the hook up: with jaron soh
We caught up with the proud, gay founder of the revolutionary lgbtq+ mental health app Voda which is closing the gap between queers and access to therapeutic tools. Jaron turned his dysfunctional relationship with himself and others as a gay, Asian man in London, into a revolutionary service for queer people globally. but in order to launch it he had to come out to his family…
CM: I think congratulations are in order as I see that you've won a few awards recently. What were they for?
JS: So the recent one this year was Attitude Magazine. It was the Attitude 101 awards. I was really pleasantly surprised. And last year we won an award by Pink News, Most Inclusive Tech Innovation. It was a new category which I applied for and we got through, thankfully. I didn't think we were going to get it, because I assumed they would probably just give it to a sponsor, and all we could afford is one seat! I think it's really helpful with credibility for working with charities.
CM: I'm sure it's the first of many! I read that you came out to your parents in order to launch the Voda. Could you tell us a bit about that tension and why that was so important to you?
JS: So I'm born and raised in Singapore, but I've been based in London now for the last 10 years. I came here to study, and I've been here since. I've been relatively out in the UK, because I don't have a family looking over my shoulder. I knew that I wanted to start this company, but to start this company, I will have to be the face of the company so I will need to be out to my parents. At that point, I'd already started two companies in the UK and my parents were quite proud of what I'd done, but I knew that to make the shift to this company, which would be my baby and my label of love, I had to come out to them. Otherwise it'd be really strange to hire someone else to talk about the company in my place. So that was really, really tough to do. I think the prospect of rejection from family is so big. With business, it's easy to get over rejection, or even with dating. But with family, there's only one family. I was kind of gearing myself up for a tough time. But even though coming out was very emotional, it eventually went quite well, I think because of the distance. I didn't have to deal with the crying in person, which I'm really glad about. And also it was during the time of COVID. I think we were less precious about certain things. You just wanted the people you care about to be happy and healthy.
CM: And what has been your experience with queerness and your mental health?
JS: I started therapy in my late 20s because I realised I was very anxious. My emotional history was showing up a lot in terms of insecurities in my friendships, in my work, and I had dysfunctional relationships with myself and with drinking, So I started going to therapy and it was really, really helpful for me. It helped me understand how it was my own saboteur holding myself back in so many different areas. And when I saw that for myself, I then saw it in all my friends as well. I could see how my friends distracted themselves with alcohol or drugs, but also sometimes people are just workaholics or in dysfunctional romantic relationships and so on. I think we're often running away from something. So that gave me the idea to start Voda, to create a mental health app that is designed by and for the community. We look at issues that other apps don't cover, such as coming out, gender dysphoria, but also dating from a LGBTQ+ perspective, managing jealousy and open relationships, exploring polyamory or reducing shame. I was really passionate about this. I think for all of us queer people, we struggle with different things, right? For me, it was my sexuality but also with a very intersectional lens, combined with being Asian. So I always felt very invisible in the London queer scene. I do think things have really changed a lot in the last decade, in a sense, I felt like in the past, it was very cis, white, gay male dominated. And I felt like people only wanted to be friends with people just like them. But that is often also a self-fulfilling prophecy. I used to go to Heaven and people wouldn’t talk to me but that's also not necessarily because of how I looked, but because I looked really sad by the corner sipping my gin and tonic. So obviously no-one is going to come to talk to that sad guy at the corner sipping gin and tonic! But the story I was telling myself before I went to therapy were all these dysfunctional thought patterns or beliefs about the world. Of course, I think there will be people that reject us based on our height, body, that we speak our accent and so on, and if you’re not somebody's type and that's totally okay. But it's really to do with what our core beliefs are about who we are, and that's what therapy helped me with, understanding that, and now I'm really happy because I have very fulfilling friendships. I'm also a big fan of what you've built with gayns. I can see you’re intentionally building a very intersectional community group for people that do feel welcome in spaces where traditionally they might not feel welcome.
CM: Thank you! What was your experience with conventional therapy? What worked well, and what didn't work well with therapy?
JS: So I think what worked well with conventional talking therapy for me was being able to speak to a gay therapist who understood my lived experience. It was just very helpful to get that therapeutic lens, but also feeling like I have a wise, older friend to speak to. He wasn't from my specific background, he wasn’t Asian, but at the same time, he understood a lot of the gay shame that we can be struck with. The first person I was matched with on Better Help was some religious woman from the Midwest in the US, and it was really strange how the algorithm matched me, it just didn't work. I think sometimes it could be a bit frustrating with therapists, you have to explain a lot of stuff to them. I have a funny story from a therapist where one of their clients mentioned how they felt really guilty because they always go cruising and the partner didn't know, and after a few weeks the therapist was like, I don't understand why your partner will be upset that you want to go on cruises?
CM: So what are the problems that we're facing at the minute with conventional therapy in terms of access and how is that impacting the wider LGBTQ+ community?
