Marcus Gners (Lifesum): The future of health and wellness

Speaker A: And then it's also back going that we realize that we have an opportunity to go beyond just the app and go beyond just digital. Because we have the platform already and the ecosystem and the users, we believe that that gives us super unfair competitive advantages in whatever market we decide to enter within the sort of realm of wellness and nutrition. And I think just like Hyper three, theoretically that allows us to do user acquisition cheaper or customer acquisition cheaper than other supplements companies, then at the end of the line we will become the biggest supplements company in the world because no other supplements company has the user relationship and the data.

Speaker B: Hey Marcus, Welcome. How's it going?

Speaker A: Good, good. Excited, excited.

Speaker B: Good. Me too. Let's jump right in. So the way we like to start this off is basically to have the guest just explain what the app is that they're working on and their role. So do you want to start with that? Just tell the audience who don't know about lifesum. What is lifesum and what's your role there?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm Marcus, I'm um, chief growth officer at Livesum, also co founder and Lifesum. We've been working on this for about 13 years. And I think you asked what the app is about. We know very well what the app is about, which is helping people eat better. And then I think over the years of 13 years we realized that the company is not actually about the app, but it's about the user problem and sort of helping people level in life. What we have built is not really just an app, it is a brand. And we have trust among like 65 million users that have downloaded us. And I think what we are setting for focus on now is delivering more value to our users to solve sort of the problems and allow them to level in life through the root of nutrition.

Speaker B: Awesome. Uh, so the app, the app itself, what's the experience for the typical user? Like, are they tracking what they eat? Is there anything else in there? How do they. Are there like goals involved or like what does the typical user experience look like when, when they download live some?

Speaker A: I think, I think the key thing to the user experience you have. Of course we have an app with a bunch of buttons and stuff that, that create actions allows you to do. It's good to take a step back and see sort of what are some of the uniquenesses of sort of what we do is like we center in on nutrition because we think nutrition is sort of the biggest lever that you as an individual have to influence your health and therefore influence the sort of general quality of life. And then we make sort of science accessible using design. And design is both something that sort of the flair of it, meaning sort of if we design it nice, we can take the guilt and shame out of lifestyle, which is the struggles that all of us as humans have as we're trying to sort of get through life and improve. And then we have the technology side, which is there is a lot of great science, but the great science isn't really accessible to everyone. It's like to get really proper nutrition advice, you need to be really good at sports or be really, really rich. But with technology we can take this science, package it through design and make it personalized for everyone and therefore sort of democratizing the possibility of sort of using nutrition as a lever to sort of level in life.

Speaker B: I see. So the big, the big differentiator or the big kind of selling point of LifeSum as an app or as a platform is basically the ability to get the science of nutrition packaged in a way that like the typical person who is not a scientist and doesn't know like all the details of all this nutrition stuff, like they can have that accessible to them really easily in a way that's like intuitive and makes sense and they can access on their phone like at any time. Is that about right?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's that what is sort of the customer approach, meaning sort of both the expression inside, through the software, through the other products we do, and also through the brand that people don't use sort of food tracking app because they want to build a giant archive of everything they've ate in their life. They use it because they want to have a life that's a little bit better than the one they have today. And I think our way of approaching the customer has I think been pretty successful. Whereas like having building things with empathy for the user to empower the user.

Speaker B: Let's, let's go into that a little bit more. I think that's really interesting because from the folks we talk to, like a lot of time when we talk to founders who are starting a business, founders are often technical or somewhat technical brained. And I think they think a lot of like, okay, I'm building a food tracking app. Therefore the purpose of the app is to track food and to basically like you said, build a database of everything you've ever eaten. And that's not like, that's not quite the way to go about it. Right. Like you said, you should be focusing on the user and what their end goal is, which is not to build a database of all the things they've ever eaten, but actually to improve their lives.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it's like, remember that the end goal is eternal. And, um, we all have ways to improve that. It's not like the. If someone says I want to lose weight, it's very important to wonder, to see why, because it differs a lot. And I think there, the end goal, I think is sort of achieving a point of eternal happiness. It's like changing that happiness is at the core of why people want to lose weight, because it's a proxy of getting there that it's not like I want to lose weight so I will become lighter and therefore I'll save gasoline costs. Or I work as a horse jockey and it's very central for my job.

