Icebreaker Community Stories — Emooter
“We’re on a journey to build better tools for people and organisations so that they can take care and improve their well-being at work”.
This is the mission statement of the next community story in our series — Emooter.
With the Icebreaker Pre-founder Project Online coming up this Friday on the 15th of May, we are continuing to showcase stories from the Icebreaker pre-founder community! Whether through finding co-founders, developing ideas, or bringing together business partners — we want to highlight some of the success stories which had our community acting as an intermediary for people to connect and found their companies.
Similar to last week’s story with Talbit, we sat down with Teemu Jäntti, Co-founder and Business Dev of Emooter, an app that helps you and your team improve mental wellbeing at work, to get some insights into how our community of pre-founders acted as a catalyst for him and his co-founder, Dani Pärnänen, coming together and forming a team!
“I was working in corporations for many years, and one thing that frustrated me was the inefficient ways that work wellbeing was being implemented. Whenever we would have workplace wellbeing or employee satisfaction initiatives, they would be a long and arduous process whereby the whole work force was asked to complete a survey to which company-wide initiatives were to be launched. But these would take ages and no one would feel engaged with these individual initiatives. That’s why we founded Emooter.” — Teemu Jäntti, Co-founder and Business Dev at Emooter.
That’s the abridged version of why co-founders Dani and Teemu founded Emooter, an app that helps you and your team improve mental wellbeing at work. Their approach was very clear from the beginning. They believed and still believe that wellbeing at work should not be focusing on company wide initiatives. Instead, they should be focusing on the individual. Since everyone deals with their own challenges and issues when it comes to wellbeing at the workplace, it is important to take those individual challenges and issues into consideration. Emooter stems from wanting to give people an opportunity to better manage their own well-being regardless of the organisation, management or leadership style.
Like with the previous community story with Talbit, Dani and Teemu met each other at Icebreaker’s very first Pre-founder Project back in 2017.
“I met Dani during one of the sparring sessions of the Pre-founder project. I had never taken part in startups and didn’t really know much about the startup scene, so I was pretty much testing the waters with my idea and seeing how it would pan out. When I met Dani and heard of his idea, I was interested. It started off as a dashboard for HR but it quickly shifted as we started to realise what could be done”, Teemu said when asked about how he and Dani came up with the idea for Emooter.
But like many startup ideas, the idea did not come to complete fruition until they had multiple other meetings after the PFP. And that is something we encourage.
After the event, they found it quite enjoyable to spar off each other and work together. They then started to craft Emooter from the ground up; basing it on scientific studies done on well being at work (you can read their full story here). The founding of Emooter is a perfect example of what the PFP was made for and a perfect example of the type of ecosystem that we at Icebreaker want to develop.
“During the time with Icebreaker and especially after that we started spending more and more time working on Emooter. At this point in our journey towards entrepreneurship, we both still had bills to pay and had to take on other gigs outside of this project. In the summer of 2018 we were having a cup of coffee and redefining the strategy for Emooter. It was at this point that we had the revelation that became the vision for our company we are now executing.”
At icebreaker.vc we want to be the ones mediating the connections made between pre-founders. We understand that the process of coming up with an idea that will reach product-market fit is something that doesn’t happen overnight — and that is why we encourage those who join the PFP to take the initiative in continuously developing their ideas.
To conclude, we asked Teemu if he had any final words of wisdom to those thinking about kicking off their startup journeys:
“Starting off, I didn’t truly know how hard it was going to be. But I thought it would be better just to jump in and see how it goes. The worst that can happen is that it will be a learning experience. You will get to see how it all works — the automation, the scaling — you would never get to learn this anywhere else or in my previous corporate environment. And if all fails, you will bounce back stronger. At the end of the day you can look at yourself in the mirror and say that you tried.”
Now, a few years after initially coming in contact at our first PFP in 2017, Dani and Teemu are now both working full-time on Emooter. They currently have a 30-day free trial if you want to see what they are all about.
Our next PFP will be run online starting on the 15th of May. Over the course of three online sessions we let you dive headfirst into the basics of starting and building a successful startup. You’ll also be given the tools to share, validate, and improve your ideas in between sessions as you get to know your fellow pre-founders.
