MindLabs wants to change how we access mental health support

Adnan Ebrahim is the founder and CEO of MindLabs, a mobile-first, video-led mental wellness platform launching at the end of January, directed primarily at working millennials. At 31, he’s only a young man. But don’t let this, or the fact that MindLabs is a start-up, mislead you. Ebrahim has been a successful entrepreneur since the age of 15.

MindLabs classes are led by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and breath work and mindfulness experts, and can be tapped into on demand or live-streamed from London straight to your phone: you can join from anywhere in the world, set targets and track progress as you would with a regular fitness app. Classes come under the broad headings of Stress and Anxiety, Sleep, Loneliness, Relaxation, Focus, and Energy, and promise “instant mood lift using positive action” or to “combat stress with the physiological sigh”. For now it’s a one-to-many format – only the instructor can be seen and heard – but Ebrahim is planning for two-way interaction as the product evolves.

“I always had that entrepreneurial itch,” Ebrahim tells me. It started in the playground, back at Hampton School in southwest London, when rubber wristbands were all the rage. Ebrahim paid a visit to his local Sports Soccer store, bought a job lot at a pound a piece, and sold them for ten pounds to his affluent peers. The only problem was the limited size of his market. Which is when he logged on to eBay, and first glimpsed the “financial potential” and “arbitrage opportunities” of the budding internet. It wasn’t long before he had accrued the handsome sum of £2,000 and was looking to reinvest. He’d mastered wristbands, he thought. “Can I master consumer electronics?” Which is when he logged on to Alibaba.

This was both good and bad. Ebrahim was fleeced by a scammer touting discounted iPods that turned out to be knock-off imitations, and promptly lost all his not-so-hard-earned winnings. What did he do next? “I cried,” he says. He suffered a moment of self-doubt: “maybe I’m not so good at this.” But he also confided in his father, who was matter-of-fact: “Life happens,” he told his teenage son, politely. It was indeed an invaluable life lesson, and in that moment Ebrahim resolved that he would never again “spend money to make money”. “That became my mantra. If something’s too good to be true, it probably is.”

Instead, he set up Blogtrepreneur on BlogSpot, writing guides to steer others through “the Wild West” of the internet and using AdSense to generate traffic and revenue. By the time he left school he was just shy of 100,000 subscribers and making two or three thousand a month, which is when he sold the business for “a mid five-figure sum” to the owners of Young Entrepreneur. “I had to get one of my parents to sign the deal, because I wasn’t old enough. It was just before my 18th birthday.”

Ebrahim’s parents are both first-generation immigrants: his father (from Zambia) set up his own dentistry practice, his mother (from India) her own jewellery business: “She was passionate about the idea of going out into the world and creating something of your own.”

It was a great start in life. Exemplary parents, the best education they could afford, hard-working siblings either side of him. Good homes, in Windlesham and Virginia Water. No complaints. No complaints at all. But there’s a downside to perceiving yourself as a born high achiever. Ebrahim never talked to his school friends about his entrepreneurial activities, his anxiety about being perceived as a geek compounded by lurking imposter syndrome and a fear of failure. By day he made sure of getting A* grades in Maths, Further Maths, Economics, Geography and French, which opened the door to an Economics degree at University College London. By night he worked on his blog. He did internships at Merrill Lynch, and then in Mergers and Acquisitions at Vodafone, before heeding the parting words of his personal tutor at UCL not to follow the herd into the City, but to be guided by his passion. “I wanted more control over my destiny.”

Ebrahim’s passion, apart from creating something of his own like his mum, was cars. As a boy, he dreamed of driving a Lamborghini, “the most bombastic of the luxury cars”; when he got his licence he drove his father’s Toyota Yaris; the first car he bought was a secondhand BMW E46 M3, “one of the older performance cars, with cult status in the community”. Trade magazines were stacked high in his cupboard. “I know,” he thought. “Can I create a blog about cars?” Which was how Car Throttle was born in his university dorm room. “I missed the bug. I missed building something.” It was an instant success, “snowballing gradually” to around 80K users a month in his final year. By this time Ebrahim had started experimenting with video. Just before he graduated, he got an invite from Volvo to his first ever press event: we really like your blog, they said, why don’t you come down to Hampshire and drive one of our brand new S60 and V60 cars? Ebrahim was over the moon, and nervous. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he thought, “but let’s get out there and make a video.”

