Blawesome Founder Jennifer Kruidbos: Wellness Web3 Creators & Communities

My name is Dustin Betts. Welcome everybody to this Founder Institute livestream. I'm a community manager at Founder Institute and I'm joined here today by Jennifer Krudebusch. She's the founder of Blossom, which is an FI Toronto portfolio company that's providing a Web3 space for wellness creators and their communities. Jennifer Krudebusch, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me, Dustin. I'm really excited to chat today.

Yeah, excited to learn about Blossom. So before we dive into your company, the first question I always like to ask our founders first is to please just tell us a little bit about your own startup story. You know, what were the experiences of yours, whether professional or personal, that led you to founding this, uh, platform for digital wellness communities?

Mhm. My background is in wellness. So before Blossom, I built and ran a corporate wellness business helping thousands of people in schools and offices and hospitals feel better. It was primarily in real life, and the inspiration for Blossom came from when I was helping teens with eating disorders at the Montreal Children's Hospital. I was going in weekly and teaching sessions to them, and I started receiving hundreds of questions from families and even medical staff about where to find really good, reliable wellness content, wellness creators for in between the sessions because the sessions were going really well. And I have so many wellness creators that I love. On traditional platforms, and I could have sent them there. But meanwhile, every week the teens were telling me that these traditional platforms had negatively contributed to their mental health, to their confidence, and ultimately had, had, you know, contributed to their eating disorder. So that was the moment where I was like, okay, has, has someone built a solution and there wasn't one. So that's when we ultimately started Blossom, which in its first, um, iteration— and it's changed as companies do— was to really create like a healthy, safe wellness, um, content platform.

Yeah, that definitely— yeah, makes sense. I think, uh, 100% with, um, yeah, especially eating disorders specifically, that tends to be grounded in like the traditional social platforms. So Yeah, really inspiring to hear a story that's, yeah, really, really rooted in like your personal experience with the in-person sessions that you were doing. So yeah, very interesting. Now I know a little bit about Blossom because you're a Founder Institute company, that it's, yeah, for wellness creators and communities to grow and create the culture together. But please give us kind of your short pitch version for those who are totally unfamiliar with it. What is Blossom?

Yeah, the short pitch version is that Blossom is the first Web3 wellness creator market network. And what we do is we help wellness creators grow, manage, and monetize their communities by offering them practice management tools and tokenized communities.

Very cool. Yeah, I want to dive into like all of the different facets and details to that. So I guess like putting this in the problem-solution framework, you know, the, the so-called creator creator economy, which is really where you're living, it's kind of really starting to come into its own now, I feel like within the last year. Yeah, and your focus at Blossom's all about wellness creators and their communities specifically. Kind of frame for us the whole scope of challenges. You touched on it sort of in the introduction, but the scope of challenges in the emerging online wellness world, you know, what are those challenges for creators in this space? Like, what are they missing? Aside from, as you said, like these platforms that have like negative externalities and moving the users away from that, but like on the creator's side, yeah, what is the scope, I guess, of the challenges that you're trying to address?

