From a failed app
to a new standard.
Redacted didn't start as an employee voice platform. It was born from a failure, hundreds of honest conversations with HR leaders, and a realization about what organizations actually need.
The Initial Vision
We began with a hypothesis: if we could track employee wellness through a daily pulse app, we could prevent burnout before it happened. We built MentCura, a beautifully designed wellness tracker, and took it to market with immense optimism.
The Reality Check
Despite initial enthusiasm from leadership, employee adoption fell off a cliff after two weeks. We realized a harsh truth: asking burnt-out employees to log their burnout is, in itself, an administrative burden that accelerates burnout. The tool was contributing to the problem.
The Listening Tour
We shut off new signups and spent six months doing nothing but interviewing CHROs, founders, and frontline managers. We discarded our assumptions and simply asked them what kept them awake at night. The recurring theme wasn't a lack of data; it was a lack of truth.
The Discovery of Friction
Leaders were flying blind because annual surveys were too slow, and quarterly pulses were universally despised. More importantly, employees confessed they never answered surveys honestly because they didn't trust the anonymity. The system was designed to produce polite fiction.
The Pivot to Redacted
We threw away our codebase and started over with two non-negotiable principles:
- A.ZERO EFFORTParticipation must take less than 10 seconds. No logins. No long forms.
- B.STRUCTURAL PRIVACYAnonymity must be guaranteed by architecture, not just by a privacy policy.