We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Olamide Afolabi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Olamide thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory. 

My business, Start Saying More, is an idea that was birthed during my second year of undergrad. You know how sometimes you want to talk to someone who has also experienced what you’ve been through? During my sophomore year I attended therapy for the first time with a University assigned counselor. She was well meaning, but she really just didn’t *get* what I was talking about. I felt like all her responses were general textbook responses that didn’t actually help much. That was when I came up with the idea to open a brick-and-mortar therapy center for women where they could talk to a provider who had experience counseling their specific issue. Years pass and as technology continued to take over everything, my idea transitioned into an online platform that connects individuals to mental health providers.

As a Black woman, it is very important for me to connect individuals from my communities to therapists. Connecting with a therapist who understood me, was familiar with my experiences, and made an effort to know me literally changed my life. It’s important to have a safe space to unpack and understand your experiences, but starting therapy is daunting. Between the stigma, the long directories, and the general mystery around finding a therapist, it’s easy for people to avoid the process altogether. Start Saying More removes all of that guesswork; patients complete our questionnaire and then are provided with a therapist in our database who is the best match.

Olamide, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I got into this business from personal experience. As a Black woman, it was difficult for me to connect with my previous white therapists; they didn’t understand my colloquialisms, mannerisms, trauma, etc. This inability to connect would ultimately be a major barrier for the success of the sessions. Once I connected with a Black woman therapist a few years ago, I finally had a safe space. From my experience and from hearing the experiences of other people in my communities, I felt the need to help others find a safe space. Start Saying More uses four primary factors to match users to therapists: personality type, experiences, area(s) of concern, and preferences. We solve two problems with our platform: 1) the issue of not knowing how to find a therapist and 2) the lack of connection with a therapist causing people to prematurely stop treatment.

I’m always proud to hear of someone starting therapy. I think therapy is such a useful tool! It’s the well-kept secret that we all need for personal growth. I want to provide this opportunity to as many people as possible.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

It took us over two years to finally launch our MVP. This isn’t because we weren’t working hard on it but because we continuously ran into roadblocks. We built our first website in 2020 on the Wix platform. Unfortunately, after much experimentation and research, we realized it was impossible to accomplish what we needed to with the Wix algorithm. The platform could not connect with databases as we needed it to. At the start of 2022, we had to scrap the website. We returned to the drawing board, built a new website, finally launched MVP in September of 2022, and are now building a database of therapists. Many times during this journey, I wanted to quit; I was tired. I cried a lot, feeling like my goal was not attainable. But resilience got us to this point.

How’d you meet your business partner?

My cofounder Giselle and I met during undergrad at the University of Central Florida. We weren’t necessarily friends, but we knew one another and were cordial. Giselle began dating, and eventually married, my best friend and that is where our relationship grew as well. I think it’s great that we were friends for years before we began working together. Surely, working together has brought different challenges to our relationship, but the underlying friendship that we have has helped us work together well and quickly resolve any conflicts.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.startsayingmore.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/startsayingmore
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/StartSayingMore/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/startsayingmore/
• Twitter: twitter.com/startsayingmore