Yeah, so to make the impact that we want to make, we realized pretty quickly that to do that was to really serve the people who have dedicated their lives to creating wellness content. And I, and I was one of those people for many years, so I really, um, knew the challenges and, and the problem. So for, for a creator, any creator, wellness creator, um, platforms like YouTube and Instagram, like, they paved the way for sure, you know. They gave them this opportunity to share their ideas and practices, um, with their communities. But these platforms were not built for creators to grow their businesses. Their models are more attention economy, ad-driven. So what ends up happening— and these are what the wellness— we did over 100 interviews one-on-one with wellness creators, and the themes kept emerging that they're battling content. You have a meditation teacher or a nutritionist sharing their practices and tools alongside celebrities, you know, and all different types of content. And because of the nature of these platforms and it's grabbing your attention, what ends up rising to the top is content that's kind of like watered down. I think, you know what I'm talking about? It kind of hooks you in. Discover pages do that even more. And not to say there's not a place for that. I mean, I like following what Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson are doing. You know, that there's a place for it. But for these wellness creators that have like 100 people, let's say, whose lives would be changed by their specific life experience, skill set, tool set, it's not ideal. So, the problem, one of the problems that Blossom is solving for them is creating this very curated specific place where they can go and they know their customers and clients are there. And they can serve them with both free content, which is just short-form free video content, is, is part of our world right now, and, and it's a powerful way to connect with people. And also we built in those other tools of courses and containers, and I can go into that more, but that was the main problem there. Like, we just want a place where we're not like constantly afraid if our, if our account's gonna get deleted, which has happened to, to creators, that we're— there's a, there's a whole new way to show up in the algorithm, and now we have to do a dance and like some people love dancing, that's fine, you know, but not everyone does. And why are they having to like kind of meet the demands of the platform that they're ultimately providing all the value to with their content? So we put the power back in the hands of the creator.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of tensions with the different, you know, I don't wanna say necessarily performative nature all the time with the different platforms, but yeah. And as you said, just the algorithms and having to, tailor your content to the platform specifically, it might be negatively impacting ultimately what they really want, the creator really wants to deliver in their content. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, let's dive more into kind of the solution side. So you've mentioned the term Web3 and tokenization for these wellness creators. Yeah, tell us more about that. And also for the non-creator, your community members, how does Blossom deliver a unique, like, platform experience for them. So if you can talk to it, you know, on both sides, that would be great.

Yeah, on both sides. Maybe I'll start with the non-creator community member who's looking for the wellness content, because that was a— that's a huge population of people. There's like 64 million monthly searches for wellness-related content, and people don't know where to find it. Um, Googling can lead to, you know, various websites, but you don't— you can't— there's not a place where you can connect with a wellness creator again through short-form video to really get a feel. It's quite personal if you're going to hire someone for like nutrition or your relationship or your weight. It is personal. So, um, that was the piece we wanted to create. And then the trustworthiness, because people know, like, I want to try but I'm not sure. So simple things that exist in many different examples in other industries with ratings and testimonials. And we kept asking ourselves, how can we make the customer have a very easy search experience and feel confident to buy something because they can read reviews and so on? Now, on the creator side, and you asked about Web3, we were thinking about tokens for many years. My co-founder and CTO you know, has been into Bitcoin since it was worth $100. And it's something we were thinking about, but we didn't want to take on the burden alone of all of this education and all of this new paradigm shift. So we were watching the market and seeing, okay, when is this starting to really, like, let's say, the critical mass or the tipping point into becoming more mainstream? And then we definitely saw that happen in 2021 with NFTs and lots of visual artists and musicians and bands really starting to create, um, non-fungible tokens and tokenized communities. And I'm more than happy to explain what that means for Blossom if, if that would help. But we saw that this was the way to really make it possible so a creator can like have 100 fans and they can like make a sustainable career and continue to create really valuable content with, with like a small group of people that just love what they do.

Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, that's a, it's a good timing thing because like you said, like it's the, I guess the creator economy that's leveraging this kind of blockchain or tokenization is coming into its own. So you don't have to do quite as much educating maybe now. I'm sure there's, you know, there's still lots of educating to do in this space, but people are generally, especially tech savvy people who are probably your early adopters are like somewhat familiar, but do you wanna kind of dive in a little bit more? I mean, so what in terms of ownership does your tokenization kind of allow for your creators? And you mentioned sort of some numbers around it, like having 100 core followers or something. Do you wanna explain any more about the nitty-gritty of that tokenization aspects for the creators?

