Breaters Pitch from FI's October Online Demo Day

Hi everyone, I'm Stefano from Italy and I'm here to show you about BreatheRs. We are enabling emotional eaters take back their life through mindfulness. So which is the problem? There are in the world 1.8 billion of emotional eaters and 98% of them are failing or losing weight every year. Why they are they fail because they don't recognize emotion, they don't listen to their body, and they are heavily stressed. That's why we created a personalized coaching program based on mindfulness to help them lose weight in a joyful and lasting way. So we help them recognize emotion, listen to their body, and then reduce stress. Why we care? Because me and my co-founder In our first life, we were strongly obese, and then we lost weight, you know, thanks to a mindfulness approach in our life. That's why we created a product that is a structured program that can help people through inspiring content that we deliver every day to them. And we created a coaching support made through a live chat support and one-on-one expert talk, and a community support where we run weekly sharing class and an online community where the peer can feel comfortable to share their problem and their concern about their relationship with food. So how we make money? We are selling a B2C subscription plan, so our customer can try a 14 days of free trial full feature. After the free trial, they can choose which kind of the subscription they want to join, uh, being for every month, every 3 months, or every 6 months. And we launched our MVP in January this year, and since now we have reached 450 users, more than 120 customers, and now we have a monthly recurring revenue of €3,500. But most important things is that our customers are loving our product because they are truly changing their relationship with the food. And that is where it's amazing because so they are changing how they are living their life. And the success, it can be outlined because we have 90% of retention rate during the program, we have 75% of net promoter scores, and And for the customer that has already done more than 6 months of the program, most of— more of 50% of them, they are losing weight. That's why we are doing great and we have a low customer acquisition cost because people love our product. They love how we tackle the problem and how we try to solve them. After this success with the end customer, we are starting a clinical trial thanks to two great partners with a university in Italy and a public clinic, clinical hospital, to understand how much is the impact of our protocol on people with eating disorder. So how we are, we are marketing our solution. Our first approach has been B2C, so we are making some paid advertising through Facebook, and we are starting with Google AdWords, YouTube, and Instagram, promoting content marketing and retargeting, and then promoting a referral strategy to help people to know that there is this solution that is going to work. And now we are going— in October, we are going to start another distribution channel. It's a B2B2C, thanks to a value-added services platform here in Italy that could help us to reach more than 700,000 potential customers. The team is made by me, I'm Stefano, CEO and co-founder, and Nick, ex-obis and engineer. And they worked with more than 10 startups. And Giorgio is a program architect and a co-founder too. He's a mindfulness counselor, and in his life he worked with more than 500 people with eating disorders. And we are supported with, um, with Lorenzo for a digital strategist marketing to help us to reach our customers. And then we set up a scientific advisor made by Vincenzo and Francesca, both psychotherapists and with a mindfulness this approach. We are now in fundraising, so we are looking for €200K to improve our growth in Italy, to test new markets. The first one will be in English-speaking UK and USA, and then improve product development, trying to reach €2.4 million of revenue by the end of 2021. Thank you so much. This is Breathers.

Great job. Thanks, Stefano. That was amazing. You know, as I start with everybody, you know, it'd be really nice if you'd give us a little bit more context on why you were doing this. I know you covered this earlier in your deck and you showed kind of like the screenshots there, but can you go into a little bit more detail about how you came up with this idea and why you're doing this?

Yeah. All the projects start from the experience from me and my co-founder. We were, as you have seen, We were strongly obese, so we were having some trouble in our life, and we figured— we found a way to understand how to limit our compulsion into the relationship with food, try to make a break and to be free to choose what to eat and when to eat, try to make the choices that could be better for ourselves. And I was helped by a friend of mine. She's a mindfulness psychotherapist. She starts to send to me any day some kind of messages. And so we recreated what happened to me and my co-founder in our real life. And because we want to help people like us to change their life, actually. We went through many problems with many suffering and We truly believe that with this kind of approach, we can enable people to transform their life, to achieve the better version of themselves. Because for us, it's been the same. We transform our life, actually. Now I am 60 kilograms less than 7 years ago. It's better, actually. And so our mission is to help people like us. There is a lot of people suffering from their emotional relationship. With food and try to help them to get the, to have the right tools to change their life.

