value in it, otherwise I believe it won’t work.
In my opinion one of the things you should also really be focusing on as a startup is trying to sell the product you have as soon as possible. Last year we did a lot of pre-sales based on our prototype, we went to practices and told them about its potential. I know that some startups are less focused on sales and more focused on getting more subsidies and funding. It’s a shame because if you test out the saleability of your product too late, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to get feedback from your customers from an early stage.
Do you have any recommendations for our readers?
“The Courage To Be Disliked” by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi and most stuff from Seth Godin, especially his podcast or book. He’s all about purpose as well. It’s about making slow progress instead of applying some magic trick and believing you can instantly change your habits and achieve success.