Over the past few months, we've received a lot of messages from people who want to access Visible's wearable device and membership but currently can't due to geographic limitations, affordability, or smartphone compatibility. We hear you.
We’re determined to ensure that every single person with an energy-limiting illness can access what we’re building, and I want to share where we are on the road to achieving this.
Making Visible available in more countries
Many people ask why the Visible membership isn’t available in their country.
Making Visible available internationally is a complex undertaking, especially for a very small company like us. It involves a few key things:
- Logistics and fulfilment: setting up warehousing and fulfilment centres for our wearable devices so that we can stock wearables, and ship quickly and cheaply.
- Legal and financial work: incorporating subsidiary companies, navigating new tax regimes, handling new currencies and deeply understanding unique regulatory environments around health-related products and services.
- Languages and support: international expansion may also involve providing Visible in additional languages. This would involve creating and maintaining translations of our app, help centre, and website. It would also require us to train and hire people who can speak additional language to provide support to our members - something we can’t compromise on.
None of these hurdles are insurmountable individually, but together they make it a significant challenge to launch Visible in many countries quickly.
Nonetheless, making Visible available globally is very much on our roadmap. Although timings aren’t fully defined, we can say that we don’t have the capacity to launch Visible in additional countries in 2024. In 2025, however, we will provide an international expansion timeline.
The exception to this may be Canada. We already have a North American fulfilment centre and many Canadians have English as a first language. We’ll look to offer Visible here in 2024, but once again we can’t yet commit to a precise timeline for this.
In the meantime, we have made our free app available in a few additional countries (including Germany and Australia) to prepare for future expansion. However, making the free app available in more countries would come with significant data and support costs, and as a small company, we’re not able to offset these costs until we can also offering our full membership in these geographies.
Making Visible available via insurers, and the NHS
We know that many people with energy-limiting illness are not in a financial position to afford a Visible membership. Our long-term goal is to make Visible available for reimbursement from insurers or provided free of charge by healthcare providers.
To achieve this, we need to build a significant evidence base to demonstrate Visible’s effectiveness in improving patients’ health. Healthcare payers understandably only subsidise tools which are evidenced by strong scientific and health economic data.
Fortunately, with a community of over 80,000 Visible users, we’re increasingly able to show the impact that Visible is having. We recently updated our website to include some early outcomes from 1,300 of our members, showing that 86% of people report that they feel more in control of their illness and that 91% of members are better able to manage their energy.
This is very encouraging, and we’re working with leading researchers including Dr. David Putrino and Prof. David Strain to publish the full outcomes from this survey in a peer-reviewed journal. This is the first step towards building a solid evidence base to engage with insurers and health plans. The second phase will be pursuing a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) - the gold standard of evidence.
We understand this can’t happen quickly enough, and we hope that our free Visible app will still provide some support during this time for those unable to afford the full membership.
Supporting more smartphone devices
While we support Android devices generally, we’re currently unable to support certain Motorola and Oppo branded smartphones, specifically due to their shared Snapdragon processor. This processor can’t currently or reliably sync real time data from our Polar armband.
We’ve been working hard over the past few months with Polar to get to the bottom of this issue, we will keep pushing for this to be fixed as soon as possible.
How are we prioritizing availability?
Visible is run by a small team, over half of who live with energy-limiting conditions. There is only so fast that we can work, and frustratingly, it isn’t possible to make Visible available to everyone today. This means that we have to prioritize where we focus our energy, which is incredibly tough to do (as many of our our members know).
With this in mind, we believe that the right approach is to take things in the following order:
- Exploring Canadian expansion via our North American logistics.
- FSA/HSA Eligibility in the US, enabling tax-free membership purchases.
- Insurance and NHS Partnerships in the US and UK.
- Language and Regional Expansions to bring Visible to a global audience.
This will take time, but we are working hard on it. We’re alway evaluating our priorities, taking into account our capabilities and community needs, so I’ll keep you updated on our progress, and I’d welcome any feedback on our approach. You can reach out to us anytime at info@makevisible.com. We’ll always respond.
Onwards,
Harry