A brand new iOS social wellness app referred to as Exist desires to assist middle-aged customers 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 foremost characteristic is social journaling. The concept behind the app’s social and community-driven journaling is to assist folks heal collectively, somewhat than alone. Exist additionally incorporates a each day temper tracker, audio workouts, 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 and marketing 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 obtained to speaking about concepts for a psychological well being app — a subject they have been each obsessed with, Waldner stated in an interview with TechCrunch.
Waldner had attended a sequence of group psychological wellness experiences, and had heard from individuals who have been seeking to have these types of community-based experiences at house. Jardim and Waldner got down to create an app that will 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 typical 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 incorporates a TikTok-like feed that permits customers to swipe by means of a mixture of movies and textual content posts that includes folks’s public journals and their responses to each day prompts. Customers can share feedback on these posts to share comparable experiences or provide help and recommendation.
“The largest characteristic that makes us totally different is the neighborhood aspect,” Waldner stated. “Headspace and Calm proved that there’s this audio-based market, however folks nonetheless really feel very alone in these experiences and in actual life, folks meditate after which they journal, however that’s a solo expertise. And what we did was make {that a} social expertise. So as a substitute of journaling all of your ideas and emotions at house and placing it beneath your mattress at evening, you’re sharing it with the world, and persons are commenting again.”
Exist additionally options an AI-powered query characteristic that prompts customers to increase on their journals and discover extra of their ideas and emotions. Waldner says the characteristic is supposed to assist folks unravel their points and permit them to suppose deeper about one thing.
The neighborhood and social journaling points of Exist are free. If customers need entry to guided audios and meditations, they want to enroll in the app’s $5.99 month-to-month subscription.
When it comes to the long run, the startup desires to proceed leaning into the human connection facet of Exist and search for means to enhance it. Exist additionally desires so as to add extra options round logging your sleeping habits and feelings, together with extra personalised prompts for journals.
