What if there was a one-stop way to care for mind, body and soul and make it accessible to everyone regardless of income?
An Austin couple is offering just that through its new Wellbody app. Their health and wellness startup is on a mission to inspire and support people to live healthier, happier and more meaningful lives by taking a holistic approach to five pillars for health and wellness: nutrition, exercise and movement, sleep, stress management and connection.
The daily practice app offers users guided audio sessions so they can build strong foundations of wellness by focusing on small, sustainable changes to simplify healthy living.
“She was doing a lot of mindless eating she wasn’t aware of, so she started to pay attention to her eating habits.”
The Wellbody app is the creation of Brandon and Lori Miranda. Brandon brought a wealth of Austin tech startup experience with him to Wellbody. He had led teams at Bazaarvoice and SpareFoot. His wife, Lori, is a certified health and wellness coach, a certified nutrition consultant and has a background in health and human services.
“We had started with this health coaching model, which was great, and I say there are two main things that led to the creation of the app: Out of all the clients I worked with, regardless of their goals and where they were starting from, and they’re all different, there was a common thread among all of them where I found myself having the same conversations,’” Lori said. “Because, at the end of the day, when you’re talking about making changes with health and wellness you’re really talking about behavioral change.”
Those common patterns piqued her interest and she started wondering if there was a way to get the same information to a large audience.
“We were limited in accessibility because of the time and cost it takes to work with a health coach,” Lori said. “We just can’t reach that many people because it does cost a bit of money, it’s not covered by insurance, you actually can’t even get reimbursed through HSA and so that was something when we started off with Wellbody, from the very beginning, we wanted to have something that could help pretty much anybody make positive changes in their life around health and wellness.”
While one-on-one coaching has its benefits, Lori said it limits the amount of people that can access their services. Accessibility was a key factor in creating the app. This way they could cover the same information around health and wellness while reaching more people.
“We both really liked the idea of daily practice apps because that’s really how real sustainable change happens is when these small daily practices build up over time,” Lori said.
She left her job with the county in fall 2017 to start working on the health coaching business, while Brandon immersed himself full-time to their startup in summer 2018. The startup is currently bootstrapped.
“We did have a host of health coaching clients who were under the Wellbody brand," Brandon said. "When I joined, my intention always was to fulfill a need in the marketplace that is scalable and provided that level of accessibility to people who can’t afford a couple of hundred dollars a month to work with a health coach. It became very clear pretty early on that there was a gap in the market as far as helping people understand how to make changes in their health and wellness.”
A close friend, Ashley Maltz, created Austin Wellness Collaborative to bring together health and wellness professionals of all types to network, collaborate and further their professional goals. She advised the couple and brought up an epidemic Americans face when it comes to contracting preventable diseases due to the lifestyles they lead. This led the couple to come up with the five pillars of health and wellness. The app launched in February, but it had a soft launch in December 2018 for friends and family.
People already engage with the app daily and enjoy access to daily content.
“It really changed the way you approach things,” Brandon said. “If you check out our content, it’s not necessarily prescriptive and we’re not telling you to track something or what to do. We’re building out content that’s in two different levels: There’s audio that are 5 to 15-minute sessions and then we have small bites that are tips and tricks that will give somebody a quick, easily digestible way to look at different health tips or hacks on how to get better sleep or reduce sleep or things like that.”
One user has reportedly already seen her life benefit from the app. She originally used the app with the intention to improve her sleeping habits and manage stress but ended up losing 17 pounds in the process as well.
“It was kind of a nice byproduct of using the app,” Lori said, adding that the woman made small changes to her life like taking daily walks and joining a gym where she signed up for fitness classes.
“She was doing a lot of mindless eating she wasn’t aware of, so she started to pay attention to her eating habits,” Lori said.
People also report noticing when they’re moving more than usual or when they’ve been sedentary for too long and adjust accordingly, they said. They’re also more aware of their food choices and organically begin to change their habits such as in the case of the woman wanting to sleep better.
Right now, the app is free, but the couple said they’d eventually consider offering premium subscriptions. They emphasized the importance of keeping the app accessible to the average person with a smart phone.
The couple has longtime roots in Austin, and even though they moved back into town about eight years ago, they said it has always felt like home. It made sense to start a family here. From a business perspective, the city’s entrepreneurial and forward-thinking spirit appealed to them.
They say Austin is extremely fit, a fact backed by several media outlets that rank Austin among the fittest cities in the U.S. This interest in health and wellness, combined with a rich network of experts and specialists, made Austin the perfect fit.
As Maltz put it in the startup’s announcement: “Wellbody fills a desperately needed role by helping people have both the knowledge and mindset needed to make progress toward leading healthier lives.”