Yeah, I will. And you're absolutely right. You know, our wellness creators, they're not gamers, they're not like tech guys. A lot of them are women and a lot of them you know, are what you would imagine, a fitness trainer, a nutritionist. They're not necessarily like reading TechCrunch and staying all up to date with this stuff. But what they are is very innovative. They're risk takers. You know, they want to learn, they want to be on the cutting edge. They're a little bit rebellious, just like founders, right? Just like entrepreneurs. They're founders in their own right. So when we started presenting it to them back in November and we started doing gatherings and starting to educate them, they're like, we don't really understand what a token is, but like, I want to understand. And like, there was this thirst and this excitement. And ever since then, like, our monthly gatherings have been growing and, and the excitement's growing. So to give you an example of how, let's say, like, a meditation teacher could use a token for their community, let's say I'm a meditation teacher. You can buy my token. When you buy it, you get maybe that gives you access to certain events in real life. Maybe that gives you events to special lectures or talks I've given really explaining how to meditate, because like no one really understands. They sort of want to, but it's kind of vague, and they tried and it's hard. Um, or really transformational pieces of content. But what's really cool— and, and that's been done, and, and, you know, people, people do that— but what's really interesting about the tokenized aspect of it is that those first few people that buy my token, as my business grows, as I grow in influence and popularity, the value of that token goes up. Sort of like how an investor would buy— would invest, right, early on in a company, and then they benefit from the upside. Well, these early fans or clients, you know, of, of, um, of the creator, they also benefit as the token increases in value. So what happens is two really positive things. One is that these community members like sort of benefit from like doing something that's healthy in our case, right? It's all wellness related, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual wellbeing. And the second thing is that they are incentivized to market and share the creator. Usually in any industry, if there's someone who's like really good and changing your life, you sort of, you want to talk about it anyways. But now there's actually a financial incentive. So for the wellness creator, let's say me as the meditation teacher, like I can just really focus on delivering like amazing life-changing content, experiences, events to my core fans. And that is also working as marketing. I mean, it always has, you know, value-add marketing has been around for a long time, but it's in a very like direct monetized way. And I'm not having to think of like, am I showing up in all of these places and dancing and grabbing people's attention as much?

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You use the word that I was gonna say, which is like incentive, but it's really, 'cause there's a lot of good incentives and bad incentives in the world. And yeah, so it's this kind of tokenization allows you to structure the incentives in such a way that it really reinforces the community aspects of what these wellness creators are ultimately, you know, trying to do in building their brand and building a core community. Around themselves. So yeah, really, really cool. The next question I want to ask you about is sort of social impact. Obviously, you know, a buzzword in the startup space, but I think is very applicable for what you're doing at Blossom. Talk to us about how you as a founder think about, you know, building and measuring at scale, like wellness as an outcome for your business, or how you conceptualize social impact and how you're thinking about it at Blossom.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, there's two ways. One is, you know, the theme we keep returning to: the more that wellness creators can build sustainable businesses, and ultimately, again, they're like raison d'être, their, their, their dedication in life is to help people. So the more that they're taken care of and they're able to have a sustainable business, that is going to ripple out. And then of course, we're also there is an AI component into Blossom as well, which there's so much to talk about in a business, but that actually will be measuring very simple mood tracking, like how they feel from using the amount of minutes they're spending on Blossom. And the hope and the goal down the road is that we'll be able to measure and build the technology so that, you know, after 15 minutes on Blossom, feeling more calm, feeling more confident, feeling more easeful like that.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I like how you talk to, yeah, the creator side as well as the community side of it because, yeah, I mean, I don't know to what degree you would like measure, but you could presumably like glean some kind of learnings from your communities about, you know, I don't know which creators are having like the most positive impact in some way, which might be really interesting for you at Blossom HQ to kind of have that overview of what kinds of content and what kinds of creators are really making like a really big tangible, measurable difference in the lives of their community members. So that's super interesting. Yeah, all these Web3 tie-ins, it's a very fertile space, I think, to experiment and have that kind of, yeah, experimental learning mindset. Very, very interesting. Are there other key features? I mean, feel free to go down the rabbit hole as much or as little as you want, but are there any key features of Blossom we haven't talked about yet or that you want to highlight here on either the creator side or the user community side?