Speaker B: So what are some of the things that LifeSum does that show that sort of going beyond just tracking what you eat, like what are the brand things or what are the other parts of the app or the community, the experience that. That touch on those things.

Speaker A: I think, I think a lot, a lot is that, uh, we emphasize the importance of design when we do things, but also when you talk about branding is like how we show up to the market and for our users. And I think it's about like having a brand that takes away guilt, shame and sort of the stigma around sort of nutrition and lifestyle. We have millions of users using us every month and they come to us saying, I want a better life, I want to be happier. I think nutrition is the root. And then we have built an app over many years, but realizing that we actually built a platform. But to be a platform, you actually need to offer additional products and services. And I think there with the brand and the demand we have from our users and the trust we have from our users that we realize we have an opportunity to sort of go deeper in the relationship with the user and offer more. So there's. I saw this direction about one and a half or two years ago that came to the revelation that we should give more, more value to our users. And then we acquired Germany's largest at home. M biomarker testing company called Licon was the first sort of more visible step. We will be sort of adding more things to our sort of our value proposition for the users, like within the near future, probably through more acquisitions, but also through partnerships, because we have the intent, we have the demand. And then we should, I think there with supplements, for example, which is something we're looking a lot at. We have this, we have, we have the context and the stage and then we Just need to make experiences, life summon and give users good access to good things.

Speaker C: The acquisition of the biomark company, uh, there what was the strategy and how does that integrate with the uh, the proposition that you have now? Is it that that will be like an additional service or is it going to be integrated?

Speaker A: It's both. We're thinking platform strategy, not like here's a funnel where uh, adding more products and services where all the things we add should be individually good but collectively great or awesome. That when you combine things that having a LifeSum Premium membership should give you sort of additional value and additional benefits and blood and biomarkers is super interesting especially when it comes to sort of breaking the void from the phone and you're actually going inside the skin. And then from a uh, user perspective the ability to get access to what's my starting points, what's my midpoint and how am I actually progressing? So you can sort uh, of go in and be sort of hyper personalized for real and meaning sort of this is health care, not sick care where sort of how do you, how do you improve your vitality? And the best way to see that is like how is your individual blood values and blood and biomarkers, how are they progressing based on sort of the improved choices you make in your daily life?

Speaker C: Yeah, that's really interesting. And then you touched on supplements there as well.

Speaker A: How does that play in supplements is nutrition? I think in, in an ideal world we would all eat fantastic whole foods all the time. But then sometimes that's a problem especially when it comes to like certain supplements like omega 3. And then if you see in your blood values that you may be short on something that if you have a lot of stress or you exercise a lot will probably be running low on magnesium. And I think our context, because we have this, we, we have the users, we have the intent then when it comes to for example magnesium, a global market grown like crazy during the last couple of, during the last couple of years. But then the user comes to the problem like oh I heard I'm going to eat magnesium. Which kind of magnesium? What's the difference? I go into my local CVS store and then the supplements aisle is like 300 meters long and you have no idea what to choose. And then you thought it's easy, I'm going to eat magnesium at least. But then you find out it's seven types of magnesium. Which kind should I choose? I'm feeling stressed that I can't relax. And then the user needs help with choice. Both navigating sort of what it, what, what kind of supplement, like what kind of magnesium and what form of magnesium to increase bioavailability. So you're just not eating like shitty laundry detergent pills. And I think this is something that we can help with to deliver sort of superior things of higher quality where you have the supplements world has gone from. So the phase one was when you started getting like tons of vitamins and minerals and you started getting these like grocery stores, 200 meter aisles, uh, with kind of um, like the FMCG playbook applied to something that was in the fringes between sort of, that used to be like pills used to be medicine and then it turned into wellness. Then the second phase was these like branded supplements like you call a pill like yoga Bliss have no science at all really and then just sell a lot to people. But what's interesting now with the phase that the market is in now is like higher uh, higher degree of science, better bioavailability, higher demands of quality. But it's like in the 500 meter long supplement style of like thousands of supplement brands, thousands of supplement types is like impossible for the user to choose. And I think this is something that we can help with. Sort of applies sort of the level of hyper personalization to, to this level also by using sort of the, what we have, the date that we have in the user and the intent of the user and then be able to offer better things for them and as individuals but then sort of better quality, a better choice in general.

