The First One
This is the first of many posts that will give you a behind the scenes look at what it’s like for a couple of not so perfect pretty normal people, in their attempt at creating an extraordinary purpose-driven startup. We have both started companies before but this is more than just a company, it’s a purpose-driven movement, it’s individual-focused, it’s human empowerment, its systemic thinking and everything in between. Sounds big right? I know! We do have a big global vision for what we want to achieve, but at the end of the day when you truly believe in something you just gotta go all out.
One thing to point out, this is my first attempt at a blog, so have a little grace as I figure out my stride. I’ll be focusing on the company development side as well as the personal struggles we have and most certainly will continue to face as we try and see our purpose come to reality: create a world where anyone can be empowered.
A bit of background
I was living in Sweden for the second part of 2019. I was in school to become an ICF certified life and health coach. I was doing this because I had seen some amazing results from this in my personal life. At the age of 2, I was diagnosed with asthma and had been daily dependant on medication my entire life. It wasn’t until I took control of my health that I was able to create a lifestyle that promoted health and was living a life no longer daily dependant on medication. So what do you do when you want to share this with others? You share it on your Instagram page (jamie_bower). I was so excited about the positive effects that I had experienced in my life, I wanted others to see that they could have a similar experience. I wanted to see if others were doing something similar so I searched the hashtag “asthmafree” and stumbled across AsthmaHacker. It was so cool, this guy Magnus was doing the same thing I was but in a more “biohacking” way, so cool! Without knowing anything more I send him a DM saying “We need to become friends”, little did I know that message would change my life.
Looking back I’m glad Magnus didn’t just ignore that message thinking I was some stocker, although the thought probably crossed his mind when, after messaging back and forth, we realized we were both living in the same city (what are the chances!). It’s hard to ignore how this twist of fate brought us to actually become friends and eventually move onto creating a company together. I need to pause and say how I feel like an old grandparent telling the grandkids of how I met my wife, haha, but to me, I see a thread of meaning and purpose in all of this.
Connecting the dots
What started with a simple DM has turned into a great friendship and now business partnership that, from the get-go, has been grounded in a common interest of trying to help others take control of their health and well-being in an effort to empower them to become all they can be. The more we met the more this was realized. We decided to start dreaming, little did we know we would come up with an idea that would help solve systemic issues within the lives of individuals across the world.
Let’s start with coaching. As mentioned before I was in school to be an ICF certified life and health coach. I love the idea of coaching (helping others realize and live out their full potential) but I saw some major flaws within the industry. Coaching as a practice is amazing but it’s too expensive and most people don’t know what it can do for them. The other issue is on the coach’s side. When you become a coach you essential have to also become your own business owner, similar to the starving artist problem. They have the skill for coaching but the challenges of owning a small business see many coaches failing. These were some problems that we wanted to solve.
We quickly realized that this had to be more than just another coaching app. If we did that we could never lower the cost of coaching or achieve what we felt was the purpose of all this- creating a world where anyone can be empowered. The problem was, how do we look at empowerment within a holistic perspective? After chatting with a social worker friend of mine he mentioned the Wraparound model. Wikipedia describes it like this: “The wraparound process is an intensive, individualized care management process for youths with serious or complex needs…During the wraparound process, a team of individuals who are relevant to the well-being of the child or youth (e.g., family members, other natural supports, service providers, and agency representatives) collaboratively develop an individualized plan of care, implement this plan, and evaluate success over time.” We are nothing but common thieves and decided to take the framework for this model and make it our own.
Now we had a framework that would help empower people, one of our superpowers was bringing in coaches but how could we find revenue streams so we weren’t dependant on making money just by coaching? This is where Magnus’ strengths shined. He had been thinking of this issue way before the “we need to be friends DM” and new that industries needed to be involved. By doing this we were solving problems for industry, how to create an individual user experience, as well as bring in additional revenue streams to help support and scale this movement.
We decided to call this company Enabled You or eY for short. In the following posts, I’ll describe in more detail what is behind the name, but I think you can catch what we are trying to do with all this.
In the next post, I’ll bring you up to speed with where we are today and describe the process of trying to turn all this into something physical.
Thanks for reading, I hope you catch the vision of what we want to achieve