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He and a mate went off to PC World and bought a cheap flip-out camcorder. They brazened it out among the big lenses, shot two shorts and got 100,000 views on YouTube. After that, things properly snowballed. Starting with Mitsubishi, car manufacturers from Audi through BMW to Mercedes Benz would deliver cars to his door, his for a week, all expenses paid. Industry validation was a game-changer. He was invited to drive an old-school American muscle car in the Gumball 3000 road rally from Stockholm to Las Vegas (airlifted across the Atlantic in a private jet) alongside Lewis Hamilton, David Hasselhoff and Tony Hawk; the £30,000 entry fee was brushed aside. One day he even got to spin a Lamborghini Gallardo around the test track at Silverstone. “It was the best day of my life.”

But amid all the glitz and glamour the fear of failure never left him. As Car Throttle grew 50 per cent year on year, so too did the pressure and anxiety. In 2016, Ebrahim hit a “crippling” low, but just like when he was a boy, nobody knew how he was feeling. “As sole founder and CEO, I had to take it all on myself.” Vulnerability was not an option.

Why was he keeping all this stuff to himself? Ebrahim decided to see a life coach, then a therapist. “It was the first time I’d seen a professional about my mind,” he says, laughing. “Looking back, it seems ridiculous. We talk openly about looking after our bodies. We should normalise doing the same for our minds. I think it’s funny now that I thought seeing a professional was something to write home about.” He read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and started meditating. It was about changing habits and mindset through daily practice. “We’re very proud of telling people if we have a personal trainer or we’re on a Peloton. Why are we not proud of talking about seeing a therapist?” Mental and physical performance and health were so inherently linked, why shouldn’t they be treated the same way?

By the time Ebrahim sold Car Throttle to Dennis Publishing in 2019, he knew he wanted “to be in the mental health space”. His priorities had changed. He was going to start over.

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MindLabs would take a science-led approach to mental health provision. Ebrahim hired a neuroscientist, then of the brain sciences lab at Imperial College, to help establish which practices were measurably effective. “Meditating three times a week for 20 minutes changes your brain through neuroplasticity: you change your pre-frontal cortex, you get more grey matter, you change your neural pathways.” For him, it’s like getting inside a car and fixing the nuts and bolts. “Our generation is so sceptical. Unless you can show them that, hey, if you do this sleep exercise, your quality of sleep will improve, and hey, we can track that now, because you have an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or a sleep tool, and we can prove that your quality of sleep has actually improved.”

Video is at the core of his vision, and not just because his years at Car Throttle made him a master of the medium. “We’re so used to consuming information by video now. We find it more efficient than via written text.” Not only more efficient, but more personal too. Live video-led classes enable users to build connection and a sense of accountability, so mitigating against withdrawal and feelings of isolation, exacerbated during the pandemic. “It makes you see you’re not alone with your problems and helps reintegrate you into society. You don’t really form a bond with an audio-only app like you do with a personal trainer.” Subscribers will be charged £7.99 per month, and Ebrahim believes this to be “a low and accessible price point, as cheap as other alternatives, but with far higher value in the live classes and progress tracking”.

Ebrahim still drives a Nissan GTR supercar. He has £3.9m in seed funding and a track record of success: the odds are in favour of MindLabs. But this time he would do things differently. No more hiding away. No more secrets. Now it was all about “letting go and trusting”. Which is how he came to join forces with co-founder and COO Gabor Szedlak, who joined Car Throttle as social media manager in 2014 and rose quickly to a position of seniority: both men left the company together, both of one mind. Szedlak has “his own mental health journey” and is “the rapid executor”, “the guy who gets things done”, whereas Ebrahim is “more bigger picture”.

“I didn’t want to go through the next journey alone.”