Speaker C: So it sounds to me like um, you're really trying to make this extremely personalized experience for users. And do you think that's really how you get users to stay engaged and how you keep them kind of in touch with the brand?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think with sort of the user data and the user intent and the note and uh, what we know about nutrition. By combining multiple products and services there we can tailor sort of uh, more experience and products for the users that give more value.

Speaker B: At the end of the day the user, I mean this is about a user's or a person's own health and so they are at the center of that. And probably the highest personalization is the best way to deliver value. Right. Everyone's different, everyone's got a different health situation. So it does seem like the right way to think about it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then it's also about going that we realize that we have an opportunity to go beyond, go beyond just the app and go beyond just digital where I think it's about how do you allow the user to sort of get access to superior products at superior price. And because we have the platform already and the ecosystem and the users, we believe that the combination of the factors that we built up with the app over 13 years, that that gives us super unfair competitive advantages in whatever market we decide to enter within the sort of realm of wellness and nutrition. And I think just like hyper, theoretically you can take, if we sort of with with what we built up during the 13 years, if that allows us to do user acquisition cheaper or customer acquisition cheaper than other supplements companies, then at the end of the line we will become the biggest supplements company in the world. No other supplements company has the user relationship and the data. And this also applies to things like biomarkers for example and how we're looking at expanding the platform further.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's such a good point actually because you kind of own the audience if that kind of makes sense. You have the captive nature there.

Speaker A: And that means from a sort of investment perspective where you often talk about tam, that uh, our core TAM is the one we already have and that's pretty large considering our vast user base, that we don't need to be desperate to sort of go out and hunt for new users. We can start with the ones we have and get pretty far from that. Far from that when it comes to go to market with new products and services.

Speaker C: Mhm. Yeah, that's really interesting actually. Slightly change tack and ask a slightly uh, unrelated question. But habit changing. How do you think that people actually form habits and what do you see the main kind of trends for getting people to kind of stay motivated and stick to their goals that they have?

Speaker A: I think I know all the theory about sort of habit form and how many days you should do something and all of that. But I think at the core of it, and what the problem is for most health, most health products or wellness products is that is their approach to the user. Like a lot of products and uh, services have historically, like they've historically used guilt and shame to fuel sales and often ending up having an approach to the user where you sell products and services that are sort of, that are sort of should products, you should use this product. But I think we come at it from a uh, sort of more consumer aspect where we think the user's motivation to use the products will go, will go up if we appeal to the user's want instead of the should M.

Speaker C: Do you think that's kind of the same as a need, is that people generally feel like they want what they actually need or Is that different?

Speaker A: I think everyone wants to be a need, but you either. But there. But most people take the route of should to become a need. And I think we take the route of want to become a central part of sort of life.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And so how does that kind of manifest itself, I guess obviously in the app, but also in the wider brand that you're. You're creating. What are the kind of things that you're trying to promote to get people to try and stick to this, this journey that they're trying to go on?

Speaker A: I think, I think it's pretty simple. It's like make good products and package them in a way that makes the user feel proud and cool of actually putting the effort to improve their health and life and uh, not feel guilt for being sort of not where they would want to be, but actually things to improve.

Speaker C: And the personalization aspect I guess as well makes it feel less generic and more personal. Which.

