OurBalance — making work-life balance accessible to everyone
The rise of attention economics, remote work, and the continuous proliferation of devices and other distractions cause a work-life balance to be an important topic. Sam and Tom Engström are committed to the mission of improving work-life balance and want to create a solution accessible to everyone.
When mindfulness was the “saviour”
In 2012 Sam Engström was running another company and was experiencing severe levels of stress and burnout juggling the CEO position and family life. His mind was constantly preoccupied with work, and the work-life balance just wasn’t there.
Around the same time, Sam’s brother Tom Engström was studying design at Aalto University and was also feeling directionless about his career and life in general.
As part of his studies, Tom embarked on a life-changing trip to Zambia and South Africa, where he was introduced to the concept of mindfulness through daily morning meditation sessions. Upon returning, he recommended mindfulness to Sam.
Mindfulness helped both Sam and Tom regain the feeling of control and provided new directions to their lives. Inspired by what it has brought to their life, the brothers want to build something that can bring a valuable contribution to the world.
“We’ve turned down many job offers and opportunities because we believe that the only way to stay true to ourselves and our values is to proactively create our own opportunities. We all draw great inspiration and motivation from making and creating new things rather than just accepting the status quo.” — said Tom
Brothers turned Co-founders
In 2017, the two brothers founded their own company, Timespace, and created their first app “Focus” — a product that would integrate concepts of mindfulness with a productivity tool.
Focus app encourages people to devote attention to a single task or activity at a time and provides a platform to structure work and other parts of life around this “single-tasking” idea.
After a while, Sam and Tom found that while Focus was valuable for users who integrate it into their lives, it didn’t provide enough value to casual users. However, they were still committed to the mission wanted to create a solution accessible for everyone.
In a biohacking conference, Sam met “the most connected man on earth” Chris Dancy. Chris, for a period of time, was tracking virtually everything about himself and became very attuned to how behaviours translate into quantifiable data points. Through their chat, Sam and Chris planted the first seeds of OurBalance, work-life balance and mutual wellbeing app.
In late 2019, the two brothers met Chris in the basement of Kallio Library and together developed the first version of OurBalance.
The app uses metrics from users’ smartphones to create a simple visual calculator of key behavioural and biological balance metrics and make it possible for people to start conversations and take action. OurBalance helped users think about their balance as a whole and how it relates to others.
Really the value has been the conversation our users have started with themselves and others about balance, and that our daily or weekly encouragement helps them do better. — said Sam
The NSS journey and the future plan
Right now, they’re excited to roll out improvements that will clarify how balance is measured and are looking to run an in-depth study on those features. They also just landed the first close collaboration with a company on a pilot project starting in January 2021.
Tom and Sam describe their journey with NSS as very intense and instructive:
“NSS has been helping us get focused on our customers’ needs and gave us the encouragement to proactively get out there and ramp up our customer research and sales efforts. We had heard from previous NSS participants that taking part is definitely worth it but it is a lot of work and they weren’t kidding!
If everything goes according to plan (although 2020 has been a fresh reminder that things rarely do), in the next 6 months we will have found our market and will be building on a robust product. Hopefully this will mean we positively impact thousands of working people’s work-life balance and are inspiring global conversations about what mutual well-being means for us all.
For more updates on our activities and mentors follow us on Linkedin. Visit Nordic Startup School website for more details of our programs.