Yeah, I'll talk about, uh, two that I'm really excited about. One is the micro lesson, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's like a short course, and I love it for so many reasons. Um, there's, there's— first of all, I'm, I'm sure we've all had that experience of like buying a 16-hour course and then just kind of drop off after 3 or 4 hours. And that, like, I've done that before, like many times. And so the micro lesson is you can have a max of 12 modules, and each module is a maximum of 10 minutes. So this is so fantastic for the person taking the micro lesson because it's really going to be distilled down the most, you know, potent teachings, and it's going to be a maximum of 2 hours. And most creators don't fill the whole time, might be 90 minutes. And then for the wellness creator, it's a really friendly piece of like on-demand content that you sell, you know, as an information product, it's really, uh, it's less intimidating to make than a whole like 20-hour course. So for a lot of our wellness creators, like, we are helping them a lot. A lot of our like first adopters, they are— they have a strong like one-on-one practice, master classes, but they've never made something on demand. And then they're just like loving the micro lesson so much. They can, um, because it's shorter too, it's, it's usually at an affordable price point. So it's that nice little bridge between free content and paid content, as it's all about building trust and relationships, right? Like, I know with some of the creators that I've followed over the years, it was like I went to one event and then I bought this one thing, and then, you know, deepening that relationship over, over months and years. Um, so micro lessons, I, I absolutely love. And, and, uh, because video content, it's like, it's a whole thing, right? Even now there's like the lighting, and we tested the sound, and then maybe the power goes out, or like your kid comes in the room. So, um, that's made it a lot easier for creators to make something that they can, they can sell. And we've also made containers because groups, sort of like, you know, the easiest way for people to understand it is like a Facebook group. And they love that. That's, that was something that our, in our interviews, the creators like, we want this because we want to get off, get off of Facebook. You know, our people are, especially the younger ones, like, they're like My community isn't even there anymore. And one of our creators, she has an amazing story of recovery. Her name is Ginny Burton. You can Google her. She's the, the way that she like turned her life around from the prison system and homelessness and is now dedicated to helping people in those populations. She has a huge Facebook group with thousands of people and she says it's not really ideal for me because I'm not really like monetizing it and it's not really ideal for my community either. And I have to say, not to say that creators like have not done amazingly well using the tools that exist. They do amazingly well. They're, they're resourceful and resilient and creative, but we've just made it easier. So for someone like Ginny that has thousands of people simply monetizing like a $2 or $5 a month, um, for the content, for all the Q&A, for all the lives that she does. That's really powerful for, for someone like her to be able to keep focusing on what she loves, which is helping people, inspiring them, helping them change their lives around. And it's really accessible for someone that, that wants to make that change but maybe doesn't have the resources to hire a therapist or a coach one-on-one. Um, so I'm really— those are, those are just two of many features that I'm super excited about.

Yeah, well, and I love that the two different features that you described, or the way you described them, it sort of speaks to somebody who's a more established creator on the traditional platforms as well as— I really liked what you said with the micro lessons— somebody who is not currently a digital creator, more like you said, offering like a traditional, like, one-to-one kind of, um, uh, service. Yeah, I think it can be very intimidating to say, oh, now you're going to be— enter this digital creator economy, and, you know, you gotta like video, uh, create video for all of these things you would previously do and kind of one-to-one interactions. Yeah, the micro lessons, it seems much more approachable to like come onto the platform and build something that's contained, like you said, in, you know, a small number of like short lessons. And then in contrast, your other creator you were talking about specifically who like has this community, but it's not really working like in the platform space to bring it in. So example of, you know, both sides, somebody who is a wellness, more one-to-one and just becoming a digital creator or somebody who is already a digital creator, but the existing like platform platform solutions aren't exactly ideal. Yeah, Blossom offers solutions for both of those and the features that you talked about, which, that's great. It seems like it's grabbing.

Yeah, so it's so clear. I love how you re-explain that. So it's such a good reflection. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So thanks. Yeah. My next question is to ask you to make a prediction, like to make founders go out on a limb. And so the question is just how do you envision technology ultimately helping people to achieve greater wellness in the next 5 to 10 years and feel free to speak to that more generally or like in the Web3 sense. Yeah. How is technology from where you're sitting changing most in impacting people's wellness?

