Now, what's really important about Tenacity Health,
is that their end-users and customers are not
one and the same thing.
The end-users are employees of companies
who want to use Tenacity Health's app,
and the customers are the companies
who pay for the employee's access to that app.
I want to ask you, Hannah-- you started off
with the idea of corporate wellness for employees.
That presupposes a very large group of people and companies.
What prospective end-users did you
have in mind when you started out?
Well, we started out with some limiting factors--
and there are plenty-- obviously because
of the nature of the solution, our users
would have to be tech-savvy, they
would have to be interested in wellness,
and maybe participating in some programs,
but not really achieving what they want.
They have to be not necessarily extremely social,
but they had to be open to being in a social solution.
And obviously, they'd have to be employed by an organization.
So they have to be employees.
And that already cuts out a lot of people.
But, it does still leave a lot of people
who are possible end-users.
How did you refine this further, and come
to the realization of what kinds of end-users
you need to target first?
Basically, the rest of it came out
from talking to potential users, and also
during the beta testing, we noticed
that some users are more responsive and more interested,
more engaged.
And we noticed that it's usually women,
maybe 30 to 40 year olds, who have been employed
by their organization for several years,
are quite social and interested in maybe losing
weight, or becoming more fit, attending the gym more often.
And they've been trying to do that,
but haven't been successful yet.
Or maybe they haven't been really aware
of all the other products out there.
So, these are our key customers.
Now let's turn to the company side, your customers.
Again, corporate wellness.
So many different kinds of companies
could be your customers.
What companies did you have in mind?
Well, when we started talking, we
talked mostly to large companies,
because we knew that large companies in the US
are self-insured, so they will be the ones that
would be able to reap the most benefit.
And then we talked to a variety of industries.
We talked to the financial industry, talked to the Procter
& Gambles of the world, and lots of companies
in healthcare and tech.
Especially here in Boston, there's quite a cluster.
And we noticed that tech companies and healthcare
companies are kind of more open to experimentation,
for various different reasons.
And we realized that those would have
to be our first customers, because they would
be willing to look aside at the kind of product we'll have.
That is, the very first version won't have a lot of features,
and won't be able to support all the regulation requirements,
so we could have pilots with them.
You have at least two different constituents, the customer,
and the end user.
Both need to be happy.
Who you focusing on more at this stage in your company?
At this stage we're definitely focusing on the end-users.
Because if they're not happy, they
won't be using the product.
And even though we might be able to sell the product once,
we won't be able to sell it again if nobody uses it.
So this is our primary goal right now.
And what makes you believe that if the end-users love
your product, their companies will pay for it?
I think there are good reasons to believe
that it will be very successful, if the end-users love
the product.
Because one of the problems with the industry in general
is the low engagement levels with existing products.
The second thing that really differentiates us,
is that we are really performance based, because we
are able to track exactly the engagement
of every single person using the product.
We can have this very specific analytical information
about who's using, and what is it doing for them,
so we can afford to price our product based on performance,
and I think that could be a winning strategy on the market.
Also, the way we enter the organization
is really different.
We don't come and launch ourselves
in a huge campaign that requires a lot of marketing resources.
In fact, we kind of come through a back door,
and we let companies try it out, and if it
works for the employees, the way the product
is designed it will spread virally.
So if you know the laws of exponential growth,
eventually it would be able to reach as many people as
possible in that given company, based on who works there.
And I think that's one of the winning criterias as well.