Build software and systems instead of hiring

Our mission is to make high-quality mental health support accessible to as many people as possible. That requires a model built for scale from the start.

Rather than allowing costs to rise with growth, we design our service to be efficient, consistent, and sustainable. We automate the operational parts of Spill wherever possible, using thoughtful processes and technology to run what doesn’t need human judgement. This approach means we can grow without passing rising costs on to customers.

In practice, this means:

• We automate administrative and coordination tasks so clinicians can focus on care, not paperwork
• We design clear, repeatable processes instead of relying on manual work
• We invest in systems that reduce complexity as we scale, rather than adding headcount by default
• We are deliberate about where human judgement adds real value
• We continuously improve how our service runs to keep it affordable without compromising quality

Hire serious professionals who are exemplary at what they do

We are no longer in the “discovery” stage of Spill where we need to change our product, pricing and strategy every few months. Now that we’ve found a big opportunity and have a compelling proposition, we are standardising and expanding. In this stage, the quality of our execution will determine our success more than our speed and scrappiness.

We need a team where every person has the technical ability to create seemingly simple solutions to hard problems and can collaborate with others to ensure that the problems remain solved.

In practice, that means hiring people who:

• have had high standards drilled into them by people who were capable of producing great work
• are senior and have therefore seen how solutions play out over a long time horizon

Run an honest business

We are building something that we want to last for decades. Because we work in mental health, trust is foundational to the impact we want to have. This often means doing things the hard way rather than the easy way.

In practice this looks like: