Wellness…

New Podcast is up today at Positively Gotham Gal…What You Don’t Know, You Learn with Corie Hardee of Union Station.

 

I invested in Clue in 2013.   There were many period trackers on the market (all started by men) but this one was started by a woman, Ida Tin, who I believed was more qualified to run a company around this vertical than anyone else.  She has proven to be a leader in the Femtech space.  They just closed on a large round and I couldn’t be happier for the company.

Period tracking is how they began but there is much more to this business.  The data that we can learn from all of these applications is huge for future generations.  Just like 23&Me, if we know that women in Japan go into menopause later or there appears to be a cluster of women in Wisconsin who are having problems getting pregnant that is powerful.  23&Me is learning about gene pools but Clue can be drawing information about real life behavior.

Wellness is the first word that comes to mind around this entire area.  There is a large movement around wellness that branches out into meditation, exercise, custom vitamins, juicing, knowing more about your body, etc.  Being in the moment makes sense.  We are inundated with information at the speed of lighting and it takes a toll on our brains and in turn our body.  Yoga and meditation are practices that has been around forever yet more and more people (men and women) are making this part of their daily life in order to take a breath and clear their mind.

I have seen countless businesses come across my desk around the “wellness” space.  I put wellness in quotations because it is so huge and will become bigger over the next decade.  It isn’t an area that I will invest in because of the many moving parts that have accelerated since 2013 but I am curious how all of this plays out.

Comments (Archived):

  1. awaldstein

    I’ll listen tomorrow at the gym.It’s passion point for me.Live with an expert and entrepreneur in the space, friends run Well & Good and I just believe in it wholeheatedly.Wrote this post a while back, still I think very much on point:http://arnoldwaldstein.com/

  2. pointsnfigures

    A lot of wellness businesses are cash flow businesses, or mom and pops. Hard to scale. Clue is different. There will be scalable businesses with network effects in wellness to be sure. Agree, the space gets bigger as boomers get older and millennials mature.

    1. awaldstein

      It’s a brand play certainly and one in almost all cases without network effects.Though brands can be huge and valuable–Equinox for example is firmly in this category as is LuliLemon.Not clear to me that the failure rate here is any higher than tech or entertainment just that the upside like movies, more capped.

      1. pointsnfigures

        good point about lulu and equinox. I was focused on Yoga. Healthy food of course, is scalable!

        1. awaldstein

          $2T+ sector and way more if you start to count it as influencer on disciplines like functional medicine.Huge commercial force controlled easily by 60% women impacting food, education, coaching, exercise, fashion, entertainment, skin products.

  3. Susan Rubinsky

    I have been using Clue for several years. When I first got the app I actually backed in the data from previous years on me (I have been consistently tracking and keeping a spreadsheet for much of my adult life) because I felt I wanted to contribute data. I really wish that Clue was around when I was younger and getting pregnant. I had pre-eclampsia when I was pregnant which is one of the few conditions that consistently crosses socioeconomic and geographic lines. There is no known cure and no known tests/indicators, only symptoms once you already have the condition. Personally, I feel that it is rewarding to contribute to a data set that may help discoveries in the future, whatever they may be.Aside from that the App is so easy to use and is amazingly accurate. I always get my period within 24 hours of it’s prediction (except for times where I have had “lapses” due to being peri-menopausal. Once they start tracking more data on that, I look forward to seeing the accuracy improve). I tried other apps in the past and found them clunky and less accurate.In addition, their straightforward focus on women’s health and de-stigmatizing normal biophysiological processes of the female population, I think, are key to the advancement of women in general. They publish a great blog that addresses many topics that are still considered taboo.Also, I recently submitted a suggestion for some changes for peri-menopausal women because the app sends you these alerts that something is “wrong” and to seek care when, in fact, you are experiencing normal peri-menopausal symptoms/lapses. I was really impressed with the personal and thoughtful response I received from Clue. They are first rate in their customer service. Really impressive.

    1. Gotham Gal

      so great to hear!