Well, I wanna congratulate you on that. That's a really big achievement. Why do you believe the time is now for Breeders? You know, there's a lot, you know, the weight loss industry has been around for a very long time and there's certainly lots of other companies in this space. Why do you think the time is now for this type of approach?

So the time is now. I mean, for the weight management market, it's always the right time because unfortunately it's a growing market all over the world with double digits. But I think that it's the right time for our approach because first of all, everyone outside there has already tried something that didn't work because 98% of them has already failed. So they have already tried something that didn't work, as a diet or pills or a gym. And there is an increasing, a huge increasing market of well-being and wellness requests from the market, where people try to understand better how they can help themselves, love themselves, and make something good for themselves. And, um, the everything based on mindfulness. Let me think about app like a Headspace or Calm. So there is a huge request about self-help. And what we are trying to give to our client that is very, very different from our competitors, and there are many, many apps, many services, many programs all around the world, in the US, but even in Italy, what we are doing very, very different, we are talking about the emotional relationship with food. So we are talking about the roots of the problem and we are giving the right tool to the people to find their own solution of the problem. There is not one solution for all. There is not one diet for all. And, um, that's the, the big differences between our competitor and why now is the moment, because there is a huge request about different approach, more introspective and sometimes more spiritual.

Uh, Jay asked the question that's, that's related to the, the question I generally ask at this point too, is like kind of why do you think you have high growth potential And Jay asked the questions like, how do you plan to scale to different geographies and things like that? So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, so we started in Italy and the program is in Italian. So we are 60 million people. So it's obviously too small to grow. And what we are doing now, we are setting up and that's why we are even fundraising to create an English version. So to target English-speaking market. This is our first goal for, you know, with fundraising to go in that market. The first one would be UK, USA. And for us, it takes, I mean, it's a content-based solution, but it takes not more than one month to go into another language market because we have created a great partnership agreement with one of the biggest institutions about mindful eating that can help us to spread the word all around the world in a you know, such with not too much effort. So we are planning first of all to go into the English-speaking market and then Spanish-speaking market.

Uh, there's a question, uh, and I believe I'm pronouncing this right, his name's, uh, her, his or her name is Marku. Who are you, your coaches and how are they vetted?

So now my coach is my co-founder and, uh, actually they, our preferred coaches would be coaches and psychotherapists with a mindful students' background, okay? And we are closing partnership here in Italy and again in UK and USA with institution that are training this kind of psychotherapies or coaching to join our program as a coach. Actually, we are— the most important thing is that we don't need so too much human effort in this time because we can handle more than 1,000 clients with only one coach. And, um, so we are already setting up and working about how to grow in terms of clients and coaching support.

Final question here, uh, from the chat rooms: how do you plan to fight the risk of, uh, you know, existing businesses? And an example that's here is MyFitnessPal. Introducing similar type of support for their user bases?

So actually a lot of solutions on the market are do-it-yourself solutions and not coaching solutions. And so we prevent them. First of all, we are trying to create a great community support. We are working a lot with them, with the, with the community, because we believe that there is another way to help people each other, and our approach, it makes it more valuable. So our community, first of all, is one of the much important resource for us when there are some competitors. And actually, again, the differences between, like, MyFitnessPal, that there, there are a lot of apps that are saying to do what to do to lose weight. We are having a different approach. We are enabling to, to understand which is the best better way for you to lose weight. And in terms of introspection and understand better which is your right path.

Understood. Thank you so much, Stefano. This is great. For everyone in the chat room and everyone that's going to be watching the recording, please take a look at breeders.com if you'd like to learn more. Thank you, Stefano. Appreciate you.