Yeah, this excites me so much because especially like to your point, the Web3 piece is like we're taking this really like human-focused or creator-focused kind of like spirit of like Web 1 before all these big platforms that became kind of unhealthy. And now we're kind of going back to that, but with all of this like really advanced technology. So just that piece alone, the power of like finding your people that was like alive in the, in the like early internet, so powerful. And then also the combination of like physical experiences and these digital experiences that we're starting to see working with senses. We're starting to see really cool things with chromotherapy and its impact on well-being, and then even movement spaces and movement practices in the metaverse. And that is one thing that we're, you know, as processors and stabilizers get better, that is one thing that we're headed towards with Blossom Body, which will be our movement, yoga, like HIIT exercise offering in the metaverse and just dreaming about how amazing that experience can be and how it can work with the senses. I think, I think that, I think we're going to see that. We're not there yet, but it's definitely coming and it's really exciting.

That is exciting. I really love that vision because it's a bit outside the box, which is what makes for a great prediction. Yeah, the chromotherapy aspect in the metaverse and just how people will interact in the physicality. Yeah. Yeah. So 100%, love that prediction. That's something that's really interesting and I think great foresight. What advice would you offer for somebody who's very early stage? And I know you're still on your founder journey too, so sometimes this question can be difficult, but to rewind back to even before where you are now, just an aspiring entrepreneur, somebody just getting started, what's something that you've learned that you would impart on a new founder on their journey?

Oh yeah, I can, I can definitely, because even though it's like a shortish time, it's like being a founder is like a time warp. It's like hyper-learning. You learn so much so quickly, right? Um, do Founder Institute. I cannot recommend this enough. I started just July, so that's under a year ago, and just, it just made me such a better business person, founder. The community— I found advisors through that community, friends, hit milestones with just confidence and precision like I never had before. Do Founder Institute. I cannot recommend it enough.

It's an unsolicited testimonial, but super appreciated.

I mean, I'm truly, truly such a fan. It's truly life-changing for someone like me. And I would say the second thing that I remind myself weekly is that The kind of rollercoaster of emotions is not a sign that you're doing it wrong or that you're doing anything wrong. That is, that is like inherent to the founder journey. So when that happens, when stress arises or, or nervousness or fear or frustration, all of these things, that's like, oh, I'm doing this right. If I was feeling like calm and at ease all the time, um, you're probably not, you're probably not on your founder journey. So just know that that's normal, that's part of it.

Yeah, yeah, you have to be emotionally invested to really be all in, and so therefore you are going to experience emotional highs and lows. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and is good advice for people to keep in mind. Final question that I have for you is, where is Blossom headed next? I believe that you're going to be visiting the Bay Area for Startup Grind, so people might be able to catch you there, but any news or updates to share with the Foundry Institute community or asks for the audience who might be watching?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've been working with our close cohort of, like I said, our super wellness creator users and building a lot of features in stealth mode for like the last like 9 months almost. So that's going to be coming out in about a month. And I want to, you know, I'm not going to tell you too much, but keep your, keep your eye out for that and for all our creators launching their offerings. I'm like, oh, I just think about it, I'm so excited. Um, so that, that is coming. And yes, I will be at Startup Grind. So I mean, if you're going, you know, reach out to me on Twitter or here or on LinkedIn, um, connect with me. I'd love to see you. And really, the, the ask is like, if you are passionate about Web3 and wellness and the creator economy and all of the possibilities there, reach out to me because the creativity that comes from like-minded people is the best. So that's what you can do.

Yes. Spoken in a true community builder kind of aspect. So reach out to Jennifer if this resonates with you. Yeah, it's a great opportunity to collaborate in the platform that you're building. This has been super interesting for me, learning about tech and connectivity and Web3 and the new spaces and opportunities for wellness communities and their creators to kind of grow and create together. And yeah, we're all really looking forward to keeping up with Blossom and where you're headed next. Uh, Jennifer Kruidbos, thank you so much again for joining us.

Thank you, Dustin.