In Wellnest, users respond to a series of guided journaling prompts on topics ranging from daily gratitude to imposter syndrome and modern love. As users build their journaling habit, they receiving in-game currency which they can use to purchase and upgrade their avatars!
APP SUMMARY
ROLE: CO-FOUNDER
Product: UX Research, Strategy
Marketing: Growth, Community
Content: Writing, Research, Partnerships
OUTCOMES
$750,000 pre-seed
10,000+ downloads
4 school pilots: BU, CMU, UPenn, Tam High
TEAM
Co-Founder
Engineer
Co-Founder
Co-Founder
PROCESS OVERVIEW
At the start of our process, we interviewed ~10 mental health professionals including therapists, researchers, and PhD students to learn more about mental health. Although each of them had their own specialities, we were surprised to hear that almost all of them typically recommend journaling as a practice outside of therapy sessions.
MENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH
CUSTOMER DISCOVERY
We also hosted a series of in-person focus groups with over 30 young adults. Through speaking with our target audience, we learned that many of them believed that picking up a journaling habit would benefit their mental health.
When digging into why these people wanted to pick up journaling but were unsuccessful in doing so, we uncovered three key problems.
PROBLEMS
“I don’t know what to write about.”
“Journaling is boring.”
“Journaling takes too much time.”
HOW MIGHT WE…
help people build a journaling habit that makes the process quick and enjoyable?
OUR HYPOTHESIS
Guided content, gamification, and voice entries will help make the process of journaling less daunting and more rewarding!
CORE VALUE PROP
GUIDED CONTENT
In response to users concerns about not knowing what to journal about, we created an original prompt library. In the app, users are able to respond to over 500 unique questions tailored to specific topics written by mental health professionals.
Daily & Evening Conversation: respond to fresh prompts every day to quickly organize thoughts and become more present
Deep-Dive Courses: explore an extensive prompt library including topics on Imposter Syndrome and Relationship with Food
Repeatable Singles: short guided sessions that can be used daily
Mood Check: identify moods and answer questions to better understand emotions
Looking back, I regret not having a more opinionated content library. By this I mean that we only ever added content and never cut any out. We were afraid of taking away precious mental health resources.
For example, at one point we added the ability for users to create and share their own question sets and only one person used this feature. Granted, he used it so frequently that he became our top power user with almost 3 entries/day, but no one else seemed to care for it. Half of the team wanted to remove the feature but the other half wanted to keep it because we were helping someone.
We ultimately weren’t able to make a decision and kept the feature until we decided to end our beta service.
If I could go back to this time, I would have advocated for us to really investigate our entire content library and be more bold with our content experimentation. It was clear that each kind of content (long form, short form, daily) helped vastly different user personas and we started to attract and bias towards users who weren’t part of our target audience.
Of course, I’m still really proud of the diverse range of content we were able to create for our users. It always made me feel all the feels when we’d host a user interview and they’d mention that a certain question or course helped them through a difficult time.
Most notably, once we ended our service, a long time user reached out for a coffee chat where he mentioned that his sister had recently gone through a miscarriage. He said that it was a difficult time because they had always been close and this was the first time she was unable to put words to an isolating experience. After some time, she sent him excerpts of her journal entries and Wellnest became a format for him learn more about how he could emotionally support a close family member.
TAKEAWAYS
GAME DESIGN
Beyond the fact that we all grew up clicking away at multi-player games and learned that:
55% of gamers identify as male and 45% identify as female
70% of video gamers are aged 18 or higher
90% of the gamers in the U.S. claim that they get joy out of gaming, with 87% of them saying that video games provide mental stimulation
We also caught on that most of the fastest growing apps had elements of gaming in them. From nuanced tactics ranging from colorful UIs in Headspace, to full on mascots, leaderboards, and XP in Duolingo, we wanted to create a similar feeling of addiction towards habits that enhance your well-being.
Here are a few of the many gaming tactics we explored!
Through our tests, we learned that users who completed their first weekly goal had higher retention, and that coins, avatars, and our element of play were reasons why people were excited for our app.
I learned the hard lesson that what works for some apps (like streaks, challenges, badges) can’t simply be copy and pasted into a different experience with the hope for similar results. It takes understanding users needs and creating well intentioned solutions in order to really differentiate a product.
Thinking about games was also my first foray in learning about retention. From dissecting our core game loop to brainstorming narrative arcs, I wish we were able to solve the mechanics of our app to make it more sticky.
Through exploring gaming, I’m lucky to have seen user delight and motivation in action and my biggest pride was in being compared to Headspace and Animal Crossing.
TAKEAWAYS
VOICE
Knowing that our target audience was young, busy, and had concerns about how long journaling takes, we wanted create an experience that was quick and easy.
From users who used the feature, we learned that voice entries helped them practice talking about difficult struggles. One surprising outcome was that multiple users said that it helped them practice talking about emotional topics before reaching out to friends and family for support.
With the combination of voice and guided content, the average session length on Wellnest was 3 minutes and 9 seconds.
I loved our incorporation of voice because I felt that it really pushed us to think about the relationship between our users and how they use their phones.
Looking back, I wish we had explored more of this frontier. It felt like a decision we made early on in building the app and never second guessed it. I suppose that if we were to really dig into the feature, we would have been able to uncover a lot more about the experience people had on our app.
Although not everyone used the voice feature, it had a massive impact on the way we positioned ourselves and on the real lives of our users who ended up speaking up about their struggles after using Wellnest.
TAKEAWAYS
ITERATIONS
REFLECTION
I’m incredibly grateful of the experience I had building Wellnest alongside my closest friends and incredible investors. I learned many valuable life lessons, but here are perhaps the most pivotal:
Career
Since leaving Wellnest, I’ve finally had the courage to be honest about wanting to pursue product design. Before working on the app, I was on track to becoming a product marketer. Though a great career path for many, I always knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do.
The clear moment this became true for me was when I stopped thinking about my life through a career and started thinking about my life through skills. Working on Wellnest gave me a myriad of skills, all of which could lead me down different paths, but I knew the skills I wanted to get better at those in product and design.
Work
One of the biggest things I’ve learned from Wellnest is the importance of team culture. Similar to a plant, even when things are going great, you still need to water it. Tend to it. Check in and give it attention.
And even though we were great friends, the team had a lot going against it. From early stage startup culture, to new life changes from graduating college, the pandemic, work from home, and managing the fine line between personal and professional friendships, we had a lot to learn. Most days we didn’t get it perfect but we always strived hard to make things work.
The moment we stopped trying to nurture a healthy team culture was the moment we started building a bad product.
Personal
Wellnest opened many massive doors for me to practice self-confidence.
As someone who had severe social anxiety, the mere idea of talking to VC’s used to freak me out. But through practice, I’m really proud of how far I’ve come in my ability to believe in myself and not fear those around me. I most notably recall getting grilled by a few partners from YC and not feeling a single nerve. I want to carry this new found confidence with me through any door I walk through in the future.