Meet the MD: Blueheart founder Sachin Raoul on the "9,000 piece puzzle" of sex therapy

It’s been less than a year since Sachin Raoul came up with the idea for Blueheart - a sex therapy app - but he’s already working on expanding the project.

Blueheart has grown from two employees to eight since its inception, and according to Sachin, is already being used by thousands of people.

Bdaily talked to Sachin about the challenges and stigmas around sex therapy, and how he plans to include advice for people from all walks of life.

Can you tell the readers what Blueheart is?

Blueheart is an empowering new app designed to democratise access to sex therapy and help people overcome sexual dysfunction to have healthy personal relationships.

The app is informed by the latest scientific research and created in partnership with world-renowned therapist Dr Katherine Hertlein.

Our aim is to help couples and individuals understand and resolve sex-related issues through proven therapy techniques, whilst tearing down the financial, emotional and psychological barriers that put traditional therapy out of reach for many.

The sessions are navigated digitally via audio and written materials. They include thought sessions, which focus on sexual fears and anxieties; body sessions, which centre around building a positive relationship with your body, both alone and with a partner; and connection sessions, which focus on how to communicate.

What does your role entail?

Following our seed funding round, I’ve had to really undergo a metamorphosis from builder to manager.

When you start out, you need to be awesome at coming up with ideas and building them at lightning speed. When the team grows, it’s no longer about how good you are as a builder, but can you manage all the complexities of groups of people.

Over and above all the designing, strategy and finances, my prime role is to make sure I’m empowering the incredible people I work for.

If they’re going through a tough time, I need to get them through it. If they’re not performing, I need to inspire them on how to improve. Our success rests so heavily on how well I can lead.

Though that’s mainly the fun stuff. Then there are the difficult questions which I have to answer. Are we moving in the right direction? Have we just wasted 2 months of work? Do we have the best team possible?

These all require constant monitoring to make sure we’re optimised as a unit - and my role is to be constantly weighing them up and take action when needed.

When was Blueheart set up, and how has it grown since then?

Blueheart was setup up in 2019 after my own struggles finding the right support. Love can be our greatest source of happiness, and consequently, it can also be our greatest source of pain. Sex is often a huge part of that.

The taboos we have around sex across the globe are causing immense pain to millions. Pain that can be avoided and addressed with therapy. But therapy comes with it’s own boundaries. We’re restricted by time, location and cost - which has made therapy inaccessible to most people.

When I initially had the idea and started doing research, it felt too good to be true. An idea that meant so much to me on a personal level, that no one else had done yet and at a time where the technology was actually able to make a leap for an entire archaic space. I needed to get an expert take, to confirm I wasn’t missing a huge piece of the puzzle. So I emailed every top sex expert I could find. That’s when Dr Hertlein messaged me back in about 2 hours saying, ‘Call me’.

Since that pivotal moment, I met my genius (and I don’t use that word lightly) co-founder Robbie on the Antler VC accelerator programme. In 2 months we’d raised pre-seed funding and had Blueheart out on the Play and App Stores. In 4 months we’d had testimonials saying how we completely changed the lives of some of our early beta users. By month 6, we’d closed £1m of seed funding from two brilliant VCs. Our team has gone from two to eight within a year (and counting) and we’ve already attracted thousands of users.

What is it about your organisation that motivates and excites you the most?

It’s hard to put this into words without getting emotional. My whole life I’ve wanted to work on a project that helps humanity. I didn’t know what that was going to be, I just kept hope that it would all work out if I kept my tenacity.

Finding any idea that has any promise in any domain is tricky, but one that has the potential to transform the world - it’s close to impossible. Then along came sex. When you spend a lot of time philosophising about sex and why it has the power to give us such anxiety, you realise it’s not about pleasure, but about human connection.

Despite this obvious fact of life, research on how to have long-lasting wonderful connections is completely understudied, with little innovation being done. We’re still using therapy techniques from 50 years’ ago! The good news is that it gave us a blank slate to transform our understanding of love and, in the process, make the most meaningful impact you can have on an individual.

We’re a company whose core purpose is to keep human connections alive when they might be destroyed. Any and every single person we can help feel happy within themselves to live beautiful and connected lives is a purpose everyone at Blueheart wakes up for.

Looking back on the past year, what has been your biggest achievement?

There was one early user, we’ll call them B. They’d been struggling with the pressure of being a new parent that meant their sex life had essentially vanished. They had a supportive partner, but that didn’t stop the voice in their head saying their partner would leave if things didn’t change.

We spent a lot of time understanding B and after a month, we had messages saying Blueheart had helped take them back to the way they used to feel, their partner had immediately seen a difference and we’d changed both of their lives. We set out to help people overcome sexual dysfunction, and we did it. It makes all the stress of starting a company worth it.

What have been your biggest challenges during your time at Blueheart so far, and how have you overcome them?

Think about dieting. It’s famously hard to stick to a diet plan, even though you’re fully aware of how good it is for you. Well, sex therapy is that problem, but a hundred times harder. It’s our job to motivate someone to confront a very emotional problem when the exit route is just so easy - a back button. It’s hard enough doing this for one person. We’ve got to do it for two. At the same time. We’re very much still understanding this challenge, but integrating the right messages at the right time to keep people on track is a key way to start solving this 9,000 piece puzzle. And it’s an important puzzle to solve.

What does the future hold for your company? Any exciting projects in the pipeline we should know about?

We’re currently working on expanding the range of issues that we address within the app. The first tranche of content is directed at heterosexual couples who are experiencing sex drive discrepancy (differing sex drives!). We want to be inclusive of all sexual orientations and gender identities so we can help more people. Over the next few months, we’ll be working with our expert advisor Dr Katherine Hertlein to expand the dysfunctions we treat within the app and reach as many diverse audiences as possible.