Breaking Inertia 🛫

The story of our shortcomings, and how we shifted gears to drive us closer towards our vision.

5 min readJun 9, 2021

We’ve been quiet at Wellnest for a while. For the first time since we started on our v1 build in March of last year, we took a step back to reflect on our progress.

We set out to build an app that helps people feel more at peace with their thoughts. We wanted to achieve this with three core values:

Pride, personalization, and play (our 3P’s)

Pride has been fundamental to Wellnest since day one — it’s in our voice, our brand, our illustrations, our characters, even in our prompts. Pride is deeply important to us because we’ve always been most worried about those who struggle silently with their mental health. These are often the people hurting the most, but receiving the least help. If we can give our members more pride in their mental health journey, we can expect to see more conversations around it, and in turn destigmatize the issue to those who feel silenced.

Personalization should make Wellnest feel uniquely yours. We felt this lacking in consumer mindfulness apps (and most apps in general) — we believe that the more you use software, the more signs of use it should have. Not only does this give users more agency over their experience, but it should also heighten feelings of comfort and safety.

Play is what makes us who we are. Our first experiences with mental health involved sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent lights with someone we’ve never met before. Mental health is hard enough to talk about, and we believe good outlets should be approachable, light-hearted, and ultimately, playful.

While our values are unique, we felt that our app resembled many others. There’s something to be said about having every mindfulness app downloaded on our phones. Not to say that we weren’t proud of what we had built — we were very proud of it — we just felt like we had hit a local maxima. I remember when Spencer Peterson told me that journaling apps consistently hit a ceiling — how would we be any different?

We sat with this thought. We had just raised our first round of funding, landed two university partnerships, found thousands of excited users, and even had employees at Google internally testing our app for their wellness program. Externally things were working but internally we felt stuck — the founding team only used the app sparingly at this time.

Fast-forward two weeks, I checked in with a group that had been using Wellnest as a complement to their support group. Someone brought up that they had just unlocked the wizard (our most expensive avatar), and upon hearing this, their colleague said something like:

“What!! That’s insane. How much do you journal?? I only have the baker but I’ve been saving up for the wizard.”

Now this may sound stupid, but it was special to me. Two people I had never met before were remarking about which little avatar they had in our app. I rushed to tell our team afterwards and they were thrilled. I witnessed first-hand pride at play from our users, and it felt incredible.

Unfortunately, very few of our users behaved like this. Instead, we were often called the “Headspace for journaling,” which was flattering, but Headspace built their product with very different values than us.

That’s when we started having many late nights, tirelessly piecing together our learnings to better shape our future. We came up with over a hundred ideas as to where we could take things. Most of them were bad. But there was one common concept in a lot of them — games. Video games played a major role in all of our lives. With a majority of our user base being 16–24, it was likely that many of them would agree (87% of Gen Z plays video games after all).

Mounting research around video games’ effects in treating major mental health issues like PTSD, anxiety, and depression meant there was foundation for us to explore. We discovered a niche of spatial, mindful experiences with raving reviews and tight-knit communities (if you’re curious, check out Kind Words, Playne, and #SelfCare). All of these experiences felt like games, but weren’t, and I would elaborate more but John Palmer has already written incredible words on this. In short, gameful experiences are emerging in every market, from learning to socializing to SaaS. Some of the design paradigms we really loved were:

Immersive spaces

The feeling of being lost in a game, existing in an alternate reality, lucid dreaming

Sense of togetherness

Knowing other players exist within a space, confined by similar rules, with similar goals and objectives

Slow-by-design

Enabling people to spend the appropriate amount of time to truly engage with what they are doing

Control over destiny

Seeing the best version of yourself, knowing it’s possible to achieve anything with the proper time and dedication

We iterated on dozens of ways to utilize game design to immerse our users in Wellnest. We built a scrappy MVP and put it on TestFlight within two weeks. We invited our power users and ran focus groups every day. We set up a Discord server for feedback and welcomed a few hundred members to it over the course of a month. Ultimately, we found that a spatial experience was the perfect medium for us to achieve our values: pride, personalization, and play.

“The collective experience of a virtual environment, especially environments with 3D avatars, provides significant social-emotional benefits.”
- Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab

All of this has led us to where we are now. We call it a digital garden of your life. Reflect and capture the moments that matter, and plant them in a world of your own.