Editor’s note: Welcome to The Pitch, a DC Inno special feature in which we spotlight young local startups led by underrepresented founders. These companies may not have much (or any) funding or revenue, but they do have plans — and they’re taking the initial steps to make things happen. Each month, we’ll highlight a different venture in the D.C.-area landscape, with an intention of following their journeys from this point forward. Previously we have featured CarpeDM, Old Dominion Flower Co., Acclinate, OneVillage, Isotonik Solutions, The New Norm, Deazly and Wolomi.
Melinda Woods knew she needed to make self-care part of her routine, but she didn’t have the time while juggling a master’s degree program, a career with the Department of Defense and an 8-year-old son as a single mother.
So she founded MentalMassage LLC “because I was precisely in need of it,” she said. “I represent the client, so I am intimately and inextricably tied to the community that MentalMassage serves.”
She launched the company in May 2021, four years after founding it. The goal, she said, is to give Black female business leaders and busy mothers a suite of services from therapy to massage to meditation from a growing network of therapists, counselors and coaches. And as a more holistic model than the disparate services currently in the marketplace, she said, it aims to address affordability, accessibility and provider fit — some of the biggest barriers to finding sustainable mental health and wellness options.
“I designed services for women who look great on the outside but are coming apart around the seams, trying to hold it all together, because I have close friends who have been seemingly on top of the world as doctors, lawyers and businesswomen, who have had nervous breakdowns,” Woods said. She then enlisted those very women in a pilot that’s now informing the direction of MentalMassage.
The pitch: The D.C. company provides a mental health and wellness concierge service for female business owners and executives struggling to prioritize self-care with work, family and other responsibilities. Its digital platform allows people to schedule and manage appointments for a variety of services including coaching, yoga and meditation, discussions about nutrition and women’s health, fitness programming and finance classes, as well as sessions ranging from massage and belly dancing to sauna and steaming and herbalist consultations. By bundling multiple appointments into membership packages ranging from $260 to $300 a month, it aims to make these services more affordable and more feasible to tackle with limited time. It also sets out to connect its users with providers who resonate — which for Black and brown women especially can be “near impossible” to find, Woods said.
The leadership: Woods is founder and CEO of MentalMassage. She has a master’s in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a master’s in business administration from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. She previously worked as a government program manager in the Department of Defense, and continues to do contract support work for the agency, overseeing cybersecurity and supply chain security programs. But the hope, she said, is to eventually shift to full-time work on her personal ventures, including MentalMassage.
The business model: MentalMassage establishes contracts with companies and nonprofits that offer leadership training, employee assistance programs and wellness benefits to their employees. It also has a direct-to-consumer offering for individuals, which drives revenue through subscriptions and individual program fees. The business is largely pre-revenue, after generating $3,000 in a three-month pilot in 2021 “that was extremely low priced” with 14 providers and eight customers. Woods then took a break to regroup and redesign her packages. She said she’s projecting to reach at least $100,000 in revenue for 2023.
The challenge: “I currently need legal and backend support to solidify the infrastructure to onboard more providers and secure corporate contracts,” Woods said. She’s now working to lock that in, while building up marketing campaigns for individual and corporate customers. She’s also looking for a partner that she envisions as “a dedicated, kick-butt co-conspirator” to help build the business from here, she said. That person would help stand up its provider network, run programming and oversee marketing. And she’s hiring for counseling and yoga director positions, and a couple of interns in the social work or hospitality spaces to help with case management and data entry.
The game plan: After securing $2,000 through GoFundMe’s Black Business Month grant program, Woods is looking to raise $63,000 in seed funding. That would position her startup to build out its digital platform with a membership portal, video conferencing, account management features and scheduling functionality. She also intends to tap legal support to handle agreements, insurance, copyrights and trademarks, as well as any future joint ventures, and to invest in digital marketing and sales efforts. And she’s searching for both office space and practice space (for therapy, yoga and fitness offerings). “I also need three corporate customers to demonstrate commitment to the women in their organizations by contracting with MentalMassage,” she said, noting McKinsey & Co., Forbes and Goldman Sachs Inc. as examples of ideal customers.
