Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Cornelius Palm and Nicola Filzmoser, Co-Founders of Happyr Health, a digital pain management tool for young people based across Europe.
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Here’s what Happyr Health is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
29% of young people between 5-25 years old experience chronic pain which causes severe physical pain, but it also has an impact on their emotional and social well-being. This leads to a high rate of anxiety and depression among this group. Current treatment of chronic pain usually involves medication to treat the physical pain but doesn't teach people how to cope with pain.
The Solution:
Happyr Health is a digital pain management tool for young people. We are providing the access but also the engagement that is lacking in other techniques or other apps that are very medically focused, as we're working with gamification and storytelling, to provide young people with chronic pain with the right coping techniques to reduce pain and improve their quality of life.
The Team:
Cornelius is the CEO and responsible for business development, while Nicola is CPO working on the product. Overall, we are a team of 6 people, made up of us and our app developer, 2D artist, and two trusted advisers in AI and the medical field.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
It was a very personal reason. Cornelius had chronic abdominal pain when he was young and I had and still have migraine since I was four years old. So, we both have experienced and are still experiencing what it means to have chronic pain physically but also emotionally and socially, especially when growing up. We understand the need from our own perspective.
We both met at a startup in Austria and liked the startup environment. We wanted to do something focused on helping the planet or people and actually started off working on an environmental solution. Yet, we quickly realised that our roots are more on the people side. We saw the UK as a great environment for startups and both applied to the Master's in Entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge. We both got in and that's really where it started.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Both the problem and the opportunities are at their peak. The prevalence of chronic pain in young people is shockingly high and studies have found that chronic pain has been increasing massively among young people during the last 10 years. At the same time, the covid pandemic has led to much greater acceptance of digital health measures, and people are providing much more trust to digital solutions. So, it's the right time because of this a mix of peaking problems and opportunities.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
One that we are quite proud of is the integration of Migraine Society Ireland with our web app. It started as our prototype, and with good feedback, we kept developing it further until became a fully usable product. We integrated this with Migraine Society Ireland's website, and we are the first support tool they are offering on their website which is something we're quite proud of. It's such a success seeing Migraine Ireland trusting us, and working with us in a very prosperous relationship.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
I think we are constantly facing the challenge of prioritisation: There are so many great options to choose from when it comes to developing our product further or choosing the next step for the business, but choosing one necessarily means leaving at least 9 others behind. Those decisions involve such a high opportunity cost and can often be very difficult.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
In hindsight, we would focus even more on just the product. The startup ecosystem is full of competitions, events, advice you can get, mentors you can meet, and this is amazing. And we're grateful for what we received, especially, for example, from the Cambridge accelerator and other programmes we've been in, but I think it often diverted our focus from the actual product. So, we always try to zoom out. For example, it can be tempting to speak mainly to advisers, but the true value lies in speaking to the users. It's hard to find that balance and while I think we did this well enough, we could have focussed even more radically on the product from the beginning.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Cornelius: Focus on doing one thing great.
Nicola: One piece of advice we always got is to own the category you're in. And so, for us, our first market that we're focusing on in chronic pain is migraines. And owning a category doesn't just involve educating yourself about it but also educating others, and showing that you can be an expert in that area. We feel like experts on the topic of chronic pain because we've experienced it ourselves, but that doesn't mean others can understand the severity of the problem.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Cornelius: My main advice is to always talk to users to understand the problem better and then go back to the problem and try to solve it better. Keep iterating on this for a constant feedback loop.
Nicola: Learn to ask why. Ask your users why and don't just take the first answer they give you. Ask your teammates why, and most importantly, ask yourself why you're doing certain things a certain way. There's this technique where you ask why five times and applying it can be challenging but you have to push people to answer and it helps in uncovering the depth of a problem.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Nicola: I would say on the product side, it's that it is really really hard to keep testing your product and keep iterating. This can be an annoying process and I've had to learn to enjoy the process. I think this is something probably most people have to learn because it's hard when you get a lot of negative feedback and realise you have to start from the beginning again. This is one of the biggest lessons that help me now with being more comfortable with these iterations and really enjoying the process of testing and building.
Cornelius: The importance of talking to users is the most important thing I've learned. In my first venture, we failed, and in hindsight, we didn't speak to enough users to properly be addressing their needs.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
Cornelius: Someone I look up to for his values is Hundertwasser, an Austrian Artist. His values are just inspiring. When I lived in Vienna, I often walked past his buildings. They genuinely reflect his values which are centred around nature and how disconnected we as people are. And I think he gained his connection back to some of the absolute roots of well-being and nature and this is something I think that we have to relearn.
Nicola: For me, it's not about an individual person either, more about parts of who they are. So, I would not pick Steve Jobs as the person, and I certainly don't agree with all his values, but what inspires me about him, because I'm working on the product side, is how he dealt with customer experience, and how he innovated an industry basically by integrating a lot of design.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Deep Work - Cal Newport
Testing Business Ideas - David Bland