From Conversation to Action
On the Thrive Together podcast, we sit down with founders, builders, researchers, practitioners, and leaders who are working to improve the wellbeing of children, families, and communities.
But great conversations are only valuable if they lead to action.
That’s why we’ve created the Thrive Founder Playbook series. Each Playbook distills a key insight, strategy, decision, or lesson from a podcast episode into practical guidance that others can adapt in their own work. Rather than summarizing the conversation, these Playbooks identify the specific choices, experiments, and approaches that helped a leader move an idea from concept to impact.
Whether you’re building a nonprofit, launching a startup, leading change within an institution, or exploring a new solution to an old problem, we hope these Playbooks offer actionable ideas you can borrow, test, and improve upon.
This Playbook is inspired by a conversation with Mallika Pajjuri of Psyche Care and highlights practical lessons from their journey.
Rent the Jeep. Bring the Pickle: How Psyche Care built trust by showing up where caregivers actually are.
Every founder eventually reaches a moment when the standard playbook stops working.
For Psyche Care founder Mallika Pajjuri, that moment came after months of outreach. Emails went unanswered. Phone calls reached the wrong people. The people she needed to reach—mental health providers, pediatric clinicians, and hospital discharge teams—were busy caring for patients, not responding to sales messages.
So she stopped trying to reach them from behind a laptop.
Instead, she rented a Jeep, moved to Minnesota for three months, and began hand-delivering gift boxes to clinics across the state. Each box contained a crocheted “emotional support pickle,” a candle, and a simple card explaining Psyche Care’s impact.
The Jeep and the pickle were memorable, but neither was the point. The point was presence.
The Challenge
After a year of caregiver interviews, Psyche Care understood the problem they were solving. What they hadn’t yet solved was how to reach the people responsible for helping families navigate care.
Traditional startup outreach wasn’t working. Hundreds of emails produced almost no responses and their cold calls rarely reached decision-makers. The founders realized they weren’t selling to technology buyers. They were trying to connect with people whose primary job was caring for children and families and their outreach strategy had to change.
The Play
1. Target a Persona, Not an Organization
Rather than targeting “mental health clinics,” Psyche Care focused on a much more specific audience: Older millennial practice owners serving pediatric populations.
That level of specificity influenced everything:
- The gift
- The language
- The conversation
- The expectations
The more clearly you understand the person, the less generic your outreach becomes.
2. Design a Signal, Not a Sales Pitch
The gift box wasn’t about promoting the product. It was about demonstrating understanding. The crocheted pickle was quirky, warm, and unexpectedly memorable. The candle reflected the emotional nature of the work. The data card provided substance. Together, they communicated something important:
“We understand the people you serve because we care about them too.”
3. Show Up
Many of the conversations that ultimately mattered started with hours spent sitting in waiting rooms. The founders learned that some relationships simply cannot be built through email. Showing up created opportunities for conversations that would never have happened otherwise.
4. Take Rejection Face-to-Face
Silence teaches very little. Direct feedback teaches a lot. When someone didn’t think Psyche Care was the right fit, the founders learned why immediately. Those insights shaped messaging, partnerships, and product decisions in real time.
The goal wasn’t maximizing close rates. The goal was maximizing learning rates.
5. Organize Around Buyers, Not Geography
The founders didn’t divide their work by region, they divided it by customer type. Mallika focused on outpatient and pediatric clinics. Hanxiao focused on hospital discharge teams. Each founder became an expert in a specific buyer’s workflow, challenges, and priorities.
What It Cost
This strategy required:
- Three months on the road
- Hundreds of conversations
- Significant founder time
- Countless hours in waiting rooms
Most days ended with a relationship rather than a sale, and that’s exactly why it worked. This was a foundation-building strategy, not a scaling strategy.
What It Produced
Today, Psyche Care has an active pilot with MedStar, enrolling families from both inpatient and emergency department settings. The company reports that 85-90% of eligible families complete intake calls through the inpatient program — far exceeding typical post-discharge engagement rates. More importantly, the founders built a deep understanding of the people they serve and the systems they work within.
Try This If…
✓ Your customers are clinicians, caregivers, educators, or others whose work revolves around people rather than inboxes.
✓ You are still learning who your true buyer is and what motivates them.
✓ Your category is new enough that relationships matter more than reputation.
✓ You need rapid feedback from the field.
Skip This If…
✕ You already have a reliable procurement or partnership channel.
✕ Your organization is operating at scale.
✕ You are using “customer discovery” as a substitute for improving your product.
✕ You have evidence that digital outreach already works.