Mindcurrent

What do a performance psychologist, Emmy-nominated storyteller, and multi-exit tech entrepreneur have in common?

We're helping thousands of users worldwide reduce stress. Using predictive analytics, their own data, and short, personalized recommendations from leading experts. 

Why Stress?

When we built our first Mindcurrent prototype everyone thought we were crazy. We heard things like, "stress is too big, pick a niche", or "there are too many factors", or "everyone is different." Turns out our [wise] friends were right. But so were we.

Solving for stress - one user at a time - unlocked a tremendous amount of data and partnership opportunities.

Our early investors include executives from Nike, successful tech angels, and the City of Beaverton. Their collective expertise and networks have allowed us to reach organizations of every size and stress has emerged as a universal factor in performance, retention, culture, and trust.

By quantifying and predicting stress we're uncovering deeper issues while also providing measurement (often for the first time) for other wellness solutions. For example, Nike's Run Club provides fitness programs, Oura provides sleep insights, Headspace provides meditation content, and Noom provides nutrition and diet programs.

All of these wellness solutions are downstream from Mindcurrent. i.e. Once we know what is stressing each user, there are many specialized and fragmented partners to provide specific content and solutions. 

Thus, by measuring and managing stress on a personal level, we're enabling individuals and organizations to make important decisions about wellness overall. All while maintaining privacy and improving our machine learning algorithms.

The $977B Problem

For decades, organizations have been trying to reduce stress to boost retention, performance, creativity, happiness, and trust. But they've never been able to personalize stress reduction so it could work on an individualized basis. 

According to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) and the American Institute for Stress, workplace stress is costing businesses more than $977 billion each year. Yet workplace wellness programs continually put the responsibility for stress reduction entirely on employees - without any reliable means of measurement.

Mindcurrent introduces transparency and accountability for stress across a company, school, or nonprofit by providing personalized recommendations to individual team members and management. All while aggregating data anonymously so everyone can see where progress is being made without discrimination.

Fourth Time is a Charm

Our initial prototype got a lot of attention and over half a million views on Facebook and a featured story on OPB/NPR Radio.

You can think of the app as a "Fitbit for the brain." Called Mindcurrent, it asks the user a few questions, like how they’re feeling. The user then indicates they’re stressed, or happy, or depressed, and the app offers short advice videos. The app can also be tweaked to suit a user’s unique circumstances. For example, the app tailors advice differently for a parent and a teenager.

Early adopters gave us a long list of things to fix. Our second prototype brought us closer to our third version, which is currently available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

We designed our fourth version with feedback from our power users and first set of corporate customers. It allows users to capture and categorize stress within seconds and integrate biometrics from their smartwatch for stress pattern predictions. 

It also increases the level of personalization for our expert recommendations and introduces a reward system where users are incentivized to check in daily and take simple, quick actions to reduce stress each morning and evening.

The demo for this new version helped us win the 2020 Beaverton Startup Challenge and brought us new corporate customers. We're now working with the City of Beaverton on a pilot for government employees and first responders - who manage an extraordinary amount of stress.

Privacy is critical for these individuals as their personal lives are often as challenging as their chosen professions, as evidenced by alarming rates of anxiety, depression, divorce, and substance abuse.

Our new version also serves as the digital platform for a joint Behavioral Study with the Center for BrainHealth, Brain Performance Institute, and University of Texas at Dallas. 50 students and faculty are tracking their stress with Mindcurrent over 45 days. All participants are contributing biometrics with data from their Apple Watches. When published, this will be one of the largest studies of its kind to determine key stressors affecting life on-campus.

The Only Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solution

With thousands of consumer users, we're monetizing Mindcurrent with subscriptions paid by employers, schools, and nonprofits. There is tremendous demand for stress measurement and management and organizations are seeking solutions that protect individual privacy while creating transparency and accountability across their teams. 

Mindcurrent is currently the only solution where all employees can see where stress is growing and get personalized recommendations suited to their specific needs. 

Every individual gets private, personalized recommendations with action items they're asked to complete within 48 hours. Recommendations differ by the individual's rank and role within the organization and results are aggregated for team members (as a whole) and for management (as a whole). This creates transparency and accountability without identifying anyone on a personal basis. 

Recommendations are designed to be quick, easy, and flexible, so users of all ages and backgrounds can make progress every day without disrupting their schedules or making large commitments. This, by design, is how stress can be systematically reduced from one's life.

The combination of ease of use, personalization, and privacy has led to a wide variety of use cases for the new version of Mindcurrent:

• Financial services companies want to use Mindcurrent to get ahead of burnout to avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in key talent replacement. 
• Corporate leadership and trainers at consumer goods companies want to use Mindcurrent to boost retention, strengthen collaboration, and improve creativity amongst team members.
• Universities are leveraging Mindcurrent with students and faculty to determine what factors create stress on-campus and at various times throughout the academic year.
• Government leaders are evaluating Mindcurrent for use with employees and police officers, sergeants, and captains. 

Why Now?

With early investments from executives at Nike, successful tech angels, and the City of Beaverton, we're poised to grow sales quickly with our new version. This fundraising effort allows us to complete development and deliver the new version to companies, schools, and nonprofits as quickly as possible. 

In the growing wellness industry, Mindcurrent is one of the only examples of machine learning being used with complete privacy and protection for each user's data. We monetize through B2B but our mission has always been to serve each individual on a personalized basis. 

By measuring and predicting stress we're uncovering deeper issues while creating transparency and accountability for stronger cultures, better retention, and overall happiness. 

Join us and our experts as we "do good while doing great" and use technology to predict and personalize stress management on a global scale.