Future of Fertility_Coupleness: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Future of Fertility_Coupleness: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Abby Mercado:
Hi, I'm Abby Mercado, an IVF mom, former VC investor, and CEO of Rescripted. Welcome to the Future of Fertility, a podcast dedicated to shining a light on the entrepreneurs and innovators who are changing the face of family building. With billions in funding over the past few years, we'll introduce you to the people, the ideas, and the businesses that are changing the fertility industry and in turn, millions of people's lives. The future of fertility is bright. Now let's get into it!

Abby Mercado:
Jenny Holström is the founder and CEO of Coupleness. Coupleness is a mobile app aimed to act as a common micro-diary for couples who want to communicate more with each other. Coupleness makes it easy for couples to take care of their relationships, creating a way for couples to be proactive and build positive habits in everyday life. Jenny's mission with Coupleness is simple, to reinvent love. At Rescripted, we focus on fertility and women's health. As such, we know full well that spending months and often years trying to conceive with your partner can leave a once healthy and loving relationship with much to be desired. Today, I'm so excited to dig in with Jenny as to why relationships are more important to our well-being than our social class, our careers, or our genetics. Thanks so much for joining me today, Jenny. Welcome!

Jenny Holström:
Thank you. What an intro. That's really.

Abby Mercado:
I literally took it straight from your LinkedIn profile. So you're the impressive one here, my friend.

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm super excited.

Abby Mercado:
Awesome, awesome. When we chatted, what, about six months ago about a partnership with Rescripted, and I was just so fascinated by your story and by your mission with Coupleness that I absolutely wanted to have you on to the podcast. So thanks again for joining. And let's start off by, I want to know who Jenny. Tell me about Jenny, born and raised. What did you do before this? Etc.

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, I'm super happy to talk about myself, even though that question is like one of the hardest one to answer. I think, you know where to start. But I grew up in, I'm from Sweden, I'm about 40 years old, I have two kids. I have a partner, Carl. We live in a house, I love gardening. And yeah, it's really my thing with gardening, it's like my happy place where I go to like when calm down and I'm all about gardening.

Abby Mercado:
How many years, how many months of the year can you garden in Sweden? It's a cold place, no?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, it's a really good question. This period, like from November until March-ish. I do a lot of planning.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Jenny Holström:
And then I spend at least, I would say one hour per day in my garden from like March, April until September.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, that sounds so therapeutic.

Jenny Holström:
... I think even more. I just love it. And my husband really likes gardening too, so it's a shared interest between the two of us, which is really nice. Talking about relationships.

Abby Mercado:
Totally, love it.

Jenny Holström:
Yeah. Assume that work-wise, I've been working with like, huge kind of challenges or issues to society. I've been working with climate, I've been working with kids consumption of pornography, I've been working with refugees, and now I'm working with relationships. And I would say relationships are maybe like the most, it's the area that is least, I would say, what word for that? Like the area that is based ... love and happiness into it. If we look at climate, refugees, pornography, even though I think refugees is a huge opportunity, it's such a sad situation they are in. And I think the response to the refugee crisis is not worthy like the Western world, how we treat refugees. So compared to relationships, a little bit more fun to work with relationships, it's more fun feelings into it. Even though my heart is really where the refugees are and how they have it.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, it seems, it's, it's hopeful. There's, there are answers to be had when it comes to us striving to have a healthy relationship. So I totally get that. So how did you, tell me a little bit how your interest in solving these little crises came to be? What was Jenny like as a little girl? What was your first job? Like how did you get so interested in this? Where did this come about?

Jenny Holström:
I think it's a combination of growing up with a dad who is, my dad is like 80. He's turning 84 this year. And in the 50s he traveled with the Swedish-American line with this big cruise ships throughout the world. And growing up, I heard all his stories about, like other countries, other people, other cultures. And then my mom, she worked with refugees. So quite early I had a kind of feeling that the world is bigger than my hometown, it's bigger than Sweden. And I wanted to explore. So I've been living overseas, I've been living in the US in Kentucky and I've been living in ... Yeah, yeah, I know all about the Southern hospitality and the Midwest and all that kind of stuff. But it's, yeah, I've been exploring and enjoying all the kind of good parts of traveling and living abroad. And in addition to that, I think that I have a lot of like empathy and care about other people and maybe sometimes more about others than myself. It's something I need to work on. So I think the kind of combination of like my parents and had really good teachers in school as well, and it's a mix of different things, I think, who led me to this path.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, love it. This is maybe jumping ahead a little bit. I love talking to founders who lay out so clearly that they feel like empathy is an important part of who they are and what they strive to be as a leader. So how does, tell me about empathetic leadership and why does it matter for you as a leader in this company to be an empathetic leader and to really prioritize empathy?

