The Relationship Checkup
Making money from day one
Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman have revolutionized the study of marriage. For nearly five decades they have conducted research on all facets of relationships, including parenting issues. At the Gottman Institute, they developed an approach that not only supports and repairs troubled relationships, but strengthens happy ones.
The Gottman Institute provides live workshops and take-home training materials for couples, while their questionnaire, The Gottman Relationship Checkup, is an effective tool for couples and therapists that shortens the time and effort required to start effective relationship counselling.
Gottman methodology uses a scientifically-proven questionnaire for assessing couples at the beginning of therapy. The questionnaire identifies strengths and challenges and provides recommendations of therapeutic interventions.
The challenge
The Gottman Institute is transitioning from in-person training and event management to digital products.
Their process once involved distribution and collection of paper-based questionnaires that required manual tabulation of scores by the therapist. Our job was to transform the current workflow into an efficient online questionnaire that automated much of this work and digitized the overall experience.
What we did
We took the laborious paper-based assessment process and turned it into a time-saving web application. This involved talking to Gottman’s customers to learn their pain points and desired features.
From there, we synthesized this information into a simple streamlined workflow, combining the mobile-friendly questionnaire experience with clinical tools for reviewing and managing couples’ assessments. We also optimized a transactional payment flow that worked for both couples and clinicians.
-
Ruby on Rails
-
Stripe
-
JavaScript
-
PostgreSQL
-
Ansible
How it turned out
The app tapped into tremendous pent up demand and started making significant money on day one.
Clinicians and their couples rave about the time and money the Checkup has saved them. The assessment app had extraordinary growth year-over-year with an excellent ROI. It became a critical tool for Gottman therapists when onboarding new couples and a significant new revenue driver within the company.
A tremendous amount of data on relationships accumulated over the course of operating the service. We were honoured to support John Gottman in preparing an aggregated, anonymized data set that was used for further research. Through our work, the Gottman Institute was able to better serve their customers, drive significant revenue, and arrive at meaningful findings about relationship patterns.