Rusty is not a general wellbeing platform with a mining skin on it. It was designed from the first line for Australian fly-in-fly-out crews, and almost every decision in it only makes sense if that is who you are building for.
Rusty is not a general wellbeing platform with a mining skin on it. It was designed from the first line for Australian fly-in-fly-out crews, and almost every decision in it only makes sense if that is who you are building for.
A small Australian team. Small enough that the people who wrote the safety layer are the people who will answer your email about it.
Every site we looked at had an EAP. Almost nobody was using it. That gap, not a lack of services, is the thing this product was built to close.
One in three FIFO workers scores high or very high psychological distress. The support exists — it is contracted, paid for and sitting in an induction pack. What it asks of someone is that they be seen dialling a number, during business hours, from a camp where everyone knows who walked into the medic’s office.
So we stopped trying to improve the service and started working on the distance to it. Something that costs nothing to open, asks nothing about who you are, and is already a habit before the night it matters.
These are the arguments we have had internally more than once and settled. They decide what gets built and, more often, what doesn’t.
A model instruction is a request, not a control — it can be argued with, drifted from, or quietly changed by a version bump. So the crisis lexicon runs before the model is called, deterministically, and nothing a persona says can weaken it. That single decision shaped the entire architecture.
A workforce that assumes employer software reports back is not reassured by a policy, and they are right not to be — policies change with management. The only version a sceptic believes is the one where there is nothing to look at. So there is no account, and the safety table has no column a conversation could be written into.
No streaks, no badges, no mood emojis, no breathing exercises, no congratulating anyone for opening an app. Hand this workforce a meditation app and it gets opened once. The product only works if it feels like texting someone who gets it, and everything that breaks that feeling is a defect.
Detection will never be perfect. An anonymous user cannot have 000 called on their behalf. Our two voice paths do not carry the identical guarantee. We publish our red-team failures rather than our pass rate. A buyer finds these out eventually; the only question is whether they hear it from us first.
Worth having in writing before you ask — and worth asking every other vendor for.
There is no sales team, no channel partner and no account manager between you and the people who built this.
We are a small Australian team, and we would rather you knew that than found out halfway through procurement. It is the reason we hold no formal audit yet, and it is also the reason the person who answers your hardest question about the safety layer is the person who wrote it.
If you want to test that, send us the question you think we’d least like to be asked.
hello@askrusty.com.au — or read the buyer’s page first if you’d rather arrive armed.