Speaker A: Yeah, because it's also. It's like you have. The Internet is full of sort of uh, generic advice with various levels of quality. And then you have what's happening with the LLMs, for example, that you get generic advice packaged in a way that it feels a bit personal, but it's still kind of generic and you don't know from what angle it comes. But I think, I think there we see an opportunity with AI where we, we released the multimodal tracking last year, which allows the users to track with, with image, quick text, voice. And also we have like barcode scanning and things like that, which takes a lot of, A lot of the friction out of the input part of the feedback loop and the user experience. And I think, uh, I think what we see as the opportunities you have, all the sort of anthropics, OpenAI, Google and the giants that are building the frontier model are racing against each other to get first to AGI and who becomes Darth Vader first. Whereas we see the opportunity of uh, using artificial intelligence and the sort of new ways of working to create the nutrition, vertical sort of nutrition AI on the. On, on top of the frontier models. And that will give sort of superior level of personalization where you combine the power of AI with the power of sort of the data, uh, and then the orchestration through design and sort of smooth technology.

Speaker C: Yeah, because it, I mean, how do you see that ending up? Um, you know, the final, what the industry will look like is that there's a lot of talk about kind of personal AI models where you have your own little model that's really fine tuned on your aspect or do you see you're kind of running a lifestyle model that is more taking what these bigger platforms are doing and creating something central that then serves customers? Or is it.

Speaker A: I think we're not going to start creating our own AI models anytime soon. Where I think if you just look at sort of the levels of funding that has been raised in sort of the, on the bigger scene, I think that will drive development and the level of quality of sort of the infrastructure. And then what was talked about like a year ago or two years ago, everything's really fast. Now people are saying like, oh, it's just the AI wrapper and the central thing is the model. And then I think what has happened during the last year is like people have realized an AI wrapper is actually what the customer experiences. And that's what we usually call a product or service.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean everything is a wrapper of something else at the end of the day. Doesn't necessarily take away from the insights and the end product.

Speaker A: Yeah. You wouldn't call sort of Nike that makes shoes that they're a leather and rubber wrapper.

Speaker C: No. For some reason uh, in software and particularly AI that seems to be how people are describing things. Where it really takes away from the outcomes that are quite amazing these days. So how does that actually manifest itself in the app? So if I have a meal, I could take a picture of that meal or I could also describe what I ate and that would then track the macros, the micros and all of that and kind of add that to my journey.

Speaker A: And I think that's the base of um, sort of multimodal tracking and using AI to take away the friction. I think what we are doubling down on now, which we call hyper personalization internally is uh, sort of radically accelerate the level of feedback you get back on the base of the actions you did. And I think this is things we will be releasing for New Year's that I have high expectations because it sort of closes the loop. Especially like I, I come from gaming and before this and that's. And there you have the central part of sort of you do something and then something interesting needs to happen. And with food tracking there's a lot of talk about like taking away the friction of tracking. But you still need to sort, you still need to sort of make it interesting. It's not like cinema still exists. You don't go like, yeah, it's unnecessary. I spent 2 hours watching this movie because when I can find out how it ended and what it was about I say time. And that's why how do you make sort of uh, self improvement enjoyable? Which I think is like the central part. You do something, you get something interesting back and you feel that you progress.

Speaker C: Also have you got like an example for the people listening of the types of insights that could come back? So if I tracked a meal, would it be like I would get something back immediately? Would it be something like on a weekly basis that would tell me no, it needs to be how I'm doing.

Speaker A: It needs to be instant. Uh, I think the problem and of course you would want sort of depth to see sort of your, your progression from a broader sense. But I think the problem with health and wellness has been that the feedback loop in life is pretty slow and us as humans, we have difficulties identifying ourselves with future versions of ourselves. If you, if you make good choices today that will pay off like in 20 years, which is a problem from a sort of UX perspective and that we're trying to sort of solve through design. So it gets, so you get the feeling or more uh, instant gratification of the good choices that you made or also the not so good choices of how they can fit in your life and what you can do to sort of mitigate.

Speaker C: Sure, yeah. Uh, so what do you see kind of the, you mentioned about that coming in the New year. What are some of the other things that you're, that you're looking at right now?

