Website Find: 7CupsOfTea.com

[KynloStephen66515]

Link is an affiliate ID which simply allows me to see how many visits come from here

7 Cups of Tea is an on-demand emotional health and well-being service. Our bridging technology anonymously & securely connects real people to real listeners in one-on-one chat.

Anyone who wants to talk about whatever is on their mind can quickly reach out to a trained, compassionate listener through our network. We have hundreds of listeners who come from all walks of life and have diverse experiences.

People connect with listeners on 7 Cups of Tea for all kinds of reasons, from big existential thoughts to small, day-to-day things that we all experience. Unlike talking to family or friends, a 7 Cups of Tea listener doesn’t judge or try to solve problems and say what to do. Our listeners just listen. They understand. They give you the space you need to help you clear your head.

Connect with a listener by requesting the first available listener, or by selecting a specific listener from our community.

All of our listeners have completed our Active Listening training program, an online course in advanced skills for compassionate communication. The course is designed by our psychologist in residence, Glen Moriarty (who also happens to be our CEO & Founder). Additionally, we interview every listener to ensure they are friendly, considerate, and very competent.

Many of our listeners have joined 7 Cups of Tea because they love to help others and want to do something meaningful in their free time. All our listeners offer their kind ear for free since they understand what it is like to feel alone in distress.

You can decide whether to volunteer your time as a Listener, or you can just chat about your issues/problems etc with one of the volunteers.

I personally am a Listener on the website and have been for about a week, and I must say, it is an extraordinary website and very well thought out.  They have personal 1-on-1 chats, Group Chat Rooms, Dedicated Support Channels for Listeners and also a brilliant support forum.

More than worth a look for anybody interested in this kind of things as it also has some fantastic Self-Help guides and online training in many different courses such as the following:

• Active Listening
• Practice Chat Refresher
• ACT Therapy
• Adjusting to College
• Alcohol & Drug Abuse
• Anxiety
• Bullying
• Chronic Pain
• Coping with Loneliness
• Crisis Intervention
• Cultural Diversity
• Depression
• Eating Disorders
• Exercise Motivation
• Family Stress
• Managing Emotions
• Panic Attacks
• Parenting
• Psychological First Aid(PFA)
• Self Harm
• Sexual Abuse
• Sleeping Well
• Surviving Breakups
• Test Taking Anxiety
• Traumatic Experiences
• Work Related Stress
• Active Listening 1
• Active Listening 2

Visit 7CupsOfTea.com/1951860
Link is an affiliate ID which simply allows me to see how many visits come from here

[mouser]

Really nice 

[rgdot]

Nice, I like this

[40hz]

Interesting. In John Brunner's prophetic pre-cyberpunk dystopian novel The Shockwave Rider (published in 1975) there was a free service called Hearing Aid. You could dial a number ("Need somebody to listen? Just dial ten nines.") that would connect you with somebody who would do nothing other than to listen to you for as long as you wanted to talk.

From Wikipedia:

Precipice is ... the home of "Hearing Aid", an anonymous telephone confession service accessible to anyone in the country. Hearing Aid is also known as the "Ten Nines", after the phone number used to call it: 999-999-9999. People call the service, a human operator answers, and they simply talk while the operator listens. Some rant, others seek sympathy, still others commit suicide while on the phone. Hearing Aid's promise is that nobody else, not even the government, will hear the call. The only response Hearing Aid gives to a caller is "Only I heard that, I hope it helped."

This book also predicted the global data network (i.e. the Internet), computer virus/worms, the "plug-in" lifestyle, Libertarian economics, the American surveillance state, reality television and many other things that don't seem very much like science or dystopian fiction nowadays.



Highly recommended, along with his two other unrelated dystopian masterpieces: The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar.

[app103]

Not trying to be cynical, but what are they selling? Or what do they plan on selling? Who is the paying customer and what is the product?

This is a for profit company, with investors. People don't invest unless they think they are going to make a profit. And profit doesn't come from pouring in investment cash and having no plan for generating income from something else.

So, they must plan on selling something, whether it's

• ad space
• user info
• additional services
• offline therapist referrals
• something else

I am just curious how they plan to do it. And I saw nothing on the site that hints at the answer.

[40hz]

Not trying to be cynical, but what are they selling? Or what do they plan on selling? Who is the paying customer and what is the product?

This is a for profit company, with investors. People don't invest unless they think they are going to make a profit. And profit doesn't come from pouring in investment cash and having no plan for generating income from something else.

So, they must plan on selling something, whether it's

• ad space
• user info
• additional services
• offline therapist referrals
• something else

I am just curious how they plan to do it. And I saw nothing on the site that hints at the answer.

-app103 (December 13, 2014, 01:13 PM)

From a write-up on Y Combinator:

7 Cups of Tea’s team is still working on monetization strategies. Listeners can currently elect to charge a fee and if they do, the site takes a commission. Moriarty says the site’s current focus, however, is recruiting listeners to ensure users get their calls answered as soon as possible.

Apparently they haven't quite decided yet and are more interested in getting their infrastructure in place before they decide to reveal it. That's a standard start-up strategy to prevent copying before you're set to do your big roll out. And from the sound of it, it's nowhere near as altruistic as it would at first appear - or as Brunner's Hearing Aid was.

Capitalism. It's a grand thing! So long as you don't get sick, old, or die.

They are oddly secretive about their funding sources to date. Possible reason why below.

They will definitely need to be very careful how they set things up since non-pastoral and/or paid counselling (and related mental health services) are strictly regulated (and require a license) in many places. I don't see state regulatory agencies that license clinical psychologists and licensed social workers giving 7CoT carte blanche to just start offering services online. (And despite what some 'free market' warrior types may think, those regulations are in place for very good reasons.)

[app103]

They are oddly secretive about their funding sources to date. Possible reason why below.

They will definitely need to be very careful how they set things up since non-pastoral and/or paid counselling (and related mental health services) are strictly regulated (and require a license) in many places. I don't see state regulatory agencies that license clinical psychologists and licensed social workers giving 7CoT carte blanche to just start offering services online. (And despite what some 'free market' warrior types may think, those regulations are in place for very good reasons.)

-40hz (December 13, 2014, 01:22 PM)

That was why I was wondering if they were going to do paid referrals, sort of like a more social 1-800-dentist, but with therapist referrals.