Jenny Holström:
I think if I wouldn't do it, it would be like hiding a huge part of myself. And I think people like that leadership, yhey like to work with me and, you know, who I am. But I think it can scare away some investors and maybe we talk about that later on, but.

Abby Mercado:
Yes.

Jenny Holström:
I think, in my leadership, I think that being transparent and honest with my own feelings and emotions and how I'm doing and what's stressing me and what's my excitement and my passion is a key thing for me. And in addition to that is really to listen and understand how people around me, how they feel and how they are doing and what is bothering them right now. And the opposite like what are they hoping for and so forth. So I think it's really being in tune with people.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, love it. So let's hop in to, to Coupleness what we're here to talk about, this amazing app that you and your team have created. So what was the tipping point in creating Coupleness? How did you come up with the idea and how did you take the leap to starting this company, the team?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, I'm happy to share that. I created a ... rights movement/organization before Coupleness. It's called Porn Free Childhood. I did it for a few years, and my youngest child was like, he was three months when I started that organization, maybe 2 or 3 years when I decided to leave. It was quite a journey. We started out as two moms just being annoyed by how pornography is kidnapping or hijacking our kids brains and how exposed are to pornography, and no one knows about it. No parents, no like politicians, not anyone, it's just like a secret world. So we started to do lobby work around this and quite quickly we got a lot of attention in Sweden. We were in all medias. We were working like day and night for 2 or 3 years, and it started to take a toll on my relationship. I just focused too much on my mission with this and forgot about taking care of, of my relationship. So it was an experience from that and I started to feel lonely and it was some other things that were mixed in. So I started to read a lot about loneliness in relationships and so forth and realized that there not much out there to support couples except for couples therapy. That was like my journey into Coupleness. Then I met my co-founder, Ted, and he had troubles with finding everyday time for his partner and sharing how they were doing and all that kind of stuff. Then we decided to do this journey together and then we got a lot of cool people with us.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. It's amazing how there are all of these different pieces of your life as a human that we prioritize. Our relationships, our our career, our friendships, and I just, I don't even know what the point of saying this is, but it's just so hard to find a balance in all of them, all of the things that make us whole people. And it's unfortunate as humans that one has to take off before realizing that we actually do lack balance. And it sounds like that really happened to you with your career.

Jenny Holström:
Oh, definitely.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Jenny Holström:
And I still work with that. It's ironic doing what I'm doing, but I still need to actively think about my relationship and how to care for it. With my friends, for some reason, it comes more naturally, but with my relationship, I need to put more effort into it.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I think and obviously this is a fertility podcast. We don't talk a ton about parenthood, but I am a parent you are a parent, you have two kids, I have two kids, and it is, it's such a different way of, like right now I often find myself getting into the trap of considering my partner a co-parent versus a husband or a partner. It's, it's a totally different way of thinking, that doesn't, it doesn't really, it doesn't surprise me that we struggle in this. Co-parenting is different from having a partner. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. That's a great conversation. So how did you meet Ted, your co-founder?

Jenny Holström:
Oh, yeah. I joined a startup accelerator called Antler. Think you can find him in the US and Singapore and all around the world. They did not invest in us, they did not believe in us enough. But we found other great investors after that. So I'm quite happy with the turnout anyway.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing.

Jenny Holström:
I was just thinking the other day, well not the other day, but like after they turned us down, I was just like, oh, that's their loss. And I work like that. That gives me fuel, I want to prove them, yeah.

Abby Mercado:
And that's, that's such an important skill to have as, I think, I started my founder journey about three years ago and it has taken me years to say their loss. So being able to have the personality, to just really have that all along so enviable. I envy you and many founders listen to this podcast and I'm sure that they envy that, that type of attitude as well. So Ted is, he is on the product side, is that right?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, he used to work with marketing, but he actually left off this summer for New Adventures, which I think is really good for him and the one who was there from the beginning.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. So tell us all about Couplness. What is Coupleness? Just give us a soup to nuts. What is this thing and why should we download it?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, right now we're just an app, but in a month we are an app and then we are a relationship calendar as well. But right now you can go to App Store, Google Play, download Coupleness and then you will have a tool for your relationship to use every day. And basically what we support you with is a daily checking with your partner, you're checking with your shelves, your emotions and how you're doing and what is affecting you. And then your partner does the same thing and you share your answers. And by doing that, you come closer to each other. And then we have another feature in there, which is called Question of the Day. And that one is there because curiosity is a really important part of all relationships, and it's really easy after a few years in, and maybe you can relate to this going through your fertility journey as well, that it's hard to find the moments and you know, the right questions like year five, even though you're not trying to conceive, it can be really hard to find at the time or like the spark in the relationship.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. And I think there's also this element of you're constantly learning about each other and we, we think that, I think as a society, we're like, okay, we're not dating anymore. We're married, we have kids, we've got a mortgage, we've got an SUV. Like all the things and I know all I can know about you, but that's just so not true. There's always something.

