WellSpace

Women globally are more stressed than they were at any point in the past decade. Chronic stress is an epidemic that disproportionately impacts women, as it often can lead to autoimmune conditions, infertility, menstrual problems, depression and anxiety. WellSpace is here to change that. In the next 10 years, we want to help 80 million women around the world take charge of their health and wellbeing and give them the necessary tools to be well.

Currently our product is a lightweight calendar plug-in, which works to optimize a user’s existing schedule (atm google calendar, outlook) with research-backed stress management techniques under the pillars of movement, rest, nutrition and sleep.

It provides simple guidance on how to do the activity, highlights the benefits and allows you to invite family and friends to join.

In particular, we are keen to help users make use of their existing health and wellness subscriptions, so that they use their meditation app to meditate and go for that yoga class they paid for.

After dozens of 1-on-1 calls with female professionals (ranging from social entrepreneurs to freelancers) we have learned that allocating enough time for rest excessive technology usage not enough movement are a huge cause of stress for young working female professionals.

We see calendar management as an intelligent way to incorporate a more structured approach to keeping up their wellbeing goals and introduce new micro-breaks that will be their proactive stress management support.

After personally designing health-centered schedules for our first users, which primarily included female professionals aged 22-32, we have seen that our first users include diverse geographical locations and professions, but what unites them is that they are early-to-mid career. Now, we want to learn more to understand which are the characteristics of specific communities that we can have the biggest impact on serving as we launch various testing and data collection.

Behind WellSpace is a team who’s been working together for over a year, with 14 years of experience in design & UX development, 8 years of health and wellness programming and 5 years in machine learning and software development. We began working on WellSpace at the MIT Media Lab Venture Studio, AI for Impact. The idea was inspired by Maria, who has been living with stress-induced autoimmunity and wanted to create a solution that would help other women struggling with health manage their career without loosing out on the health. We are a group of friends with real empathy for the users we’re building for, which include our mothers, our sisters and ourselves. We are motivated by a shared vision and passion for designing tools for wellbeing and personally lived experiences with chronic stress.

When it comes to progress, we’re past the early stages of wire-framing and customer discovery. We’ve integrated and synthesized wellbeing research from Harvard Medical School into product features. We cultivated a working environment rooted in mutual support and personal wellbeing. We innovated customer surveys and shaped software roadmaps. We conducted a thorough market analysis to identify gaps in the integration of ML and calendar tools and crafted stress management learning experiences. We identified a real pain point and are on the way to delivering a beta product to growing amount of users waiting for the product on our waitlist. Some

We want to be surrounded by other social entrepreneurs and be able to really go through this challenging process together. We have made a concious decision not to raise VC funding and grow organically so the help from Solve would be primarily from the financial category. We want to spend the next months to test more and know our users like the back of our hand; shadow them, get better feedback, reach the ones who really desperately need our help and figure out what they really need from us. We want to level up our customer knowledge, test new pilots and build out our MVP to a robust product that is marketable. We are set to run two pilot projects and A/B test to gather real-world data about how our product performs and how it's received by users. Apart from funding we want to leverage deltaV mentorship and we hope to ensure our business is legally sound after incorporation by taking advantage of legal counsel resources.

Our innovative approach stems from our understanding that time management is the foundation of health management. What we understand about health that is innovative is the critical need for tailored solutions to women, the advantage of a lightweight solution that is proactive and accessible.

Here's the thing we’ve seen the most in our initial customer discovery, creating a healthy routine that works consistently isn't easy, because every day is different. This is real simple - every day is different - while most of other tools and services make generalized recommendations, we want to use reinforcement learning in our tool to make it hyper relevant to our users for that specific day.

Women in the workplace, will be able to tangibly prevent chronic stress from running wild, to lead their lives with greater balance and less sacrificing their health to make ends meet and improving health outcomes across the board.

Traction is one of our main criteria for evaluating impact.

We continue to interview female professionals everyday and have heard the voices of more than 200 of them thus far. We have personally built daily schedules for dozens, tested their willingness to pay and are pivoting on our business model due to our findings.

Currently our product is a lightweight calendar plug-in, which works to optimize a user’s existing schedule  google calendar, outlook) with research-backed stress management techniques under the pillars of movement, rest, nutrition and sleep.

Maria Ko full-time

Cheng Chang and Duanchen Liu part-time

Just hitting our 1,5 years in May!

Team wellbeing is one of our KPI's and we're proud of the fact that we value health over hustle, which is rare in the entrepreneurial space.

When it comes to our diversity, we are a team with individually unique ethnic and cultural backgrounds who we love to bring to our work and our culture. 

WellSpace culture centers on communal well-being, thoughtfulness and respect. We even have a culture compass, a list of 13 guiding principles that we've co-created as the foundation for our work on WellSpace:

Empathy and Respect: Recognize that everyone brings unique experiences, perspectives and abilities. Respect and celebrate these differences and speak with empathy to foster a supportive environment where all feel valued and heard.

Well-being as a Priority: Encourage a healthy work-life balance. Ensure every team member has the necessary resources and time to take care of their physical and mental health, practicing care and putting health as a priority. Understand that everyone works at a different pace and has different strengths. Be flexible and considerate of individual working styles, ensuring that no one feels overwhelmed or left behind. 

Transparency: Be open and honest in all actions and words. Whether sharing start-up news or addressing individual concerns, maintaining transparency helps build trust among us and credibility as a start-up. 

Continuous Learning: Cultivate an environment of growth and learning. Encourage curiosity and exploration amongst each other and recognize that learning is a part of building. 

Creativity and Innovation: Make space and time for everyone to be able to share their ideas and be given a chance to bring them to life.

Fair Voice: Foster an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing thoughts, ideas, and concerns proactively.

Recognition and Appreciation: Regularly recognize and appreciate contributions. This promotes a positive atmosphere and encourages team members to maintain high standards of work. 

Responsibility and Accountability: Encourage everyone to take ownership of their work and hold themselves accountable. Promote a sense of pride in one's work and self-drive for continuous improvement. 

Equity: Foster a culture of fairness where opportunities, resources, and rewards are distributed based on merit and are equally accessible to all team members. 

Collaboration: Promote teamwork and cooperation. Build a supportive, collaborative environment that encourages sharing of skills and knowledge and leads to stronger solutions.

Resilience and Adaptability: Help each other to be resilient and adapt to changes. The ability to pivot and not give up when it gets hard is everything. 

Real Bonding: Foster community and connection amongst each other through regular team events, collaborating on tasks, and check-ins not part of work communication. 

We want to operate through enterprise model, which would involve charging wellness apps and businesses for increasing their customer retention, which is their biggest pain-point, by integrating their activities into user’s scheduled daily use.

Our original plan was to make money with a SaaS subscription by charging customers $15 per month. However, so far we've been sharing our services for free and are exploring way we could keep it that way.