Speaker A: Uh, I think New year is a complex thing doing this for 13 years now, the seasonality of New Year and health. So but I think big focus for us on the product side is sort of hyper personalization and level or use of AI. Then on the other hand it's like we're building a company and from building a company now is lot of central around sort of how do we execute our marketing strategy this year? How will the app stores function this year and uh, how will user demand be this year? It's like uh, I usually like New Year's is kind of a neurotic time uh, where I uh, think internally we were pretty clear that we're kind of like we run a New Year's party company. So we can't expect New Year to be really the time to be off and relax like you're supposed to do.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean it's a big period for health and balance in general. Right. Everybody's that's new new uh, or tries to at least start new habit programs. And so how does your for example marketing strategy looking next year compared to

Speaker A: Compared to this year, I think uh, we've been following a lot the developments of what AI means for creative. For example, where if you take 2024, the last couple of years there's been a lot about how do you create a lot of, how do you go about creating sort of creative volume and then let sort of the meta algorithms to decide what is actually successful. I think with the rise of, you have like nano, banana, VO 3.1, Sora 2 and things like that cuts the cost of making creatives radically and then combine it with the agents that

Speaker C: I

Speaker A: think when anyone can create pretty advanced things, then you really need to sort of work on what's your value prop and what's your edge in the market. And I think this is something that sort of having gone through the whole cycle of mobile where we're in a paradigm shift now driven by AI with new ways of working, uh, new possibilities of doing things as a whole, as a company that uh, sort of seeing it what it is, that it's not enough to say like there's an app that you can for that now, uh, you need to sort of have a tighter angle. And I think ours is like doubling down on sort of personalized, more hyper personalization in general and then steering for different sort of needs of the user with more granularity.

Speaker B: I mean, I assume you guys are just trying anything at your scale or trying everything at your scale, right? Like I assume you have TikTok influencer marketing running. I assume you have programmatic ads on meta and kind of everywhere. Have you seen any particular one of those do much better than the others or not so much?

Speaker A: I think uh, I'm pretty surprised we changed the way we're working with influencers to becoming more sort of relational model with more types of ambassadors that we work with over time rather than sort of transactional. I'll pay for an Instagram post. And I think this is something especially when if you combine influencer with search, then you kind of get a pretty good, close, pretty good commercial loop that that uh, has been working really, really well for us.

Speaker B: Is that combined with search? Because folks will hear about it via the influencer and then they'll go and search you and you need to make sure that you're ranking like at the top for anything related to.

Speaker A: Exactly. And it's also sort of both, both through uh, sort of organic efforts but also through paid search. It's forced us to think a bit different about how to evaluate and how to, how to evaluate how we deploy

Speaker C: the marketing budget is there an attribution problem there as well. Because if people hear about you through an influencer or something, they see and then actually just go and Google you. How do you kind of understand where that budget is performing?

Speaker A: Yeah, but I think it's also, it's like attribution was easier before and attribution will probably not become that easy again. And I think it's like if you think you can sort of navigate in this perfect last click attribution world, I think you need to give up. It's like, just because we were able to measure things with our great exactness before doesn't, uh, mean you still can. You can't apply that model. You need to think differently and have a bit more of a holistic view on the efficiency of your marketing investments that you will not be able to measure everything.

Speaker C: That's going to get even harder, I assume with LLMs, because people just ask the LLM a question, they don't necessarily click on anything. They're just seeing a mention or a citation and going away and finding information for themselves.

Speaker A: And it's like things evolve and progression should always mean that things get better. Attribution became worse. But that's something we just need to roll with for sure.

Speaker C: Um, on the acquisition side, just going back to when you mentioned Lycon, what do you kind of look for when you want to acquire a company like that? Is it that you don't necessarily have the. They realize that you can't necessarily do everything in house and so you're looking for a team to bring on, or is it looking for a partner that already has a brand that's kind of orthogonal or parallel to what you do? How do you think about those?

Speaker A: Uh, but it's like we look at sort of, we have our internal markets, we have our users, we know what our users sort of want or dream about. How can we add additional products and services that help users on that journey? And then we don't really think about sort of having in house or not. It's just being humble a bit. It's really hard to build things and, and if someone has built something, then we try to make them into something that becomes in house whenever. When we do, like the acquisition of Lycon, we are turning ourselves into one firm. It's not two, uh, companies. And we apply a bit the same type of thinking when we do partnerships, that we do proper partnerships where we actually work together and try to sort of not be so, uh, we're in the house, you're outside of the house. But more, how do we bring value to each other so it becomes sort of mutually beneficial to do things?

