0:00Introduction

Welcome to Give It A Nudge. This week we have a good friend and a client of Nudge, Tim Veron from Vively. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, Steve.

I have known you through the club we are both members of. I do not think you were doing Vively at that time, or you were just starting it. Why don’t you give us a quick overview of what Vively is, how long you have been going, and where it came from.

2:00What is Vively

I am one of the co-founders of Vively. We are a metabolic health company that helps people understand how their diet and lifestyle is affecting their health through things like real-time continuous glucose monitoring and other wearables tracking.

A continuous glucose monitor is a small device that usually sits on the back of your arm. It sits just beneath the skin and measures the glucose in the fluid between your cells. It has been used in diabetes for the past few years but we are actually bringing it to a broader group of people in a prevention setting.

5:00Continuous glucose monitoring explained

By measuring your glucose in real time you are basically putting a finger on the pulse of your metabolic health system. Your metabolic functioning is your body’s ability to regulate glucose and convert inputs like food into energy and fuel for your body. No other wearable provides that sort of level of holistic information.

8:00Wellness versus prevention framing

We do not like to use the word prevention because there is a bit of cognitive dissonance with preventing something that might occur in ten or twenty years time. Health is more than just the absence of disease. It is about building health, growing health. We talk about it in terms of wellness. We focus on making the data actionable to help people achieve their short-term goals, whether that is losing weight, increasing energy, reducing fatigue, or improving their diet, sleep, and exercise.

11:00Tim’s background

I have always been obsessed with entrepreneurship and health. I was exposed to the health tech space through a local VC firm called Rightly Capital where health was part of our investment mandate. Then in early 2020 my co-founder Michael and I acquired a company called Natural Therapy Pages, which is the largest directory of allied and complementary health services in Australia. Thousands of nutritionists, naturopaths, chiropractors, physios, psychologists advertise on the platform and pay a subscription fee.

14:00Acquiring a losing business

We acquired it just as COVID hit. We were acquiring a company that had a couple of million dollars in revenue but was losing a million dollars a year. Our job immediately was to figure out how to make the business work. The company was owned by a larger business called Hi Pages that wanted to divest non-core assets. Michael and I were able to restructure the team and get the business to a profitable state within a few months of taking over.

17:00The name Vively

We actually acquired this name as part of acquiring Natural Therapy Pages. There was a whole bunch of domain names we got as part of that deal. We saw vively.com and thought it was interesting. We looked into the history and discovered that vively is actually an old word that has been removed from the dictionary. It meant two things: to see clearly, and to be full of life. So we are bringing it back from the dead.

19:00From NTP to Vively

Michael and I always wanted to solve a big problem in the health space. We knew Natural Therapy Pages was not going to be the way to do that, but it was a great entry point into the industry. Through the process of turning NTP around we got to understand the industry and one of the things that really stood out was chronic disease, specifically lifestyle-driven chronic disease. Type 2 diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome. The healthcare system does a great job at treating acute conditions but it has not been designed for disease that manifests over decades and is driven by daily choices and behaviours. We concluded we needed to create a new brand that went direct to consumer to empower people to take their health into their own hands.

22:00How the device works

The sensor is about 20-cent coin size, sits on the back of your arm, and there is a tiny filament like an acupuncture needle just below the skin. You cannot feel it, it is completely painless. It monitors your blood sugar levels and relays the data straight into our app. We also connect with Apple Health and Google Fit and pull all of your exercise data, sleep data, into the same spot. We are basically adding glucose monitoring to the existing toolkit consumers have for monitoring their health.

24:30Revenue and customer acquisition

We closed our pre-seed round at the end of last year, one and a half million dollars. We are very capital constrained so we have been forced to think about how to grow really efficiently and focus on unit economics. Our main acquisition channels are social platforms and Google. Over the last few months we have gone from zero to over 120,000 dollars in monthly revenue, trending over one and a half million dollars ARR. Our current objective is to get to a break-even position this year.

26:30The subscription model

We decided not to go down the monthly subscription path. We offer quarterly or annual subscriptions instead. A continuous glucose monitor lasts for two weeks. You actually do not need to measure your glucose continuously. You get so much data from two weeks of use that you need time to process that information, put some of it into practice, make some changes, and then do it again and compare to your baseline. The quarterly cycle really matches people’s motivation cycles. It also gives people a chance to take a break from technology.

28:30Future vision

There is a lot of opportunity within the current product set, building a really solid behaviour change tool that leads to better retention over time. But we are also thinking about how we get Vively into as many hands as possible. We have had so many practitioners, doctors, and dietitians reach out wanting to offer our products as part of their service or in their clinic. We would like to integrate into the healthcare system. Health funds are another option. The healthcare system has a wellness problem. It is really lacking in lifestyle and dietary medicine and we believe we can fill that gap.