JS: That's a good question. I think looking at the wider community if you look at the trans plus community, there's almost no support whatsoever because they can’t even get gender affirming healthcare and so the mental health care portion of it is also heavily under invested because there aren’t enough therapists that understand trans issues and also understand therapeutic modalities that are more suitable for trans people. So our lead therapist is trans non-binary and they actually left the NHS because when they came out as trans, it was just so tough to be a practicing therapist that's trans in the NHS. So they left and set up their own practice. I also think for queer communities, we speak with some people from the NHS and the general vibe is that queer communities are often over sexualised. We do really well with services like Dean Street, but they should all interlink. So if I'm struggling with substance use, there aren't avenues for me to seek support to manage my use. Also a lot of these clinicians don’t even understand what we’re using in the first place, they wouldn't understand what GHB is if you were to go to a typical therapist, for example, and they would not understand the situational context in which we use all these different substances. So yeah, I think the state of LGBTQ mental provision is really lacking in the UK. I'm not sure if it'll get better, but we're hoping to work with the NHS on this.
CM: You’ve raised £200,000 in a pre-seed funding for Voda. Raising money from institutional investors for LGBTQ businesses can be hard, as we're often overlooked as too small a market to invest in or profit from. So, how was the whole fundraising experience for you for Voda?
JS: For my first company I raised funding. It was a better climate, but it was also easier to raise. With Voda, it was a lot harder to raise funding because investors invest in companies and startups that they often feel resonance with. Because even if you're an angel investor, which means a high net worth person, or you're an institution, you're still made out of general partners. And how it works is, you need one person to really vouch for you and fight for you amongst others. And you can only do that when you form a strong connection with them. And this is why femme tech is often underinvested, because there aren’t enough women investors that will see this is a massive market. And likewise, for LGBT partners, I think there are a lot of LGBT investors, but sometimes they are not fully out, because they don't want to be seen as ‘that gay investor’ or something. So, conversations were a lot harder, the investors that I pitched to, oftentimes, the men didn't really get it or weren't really listening. They were just taking the call because someone said they had to take the call with us. But there is queer capital out there and there's increasingly more queer capital out there. And people are realising the queer market is big. It's not a niche. So that's the biggest point I always fight people on. I'm like, it's not niche, we've got a lot of money.
CM: You've had a few businesses before this one. So, why Voda and why now?
I think VODA for me is a personal calling. It's so fulfilling to work on something that I think I have the right skills for, so I'm a product designer, I can build websites and apps, my co-founder and CTO Chris, he is gay dad that has two kids with his husband. Our lead therapist is trans, non-binary, so to work with us as a core team of people that just care a lot about the community feels so good, and to wake up every day to do something that I think matches my skills, that I love and I get paid for, is just a dream. And also because the world needs an alternative to what we have out there, and an app works a lot better for a lot of LGPTQ+ people. Outside of the UK for example in Singapore, all of us live with a family until we are ready to buy a house. Whereas people here rent until they're ready to buy a house. So people in those countries can't really do talking therapies because you can be overheard by your family. And therapy is so stigmatised. So an app makes a lot more sense as a discreet way to access mental support. My eventual life goal is to move back to Singapore and fight for marriage equality. But that will likely be much later down the line.
CM: Can an app like Voda help you feel a bit more supported on a daily basis because you have access to it all the time?
JS: Yeah, so I think that's how we are different. We're not trying to replace a therapeutic relationship. I think what's great about therapy is that if you can afford it, you go on a weekly basis and I think that that therapeutic connection helps you grow over time. But we've seen Voda as complementary to therapy. Something you can use in between therapy for mental support and we have emotional regulation exercises. We’ve now built a four part therapeutic exercise based on what you're going through, so if you're struggling with social anxiety in queer spaces you can get a four part exercise that helps you break down your your thoughts and feelings about the situation but also an exercise you could apply in reality when you're actually in that space to calm yourself. That's how I see Voda, as being able to not just relieve anxiety but also help people grow to be more confident, be more present in their relationships, manage their relationship with alcohol and substances and so on.
CM: So what are the sort of unique barriers that queer people face when it comes to conventional therapy or traditional forms of mental well-being?
JS: I think the first of always like the difficulty in finding LGBTQ+ affirming therapists that understand your situation. I think I feel like LGBTQ+ therapists are quite hard to find, one that really understands you. Secondly, conventionally, like most people, it's just cost. Most people are really happy to access therapy, but then to pay anything from £60 to £120 per session a week is just so much in addition to the cost of living that it's just not possible. And the third way is just the lack of LGBTQ+ authorities out there, especially in things like a Calm or Headspace, that understand who you are. Those apps are often quite cis-normative, heteronormative. I would say those are the main barriers for our community.
CM: How much would it cost somebody to access Voda?
JS: For Voda we charge £8 a month, £55 a year. So even for a year, it is less than the cost of the therapy session, but we also give free scholarships. We'll give free codes to charity like Not A Phase, and also to anyone who writes in. So if anyone writes in and says they can’t afford Voda, we’ll activate it for them, and we often do get a lot of people to write in and say, I really love it, but I can't afford it at the moment. So we just turn on Voda for them.
You can download Voda on Apple App Store & Google Play. Jaron can be found via his LinkedIn here.