About five years ago, Kadie Okwudili was an aspiring physician-scientist. One near-death experience and lots of hard work later, she’s a startup founder who just became a 43North finalist.
She was studying epidemiology at the University of Rochester when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition, which led to deep, meaningful conversations with her loved ones. After her health stabilized, she reflected on those talks.
“Why does it take almost dying to have these types of conversations?” she said. “I thought perhaps if we prompted people, they could happen more often or organically as opposed to response to trauma, like in my case.”
She founded Agape Wellness Inc., which uses personalized questions to spark meaningful conversations, in 2018 and started working on it full time in 2020 thanks to a $75,000 Launch NY investment.
The Rochester-based startup created an app, which launched November 2020, that prompted users with questions to kickstart deep chats. After one user’s TikTok showing her experience with the app went viral in early 2021, the app got more than 100,000 installs within 48 hours. Though the team wasn’t prepared for the rapid growth and the program crashed, the company was able to leverage the momentum to get into Y Combinator, a Mountain View, California-based accelerator and raised a $1.8 million pre-seed round.
Since rewriting the app and focusing this year on growth, the startup has gone from $13,000 in gross revenue in May to $160,000 last month, making it a profitable business.
Now, Agape Wellness, which employs six, is focused on customer retention and content marketing, especially on TikTok, a platform where the business has hundreds of thousands of followers.
“We think that if we focus on the right things, like customer experience, user journey and retention, we’ll be able to build a really lasting, sustainable brand and product,” Okwudili said.
The startup expects to hire four more employees by year-end.
The business also started a pilot program earlier this year for a business-to-business product where it matches employees and gives them personalized questions to prompt 15- to 30-minute meaningful talks. Okwudili expects to launch the product next year.
“It’s mainly for remote teams or hybrid teams as a way to help employees feel growth,” she said.
Based on her experience in the 43North contest so far (she’s made it to the final 15 after the organization got over 700 applications), she recommends using storytelling frameworks – structures often utilized in public speaking – when pitching. In particular, she focuses on the story of self, the story of us and the story of now.
“I used to struggle with my pitch because Agape was always a very emotional thing for me," she said, "and I’ve learned how to incorporate those emotions in an effective way."
