YouMatter

As long as I can remember, I have always been an empathetic person. People’s suffering pierced my heart deeply. I just can’t pinpoint one legendary stories as the ones people tell about tending to a sick loved one. I guess mine was a conglomeration of witnessing the pain in the world. Either walking with a friend through their parents’ divorce, listening to a friend retelling their body image discomfort over and over again, watching a smart guy I grew up looking up to succumbing to drug addiction, witnessing my own sibling attempting suicide, or noticing my friends scars of self mutilation. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that mental health should be promoted as loud as other physical health issues such as diabetes, HIV, malaria, etc, and this what birthed YouMatter.

What it does

We built a school mental health platform that modernizes how students access counseling. We have two main use cases students and school counselor/therapists.

For students, it's a way to book sessions and message their school counselor whenever they need support. Sessions can happen in person or online depending on convenience . For school counselors, it's a dashboard where they can schedule their availability, manage appointments, track student progress over time, and keep secure notes. For schools, it's a tool that helps counselors do their job more effectively and gives them data on how many students they're helping and what problems they're addressing.

What makes this solution work is that we are not bringing an alien solution, but embedding in an existing ecosystem and making the counselor relationship easier to access and less stigmatized. How we built it We prototyped YouMatter in 48 hours using Next.js 15, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS with Turso for the database. The breakthrough was integrating MCP for privacy and data immutability—instead of promising privacy, we architected it in from day one. Custom JWT auth, Jitsi Meet for video sessions, AWS S3 for files, deployed on Vercel. MCP is the proof point that this model can actually work.

Challenges we ran into Implementing MCP in a hackathon timeline was ambitious. We had to figure out how to make data immutability work without slowing down the user experience.

Accomplishments we're proud of We shipped a working prototype in 48 hours that proves the core insight: young adults will use mental health platforms if privacy is architecturally guaranteed, not just promised. The MCP integration validated that immutability and user control can coexist.

What we learned Attempting privacy in healthcare with limited infrastructure is hard.

What's next for YouMatter Post-hackathon, we're hardening the MCP infrastructure and onboarding licensed counselors to validate the clinical side. Then mobile, then scaling across different education institution. The goal is to prove this model works before building it to production scale.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• claude
• sendgrid
• stripe
• supabase
• tailwind
• typscript