Jenny Holström:
I love that you're saying that because that's basically what it's all about.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. I answered my question this morning. Which is, is everybody's question the same or?

Jenny Holström:
For that specific day it is. But then you can use the question of the day. Like you can sit down if you're having a dinner or something and you can pull out all the question of the day and just go through the 10 or 20 of them if you want to ....

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I love it. So it seems in reading through Coupleness marketing language and whatnot, it seems like you all prioritize being easy and being fun.

Jenny Holström:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
So like why is there are other relationship apps that exist? Like why, what kind of these the two things that differentiate Coupleness. Can you expand on that a little maybe?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah. I think ... One's doing the same thing as we do. Like they want to be easy and fun. To us, it's, it's a balance between being too much of couple's therapy, which we're not and too much fun. We still want to come across as like a serious tool for couples, but we want couples to do their couples kind of thing together in a fun way. So for especially for men who are not, if I quote like generally, as a ... used to talk about their feelings, we don't want to scare them away. We want to do the opposite. So then we use like gifs and stuff like that to take the drama a little bit away. It's not drama to talk about your feelings, it's something you should do but for some people, maybe it's a little bit too much or they're not comfortable doing it.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, that's an interesting point. At Rescripted, we are like, 97% of our consumers are female. When thinking about, totally, you're also thinking about the partner and your partner's communicative. And I know that your expertise is in communication, and I know that gifs ... on the marketing and branding side. So how do you strike the balance between talking effectively to both females and males?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, I think it all comes down to that. As you said, more than 90% of downloads in Coupleness is a woman, but if she's living in a relationship with a man, if the man is not like joining Cpupleness at any point, they will not use the tool in their everyday life. So we need to find a way of being clear and transparent that attracts men, or at least get them on board to try the app. So we tried in the beginning, we had a lot of emojis, which is a universal language. We tried not to have as much as hearts and doing it too girlish, and we're, I think we're on a journey with our branding and our tone of voice, and I can share. When we started, we were a little bit afraid of talking about problems within relationships because we wanted to market this as proactive app. Something fun and joyful, as you say. But we realized that or we didn't know from, we did know from the beginning as well. But that was not our marketing angle, was that everyone struggles in their relationship from time to time. So now, we're much more transparent with that and we can talk about that, but we try to twist it and do it in a fun way and that people can see like that.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Jenny Holström:
When they can feel like it's themselves.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. So how are you thinking about gathering data on the consumers that you serve and serving them up with kind of a personalized approach to their relationship?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, quite early we were thinking about integrating AI and there's tons of things you can do with this and I think we're not ready on, if we want to join like that kind of product or not. Right now we're working with data, but we're not using any kind of smart data like AI. However, I think the users of our app could benefit from more personalized stats, for instance. But up until now we haven't really had the capacity to develop that, unfortunately.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. No, I get it. It's like, there's so many things on a product roadmap and not enough money yet, not enough people yet. So let's dig into that. How have you funded this thing since inception and how do you look to fund it in the future?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, first we kind of self-funded it. We're not taking any salary, paying the first things ourselves, but then when we wanted to develop the app, it's quite expensive to build an app, but we found our first CTO and then after a few months I think I had maybe 120 ... meetings with Angels.

Abby Mercado:
That's a lot of meetings.

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, a lot of meetings ... some had myself and so forth. And then we had one person who co-founded like one of the big kind of healthcare companies in Europe, and he said, I really want to support you, this is really cool. And so when he, we had a commitment from him, it was a lot easier to get commitments from other people as well. So it was that first yes. And when the yes ... really good person who made the journey himself and so forth. His name is Joachim and he's co-founded ..., and I like him a lot. He's really cool, he was much easier, but it was like a lot of banging the head to the wall and just getting up on the horse again.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. What, what was like, this is a, this question like is would be undressing for most founders that I feel like you'll give it a really authentic answer but like why, what was the common reason for the no in talking to those 120 angels?

Jenny Holström:
Exactly. I think it was because first, I'm a woman. I haven't done this. I created my children's right movement organization, and that's quite impressive what we did, I think.

Abby Mercado:
Yes, of course.

