A brand new iOS social wellness app referred to as Exist needs to assist middle-aged shoppers join and construct significant communities with each other as they navigate their lives and the stresses that include it.
The app describes itself because the edgier cousin of Calm or Headspace, and its important function is social journaling. The concept behind the app’s social and community-driven journaling is to assist individuals heal collectively, slightly than alone. Exist additionally encompasses a each day temper tracker, audio workout routines, guided meditations, and extra.
The app was based by iOS developer Jason Jardim, who beforehand based a startup referred to as Lounge, and Alicia Waldner, who’s the founder a advertising company referred to as ADventure Advertising.
The co-founders didn’t meet at a networking occasion, a job, or their alma maters. They met on a date. The 2 remained pleasant and acquired to speaking about concepts for a psychological well being app — a subject they have been each captivated with, Waldner mentioned in an interview with TechCrunch.
Waldner had attended a collection of group psychological wellness experiences, and had heard from individuals who have been seeking to have these types of community-based experiences at residence. Jardim and Waldner got down to create an app that might embody this community-building concept.
Whereas Exist was initially meant to focus on Gen Z customers, the premise ended up resonating with middle-aged customers, as the common age of customers who signed up for the app was 40. The duo then determined to focus and middle the app round this older group.
Exist encompasses a TikTok-like feed that enables customers to swipe by means of a mixture of movies and textual content posts that includes individuals’s public journals and their responses to each day prompts. Customers can share feedback on these posts to share related experiences or provide assist and recommendation.
“The biggest feature that makes us different is the community side,” Waldner mentioned. “Headspace and Calm proved that there’s this audio-based market, but people still feel very alone in those experiences and in real life, people meditate and then they journal, but that’s a solo experience. And what we did was make that a social experience. So instead of journaling all your thoughts and feelings at home and putting it underneath your bed at night, you’re sharing it with the world, and people are commenting back.”
Exist additionally options an AI-powered query function that prompts customers to broaden on their journals and discover extra of their ideas and emotions. Waldner says the function is supposed to assist individuals resolve their points and permit them to assume deeper about one thing.
The group and social journaling facets of Exist are free. If customers need entry to guided audios and meditations, they want to join the app’s $5.99 month-to-month subscription.
By way of the long run, the startup needs to proceed leaning into the human connection facet of Exist and search for approach to enhance it. Exist additionally needs so as to add extra options round logging your sleeping habits and feelings, together with extra customized prompts for journals.