Speaker C: What's an example of a partnership that you've done recently that you could talk about?

Speaker A: I think the central partnerships is like, historically, when we've partnered, we've come with the angle that we are a Swedish company, we would like to sort of play in the premier league with our industry. The premier league of our industry is Silicon Valley. Therefore, we've done a lot with sort of Apple and Google over the years. And now that we reach scale, we've been thinking more. Not how do we do partnerships to drive our distribution, but how can our platform be distribution of things that people usually do not have access to? And we're doing two experiments at the moment right now where we are looking at selling products that I didn't know existed or how they worked, where one of them is this new supplement and superfood that you eat. It was developed for mountaineering years ago. And then realizing that it could be a wellness product where they're so nutrient dense that if you eat 10 or eight of these, like cookies a day, uh, you, you can, you get 800 calories, which is like less than half of what you should need. But since it's so dense with nutrients the body absorbs, because we know, like, yeah, calories in is calories out is important. But the problem is, like with humans, we have a good idea of how much calories or how nutritious certain food is, but we haven't found the combustion engine inside the body yet. So it's very different how we, uh, how this energy is actually used and used in the cells. And we're working with this superfood company now to try to figure out how do we package this and find what's the natural fit in life. As part of my experiments with this, I've been only e this for two weeks now. So I'm gonna do a couple of more days and then I'm gonna have a proper dinner, which I'm really looking forward to.

Speaker B: So for two weeks, you've only been eating. Eating the superfood. These cookies?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Or bars. Cookie or bar?

Speaker A: I don't know between. What's the difference?

Speaker B: I guess. I guess the shape is the only difference. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I think, I think for us, it's like part of this is. And what we do is like, how do we. How do we bring this to. To the market? How do we bring this to our market?

Speaker B: How.

Speaker A: How do we make it accessible? How do we make it understandable and then I don't know, is it a cookie or a bar? What's, what's.

Speaker B: I guess.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: What.

Speaker A: What is the, of what is the official. What, what. What is the official explanation? But uh, but uh, I see now after these two weeks that as I measure everything on myself to different perspectives, just looking at my Oura ring For example I have 5x more recovery per day than I usually have. So then there is something good with this strange superfood cookie biscuits bar

Speaker C: and it's much more efficient. You don't have to cook, I guess.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's cool that you, that you try these things. I think it speaks a lot towards the, the level of kind of respect for the user where you don't want to like you have, you've amassed this huge distribution channel now but you understand the importance of making sure that that distribute distribution channel is leveraged for products that are worthy of, of that channel.

Speaker A: Yeah, but, but it's, but it's like if we look at what's happening with, with sort of production becoming so much more easy that sort of the game comes down to sort of trust and taste. Uh, we've earned the trust of our user but we need to sort of re earn the trust of our users. And uh, for me to be able to sort of with a clear conscience sell things to our users I need to have done it on myself. Otherwise I'm not doing, I won't stand behind it. We have the responsibility there. I think it's like we launched Livestamp work a couple of years ago with I think the great revelation that even if it's a B2B product, that the end user is a human. A lot of B2B products, especially in sort of corporate wellness have been things that have been just sold without and is centered in as like the thing has not been the customer experience but sort of selling some kind of good PowerPoint. Whereas the end user of a uh, corporate product they sort of demand Instagram grade product experience. And I think this is like why we set, why we sort of went out for the market because we saw we could bring value, there was demand. And uh, uh now we have like we have General Electric for years

Speaker C: and

Speaker A: uh, we're working with the UN for example. So we have some clients that we are super proud of and then we're expand. We see this as a way to sort of expand distribution of the platform. But it's like maybe your employer pays, uh, but we center in on sort of the end user to sort of make you Healthier and from an employer perspective a more productive team member.

