The Case for Building What You Need

Claudia's Bio

Claudia is the co-founder of Circe, the first digital platform connecting women with therapist-led online group therapy. She has spent the past 10 years working with mission-driven consumer startups and is now building the resource she wishes had existed for her years ago.

Claudia's Blog

I remember the first time I was confronted in group therapy by my peers. I did something (that I shall not get into now) that was damaging to the group dynamic.

My peers lovingly held me accountable. It felt incredibly uncomfortable, and I felt terrible for the way I had behaved, but it was in that discomfort that something clicked for me.

I wasn't a hapless, blameless victim. I was a human being with agency, to whom bad things had indeed happened. But so is everyone else in that circle. And while I can grieve the things I lost, some that I never had, I also have the power to choose how I react, and a responsibility towards others to do my best.

It was a pivotal moment. I had been in individual therapy for a few years, and that work had been invaluable. But it was the mutual accountability I felt towards my peers that pushed me forward in a way nothing else had.

That was over a decade ago. Last year, going through what I can only describe as a quarter-life crisis, I tried to find a group therapy space that suited me and couldn't. The right group simply didn't exist in an accessible, digital form.

That gap is what led me to build Circe, the UK's first digital platform connecting women to therapist-led, online group therapy.

Accountability and Impostor Syndrome

Central to how I build is a commitment to staying accountable, and that starts with being honest about what I don't know.

I feel impostor syndrome almost daily. I've come to believe that's not entirely a bad thing, as long as I channel it in the right direction.

I've spent the last decade working inside early-stage startups, sitting alongside mission-led founders through the hardest and most formative moments of building something from nothing. I understand what makes an early-stage business, and what breaks one.

But I am not a therapist, and I don't have a clinical background or academic grounding in psychology. Pretending otherwise, even quietly through omission, would undermine both my mission and my confidence.

A former boss once told me that the best antidote to a lack of confidence isn't positive thinking, it's making genuine improvements in the areas where you feel least sure of yourself. For me, that looks like deliberately choosing to work with people who hold the knowledge I don't, while bringing what I do have: a decade in startups, and years sitting in the chair as a patient.

The impostor syndrome doesn't disappear, but it becomes a compass rather than a cage.

Why Building from Experience Is a Strength

I want to make a case for why building in the mental health space without a clinical background can be powerful, provided you have the right people around you and are humble enough to know your limits.

When you haven't been trained in how a system works, you are less likely to internalise its limitations. You're more likely to ask the questions that practitioners, through familiarity, have stopped asking. And you are more likely to keep the patient, their actual experience and their actual barriers, at the centre of every decision.

Research on co-production is still limited, but what exists supports this. As one research team put it: "To centre lived experience and foster genuine collaboration, we found it essential to put our professional hats aside and connect as people first." (Soklaridis et al., 2024, A balancing act: navigating the nuances of co-production in mental health research, PMC.)

That sentence could have come from my first group therapy session. It didn't, but the lesson did.

Accountability as a Core Value

I started Circe because I couldn't find what I needed. I kept building it because I believe the insight that comes from having been a patient, really been one, in the uncomfortable, accountable, transformative sense, is not a gap in my credentials. It is a credential.

The impostor syndrome is still there. Some days it's loud. But I've learned, in a therapy circle and then in a boardroom, that accountability isn't the enemy of confidence, it's the foundation of it.

PBI Take: What stands out here is the build philosophy. Claudia reframes impostor syndrome into something to use. That’s a powerful shift for anyone building in psychology-led spaces. There’s also a deeper principle at play: Accountability drives growth faster than insight alone. Lived experience is a different kind of data. For PBI members, this is a reminder that you don’t need to be everything. You need to be clear on what you are, and build around it.