Jenny Holström:
But it was not like scaling a tech company. I worked for the, I've done a lot of things but didn't seem like that was like valid or it didn't count for anything. I think that was one, and I'm quite soft. I'm into numbers and stuff, but I'm quite soft, emotional person and I'm not like the typical I would say you can find female founders straight after business school or I came to business school myself, but I'm not a typical person, like that.

Abby Mercado:
Because you didn't work for HBS, and McKinsey, and Uber.

Jenny Holström:
.... The UN and doing my own stuff and so didn't fit their profile. I think that was part of it. I think the other part was that we didn't have a really like big-name CTO and ... were building like a tech company, we were missing that. But that was just like a small part of it. And I think the other part was like it was really hard for a lot of investors to see how we could scale and grow this. Would people really use this in their relationship? Is this just another app? I think that was a really big question mark. Will you be able to monetize from this? Who will pay for this?

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, yeah.

Jenny Holström:
And for me, it's like a no-brainer. But yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. In that vein, how do you think about pricing, compared your pricing to some other relationship apps? And let's just say I easily paid for it. It was it seemed much more affordable, and especially, just trying out the 3.99 a month. I'm totally going to do that. And I think it's like 10.99 for a year, that seems pretty, pretty okay with me, versus other apps, you are paying $99 a year, that feels difficult. Especially because you can't really try it. I want to see this working in the long term before I commit that kind of money, talking from a typical consumer perspective. So like, how did you come up with the pricing and what kind of testing and research was done there?

Jenny Holström:
Well, first of all, we were looking into what is the cost for couples therapy? Like how much do you pay to go to couples therapy? How many times do you go? And then we, then we looked at what are the options? And there are no other options. So we just said, what is reasonable? How much do you pay for Netflix? We looked at all other subscriptions, that is not Coupleness. And then we, quite quickly found that a lot of people are benchmarking the prices with Netflix or similar like Spotify, etcetera options, because there is nothing to benchmark Coupleness with. If you are like a Headspace or Calm user, maybe kind of benchmark it within the mental wellness space or if you're doing anything else like that. But so I think that was like a quite a few of the areas we dig deeper into. Obviously, we looked at our competitors. Some of them are, as you say, much more pricey. We want to get a lot of people on board. We want to people to get to know the app. And if they leave, they can come back. And it's not like that big of a deal.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. How have you thought about, if at all, basically taking this to another space where you're actually offering services as well? So couples therapy. I had a friend come to me the other day saying, okay, I want to do this with my partner, but how on earth do I find the right person? Has that come to mind and thinking through this business like some sort of marketplace for couples therapists?

Jenny Holström:
Yeah, I mean, it has. And to be honest, I think with relationships, the sky is the limit. There is so much we could do with relationships, especially since the couples therapy business is not super digitalized. There's a lot of things you can do within that business as well. And you can use couples between the sessions with the couples therapist. So there's so much what you can do. But what we asked ourselves, like what are we good at within the team? Like the core team. And since we're good at like marketing, branding, building this movement, educate the market, we decided to stay a little bit in that space for now. We think that will be needed anyway. And in addition, we're looking more into building a toolbox of tools for them so they can have the app, and now we're building our new tool, which is the relationship calendar. With that being said, it's not a super close door to couples therapist, but as of now, we're not focusing on that.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. Okay. That's good guidance. I'm excited about the future of Coupleness. So I want to zoom out a little bit and I want to talk a little bit more about the research that you put on your Linkedin profile. That's the, you stated that there's Harvard research that states that relationships are more important to our well-being than social class, career or genetics. So just wanted to zoom out and talk through that and what that means and like more, more the why about this business and why it's so important to us as humans.

Jenny Holström:
I love this question. I think if you would have asked me like, what's my fuel? What's my passion with Coupleness, that would be my answer. And the reason for that being my answer is that, it's something with the lack of knowledge that we don't know this. We think that what we, how we sleep, how we work out, all that is what is affecting our overall health. And that's not the case. It affects our overall health. But if you don't take care of your relationships, you miss out on a great chunk of your health. So what I'm irritated or like frustrated about is that people don't know this. So what I want to do is spread this message throughout the world. We have the research, we know how you can take care of your relationship if you do it, but it's not like, it's not out there. The word is not out in the world. That's really my passion with Coupleness to, to spread the word and give couples tools.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, awesome. I couldn't help but in doing more research about Coupleness, I couldn't help but, I don't know if you saw this, but it was a chart that, that was viral on socials a couple of weeks ago. And it's essentially, I would show it to you, but that defeats the purpose of a podcast because I need to explain this to the listener, but it's essentially the title of, the title is Who Americans Spend Their Time With. And it starts at age zero and it goes up to, I think, age 90. And so it's essentially is you're not spending as much time alone when you're, when you're little, by the time you're 90, most of your time is spent alone and then you're not spending as time with that potential partner, sub-age 20, your partner as you age is the person that you spend the most time with by a dramatically large multiple. How you invest in your partner is just, this chart really says it all to me, so I'm going to show it to you because it's, I want to hear you expand on it. But it was just so profound to me, like, why does this matter? Obviously, this is so important and it feels really sad. Like you spend a lot less time with your family, you spend a lot less time with your children. You spend a lot less time with your friends, with your coworkers, with these really important people in your life. You're the time that you spend with your partner is just absolutely skyrocketing as you age. So investing early on is and we can add this to the show notes, but investing early on is just so critical.

