Cohort 14 Spotlight: Scaling Holistic Healing with Before Noon
In Blue Startups’ Spotlight series, we highlight the people and stories that make startups possible. In this Spotlight, we interviewed Ann Tham, co-founder of Before Noon. Before Noon is a marketplace that connects busy people with virtual holistic practitioners such as hypnotherapists, reiki healers, and meditation teachers.
Can you talk a bit about your wellness journey and how Before Noon fits into it?
The three of us, Danielle, Natasha and I, found each other in 2017 between life’s ups and downs. After bonding through stories of workaholism, heartbreak, and anxiety, which showed up as burnout, depression, and shingles, we realized that our individual challenges were not unique. United in our desire to break patterns, we found healing in complementary and alternative therapy and felt a greater responsibility to share.
We are three ambitious women who refuse to settle for mediocrity. We continue to navigate inevitable life transitions and our individual well-being journeys. Before Noon is the place we turn to for healing and growth with a like-minded, supportive community.
What challenges have people been encountering with their mental health and wellness, and how does Before Noon help?
We just wrapped up 150 customer discovery interviews and one of the most common challenges we heard is people not finding talk therapy effective. We found that most people turn to talk therapy as their first resource for mental health help (hence the crowded marketplace of talk therapy providers and apps!) but more often than not, people leave the experience feeling dissatisfied and unfulfilled.
Before Noon provides our end users with a variety of mental and emotional health options outside of talk therapy. These options are rooted in Eastern traditional practices, have been around for thousands of years, and can lead to more meaningful healing (think hypnotherapy, Reiki, and Ayurveda, among others).
Why do customers love Before Noon and how are you capitalizing on the value Before Noon brings to people’s lives?
Customers love our brand, our community, and the personalized support they receive in navigating the inevitable ups and downs of life. We support our customers in their personal growth and discovery journeys by offering a trusted marketplace of complementary and alternative practitioners. At the beginning of their journey, each customer completes a matching exercise where they input what they’re currently navigating through, how they would like to feel in 6 months, and what they are looking for in a practitioner’s personality (e.g. tough love, sense of humor, focus on science and research, etc.). From there, they get matched with 3–5 practitioners across a variety of modalities and are encouraged to meet with each recommended practitioner until they find one they feel uniquely connected with.
What are some milestones for Before Noon in 2022 so far?
One of our most exciting milestones was raising initial funds from an incredibly inspiring and supportive group of VCs and angels that includes Hustle Fund, EY Ventures, and Tonia O’Connor (former CEO of Chopra). Getting accepted into Blue Startups was also great for us. The experience has been transformational in creating the foundation for Before Noon’s next phase of growth. On our product side, we launched an apparel capsule with the key message of “more being, less doing” by bringing together our practitioners and brand influencers in a fun and creative way.
What projects or goals are you currently working on with the help of Blue Startups?
Even before the Blue Startups program, we knew we needed help with three things: business development, go-to-market strategy, and fundraising. We hit the ground running at the start of the program, completing 100 customer discovery interviews in 10 days. Given themes from these interviews, we decided to completely shift our business model away from group to 1:1 complementary and alternative therapy sessions and away from B2C to B2B. Needless to say, we’ve changed a lot in just three short weeks! We are almost done with 50 additional customer discovery interviews focused on the workplace and have received some great initial corporate interest in partnering for our pilot!
To learn more about Before Noon, visit their website.
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