Speaker C: That's interesting because I mean corporate wellness, you know, it's really mainly being sold to the business for the business to say that they are supporting their employees. Ah. And for hiring and, and they forgot

Speaker A: that the employees were human beings somehow. And that's our big revelation. And uh, we've been doing this for a couple of years now and it's growing really fast. So this is something that uh, I think as we also expand the value proposition in relation to the platform that this is going to be super interesting to see. How do we add sort of more things beyond the app as part of the corporate offering feels.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: Like a natural extension of the platform because it's really the same use case. It's just a different way of going, of finding the end users. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. The end user is still a human being that wants to sort of improve their health.

Speaker B: Exactly, yeah.

Speaker C: And it's quite a different um, you know, go to market and for internally in life some. How does that kind of manifest as if you've got kind of two separate arms that are kind of doing a B2B side and a consumer side.

Speaker A: I think it's like the corporate wellness side is a fairly immature market still going through a lot of changes and therefore uh, we are trying a bunch of different model go to market models. That's why we call it business development and not sales because it's like no one's found the perfect solution to do this. So we're experimenting a lot and some things we thought were not going to work have worked great. So I think uh, we just experiment forward on this.

Speaker B: Definitely for sure. Um, there's one thing I want to touch on. I don't know if you guys talked about it while I was out, but if you did then just let me know. You mentioned a few times the importance of design at Livesum. Um, and I'm curious your perspective on how design, specifically design of mobile apps may or may not change as a result of AI. Like do you think that kind of these chat based style interfaces are going to become much more common because users are just getting used to them with chatgpt and stuff? Or are there any other kind of design things that you see changing as a result of the AI wave?

Speaker A: I think short term we'll see much more of the chat based sort of interfaces but I think uh, I think a bit further we'll see more sort of more imaginative generative UI solutions where we see that in games, games usually lead How UI is personalized and adapted and created on the fly for the user. I think this is a direction that will be. But in the short term more chat interfaces and then more sort of feels like magic type of, I say image execution.

Speaker B: So do you think, for example, like a version of lifesum in the future based on the specific user that's gone and created their account and kind of specified what their goals are? They might see a different UI based on whether their goal is for example, to like lose weight very quickly or just to like make sure they're eating healthy. They might see like a different version of the app based on some kind of AI generated UI for them.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, it's like the world is moving and technology is evolving at sort of ridiculous speed now. So if we don't adapt to the possibilities of technology, we will be vintage. And vintage is usually not really good if you're in software.

Speaker C: Yeah, definitely changes a lot of things in the software model. Like the traditional software model though is you have one experience that you kind of release new features to incrementally. It's very well defined. But if you have at essentially an infinite number of variations that, that somebody could experience, how do you even begin to imagine how to develop that system and how to manage it over time?

Speaker A: I think that there is like, think of it more as sort of games is much more developed when it comes to that in terms of its interactive experiences. Whereas apps in general outside of games are kind of stuck in this sort of. That experience is a collection of different screens that you flip through and you press buttons. So I think it will be more sort of rich experience as sort of new uh, technology comes, but also improved performance of the hardware.

Speaker B: I think the game thing is really interesting because Charlie, like the way you framed it, it's like how could we ever deal with this situation where anything could happen. The user could get a toy for UI and then you think about a game and that's exactly what happens.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Based on what the user chooses, they can go and a huge number of directions and get a totally different experience. So in a sense the game, the gaming world has kind of solved for that already. And it's just maybe we software folks just need to adapt to that way of thinking where it's like we set some framework in place and then every user will kind of have a different path through.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's like why are games so good at that is because they don't have a benefit of uh, there's nothing useful really with playing a game. It's kind of pointless. Whereas, like, but they realize like, fun beats smart. And how, uh, do you, how do you make it into delightful experience? And then I think we've had so much like in many of the app categories we provide, we have so much usefulness in what we do. So we sort of, we haven't had to become, we haven't had to become as good at the user experience as games has had because we could lean against sort of, yeah, I'm improving my life and things like that. Uh, yeah, because, uh, I think health apps is at the core of what we do is like, we help users drive motivation because at the end of the day it's like the user eats, sleeps, exercises, and our job is to influence them to make good choices and feel good about how it was. But at the end of the day the user is the one that eats. And I think there is like, what we do is sort of drive motivation.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a huge piece of it.

