Startup Spotlight: Joina

Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness and wellness startups that use Terra, to share their wisdom from their own journey to success and also where they see fitness data going in the future.

In this Spotlight, we connected with Leonie Sterner Sazesh, CEO & founder of Joina, the social platform that turns your health journey into a game. Leonie founded Joina with her husband after working in the health and fitness industry and realising that people have nowhere to turn to when they lose motivation for exercising. Read more below about how she started Joina and what sort of challenges she's overcome!

Describe your company:

Leonie Sterner Sazesh (LSS): Joina is a social platform that turns your health journey into a game - through achievable goals, gamification, challenges and rewards

How did you come up with the idea?

LSS: Me and my co-founder (and husband) both worked in the health and fitness industry as coaches and personal trainers and struggled with the fact that most people are great at staying accountable to their healthy habits when they are motivated, but there is nowhere to turn to when motivation is lost. We wanted to find a solution for that.

How did you turn your idea into a company?

LSS: We truly believed in our idea and decided to bootstrap with our own money. We contacted an IT consultant firm and started working with them to create the design for the app and then another company helped us to develop our first MVP. We launched the app Sep 2019 and since then a lot of things have happened, we now have developers in-house and a much better app and we have done our first round with angel investors.

What have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced so far?

LSS: Oh wow! There have been so many I don't even know where to start. The biggest challenge was in the beginning to get the app approved and to figure out our business model because it was not good at first. But challenges will come all the time and I think we still have a lot of big challenges ahead of us.

How are you using health data?

LSS: For us it is really important that our challenges are measurable and validated and since they are about tracking steps, health data is really important.

What do you think are the current gaps in health data today?

LSS: I believe smartwatches are often too expensive for underrepresented groups so I believe the cost of these devices is too high. That leaves lower-income groups excluded from the ability to track their health and from research studies that use wearable data.

What do you think is the future of this space?

LSS: I think that in the future we will be able to track a lot more, get more accurate data and with AI get advice on how to improve our health through our wearable devices.

Anything else we should write about?

LSS: Joina is currently only for Sweden but we are planning to expand to new markets in the near future so stay tuned!