Jenny Holström:
It is. And I think you're really put in the singer something that's really important is if you spend time, when that is with your partner or with your friends. But this research by Waldinger, as you talked about earlier, is saying, is that if you have close people around you, that you feel that you can trust and share ups and downs in life, that's the good, juicy part for your health. Like having people that you can talk to when you're struggling in life as well. So looking at this chart, I'm thinking since it's not included, what is that quality time? What is the, what are you doing? ... When.

Abby Mercado:
I know ...

Jenny Holström:
Scrolling like going through your social Tik Tok.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, yeah. Something about that Netflix subscription.

Jenny Holström:
Exactly. Or are you actually, as you said earlier, learning more about each other or you're doing things together or you're putting your phone away. So think it very much depends on what you're doing together. You can be really lonely in a relationship sitting next to each other on a couch every evening just watching Netflix and not talking to each other. You're spending a lot of time together, but you're not nurturing your relationship.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, that's critical. Jenny, this has been absolutely fantastic. I'm so happy that we chatted about Coupleness, just especially under the bucket of, within the bucket of fertility and just there's just a lot of loneliness and a lot of isolation that can come alongside an experience of a couple trying to conceive and not really going back to their roots and remembering why they actually are together. I think when we hear from our community, we talk about that a ton, like relationship health, it's really important. So the last question that I usually ask on this podcast is what would you rescript about this experience for the consumer that, that you're targeting? And the question is typically what would you rescript about the fertility industry? But I think given what Coupleness does, what do you want to rewrite the rules? The rules about.

Jenny Holström:
Yeah. I know, what I want to go, whether you're in a fertility journey or not, but if you're in a relationship, I would love to have everyone before they fall asleep to think about what did I do for my relationship today? I think if we could think that and if we actually could do something for our relationship, it could just be like those tiny, small things that, you know, making breakfast for your partner or just giving them a big hug when they come home from work. It doesn't need to be this big thing. So if we could get that into kind of our routines and habits, I think it would Be really good for humanity.

Abby Mercado:
I love that. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you and where can people find Coupleness?

Jenny Holström:
GetCoupleness.com, or you can go onto the app store or Google play.

Abby Mercado:
Awesome. Awesome. And Jenny is also an incredible content creator on LinkedIn, so make sure you follow her.

Jenny Holström:
And welcome everyone to join my LinkedIn network. I love Linkedin, even just started with TikTok. Are you on TikTok?

Abby Mercado:
Not personally, but Rescripted is growing. No, not personally. I'm so bad.

Jenny Holström:
I just started, I'm learning.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, interesting. So I have to ask you this, since you're big on LinkedIn, is LinkedIn going to replace Twitter? Because I'm here for it.

Jenny Holström:
I think so.

Abby Mercado:
Are you active on Twitter as well?

Jenny Holström:
No, I'm not. I started Twitter, it was not my cup of tea. And I think with everything going on with Twitter now, I think it has been growing even before. Who knows? I think there is a place for both, but LinkedIn is definitely a place like.

Abby Mercado:
You feel comfortable there. I do too, so you'll have to mentor me on how to become a LinkedIn content creator.

Jenny Holström:
Well, I would love to. Then I can learn TikTok from you guys.

Abby Mercado:
Oh yeah. Follow Rescripted on TikTok. Awesome. Thanks again, Jenny. This has been an absolute joy, and I'm sure we'll talk soon.

Jenny Holström:
Thank you so much, Abby.

Abby Mercado:
Thank you for tuning in to the Future of Fertility. We hope you'll leave here feeling empowered about all of the exciting innovations taking place in the fertility space. If you liked today's episode, don't forget to click subscribe, and be sure to check out Dear (In)fertility, our popular podcast/advice column where we chat with experts about all things fertility, infertility, and pregnancy loss. To learn more and to join our free Fertility Support Community head to Rescripted.com.

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