Speaker C: Yeah. Um, I was going to ask about mental health. Um, it's obviously a massive, I mean it's been described as an epidemic now, mental health epidemic. How does kind of the things that you do @lifesum interact with, with mental health?

Speaker A: I think what we do with lifesum interacts more with mental health than what most mental health things actually do. Because, and I think in science and healthcare you see like metabolic psychiatry is super interesting where people like to define wellness as like you have 1/4 nutrition, 1/4 exercise, 1/4 sleep, and then you have 1/4 listening to relaxation tapes or something which has been sort of, that's mental health. But I think what you eat is sort of the super lever. We don't think we're 1/4. We're the entry point of all things with health. It's like we make nutrition makes you sleep better, it makes you lift heavier weights, run faster, be more alert at work, get more like, get more balanced mentally through sort of blood sugar and cortisol control and things like that. I think what we do with nutrition, nutrition does more for mental health than most things. I wouldn't say most things, but a lot of things that are sort of packaged at Mental Health helpers is like control your blood sugar, then your mood will be better. More in our field, you have sort of consumerization of health where a lot of things that were previously within clinical health are becoming accessible for consumers. And this is part of sort of the biomarkers, but you also have the longevity movement where there's been like a hunt for a long time. People have been talking about preemptive care and things like that, but then no one has wanted to go to a preemptive care place and no one has wanted to engage because it hasn't felt fun. There's like Four Seasons would not open, like come down to our preemptive care room. It's like no one would come there. But then what now, like, preemptive care has finally found its brand. Where I think with. Through the longevity movement, where longevity movement has gone also from sort of not only focusing on sort of lifespan to more centering on sort of health span, that there's no point in like, I want to be 200 years old, but actually sort of live life to the fullest as long as it goes. And I think, I, uh, think this is great because it's like people want to engage in things that they can have as a dinner topic. And I think we use the analogy of like, especially with longevity is of no one wants to go to preemptive care resort, but people flood to longevity clinics because that's cool. And you want to. And you can talk about it. It's trivia. You, you can talk about at the dinner table where sort of taking responsibility of your health has become like the new Rolex Watch of society. And uh, I think this is sort of. And this is great because it's like, how do we fuel. How do we fuel this for users? Because it leaves better outcomes for our users. And of course the longevity movement has sort of the extremes, but I think it's not about the extremes anymore. It's like making it accessible for normal people. And it's not about sort of stem cell transfusions or plasma Washington or things like that.

Speaker B: I assume those things have a kind of rate of diminishing returns. Right? Like, you have to imagine that the longevity movement, there's an 80:20 rule where the majority of it is the basics. It's eating well, sleeping well, like you talked about. And then like all those other stuff. I mean, I don't know anything about this, but I would guess that all that other stuff with the plasma transfusions and like the crazy stuff probably gets you the last couple of percentage points, right? Like.

Speaker A: Or it kills you because. No, because the science was only done on rats and not think it's like longevity movement started with sort of biohacking super enthusiasts, but then it's been embraced by the market and sort of popularized and changed from sort of the extremes to becoming something more accessible and getting ingrained in sort of people's identity that is something that sort of. You're doing it for longevity reasons. It's like, um, instead of. I'm doing it as a preemptive care measure, and it just sounds semi sick. It's just like, if you see how the changes of how mental health has developed over the last couple of years, where, uh, sort of now it's gone from, like, dealing with mental health problems to optimizing and improving your mental health, has become something that is sort of cool to do.

Speaker C: Yeah, M. Yeah, it's definitely, definitely changed.

Speaker B: Um, that was really interesting chat.

Speaker C: Is there any other things that you want to make sure we get in now?

Speaker A: I don't know. You're the director. Direct me.

Speaker B: Cool. All right, then we can. I can have that be a wrap then.

Speaker A: Awesome.