The importance of mental wellbeing is being raised more and more often, but people still don’t know how to manage their feelings and transform them without bottling them up all the time. Today I talk to the founders of Wevoice.ai – a sound healing and AI-based application helping us to manage stress and anxiety. They share with me their story of how they developed and commercialized their application, working at the intersection of psychology, science, technology and business.
Agnieszka Węglarz: Please introduce yourself and your company – what is your role in the company? And what does your company offer – in short?
Wevoice.ai: Our mission is to give back the best version of you to 1 billion people in Health, Mind, Impact, Performance & Human Connections by transforming people’s stress patterns in 7-15 minutes a day. We are Bridging the Gap in Mental Wellness through biofeedback, adaptive Sound Healing powered with Voice Emotion-AI and Transformational coaching sessions, making mental care accessible to everyone, who wants to live a stressLess life free of Rx medication.
We are a diverse team bringing together expertise in deep tech, voice recognition, voice-emotion AI, transformational therapies, life sciences, sound healing, clinical neurobiofeedback, and 3D sound production.
We met at Demium incubator in Malaga, brought the synergy in place, and created WeVoice: A science-proven art of living a stressless life.
Alfonso Paredes Saavedra,CEO and Co-Founder: I have 12 years of experience in the Medical / Biotechnology industries and four years in R&D Sound & Emotion-AI. I also have a business administration and management background. My objective with WeVoice is to help people improve their mental wellbeing, applying the power of voice, sound, and technology. My ultimate goal is to help people become self-healers while sleeping.
Anton Melnik, WeVoice CTO and Co-founder: I have 10 years of experience in AI development. I provide a scalable technical solution from basic (human-intensive) to full automation (AI-intensive) that serves across all departments: marketing, sales, customer success, etc. I provide the latest AI-coach technology based on analysis of vocal biomarkers, which helps provide unique and personalized sound healing sessions to WeVoice clients.
Nataliya Storozhylova, CSSO and Co-Founder: I am a scientist “with the gloves off”, an innovator and scientific advisor in the space of stress-management solutions, & biohacking & for longevity. I have 12 years of international multidisciplinary experience working in the academic, corporate & EdTech startup world. I have over 100 experimental designs and setups. I am a WeVoice visionary and company culture builder, developing solutions to revolutionize the future of wellbeing & healthcare, creating the world’s most robust anxiety & stress model based on biofeedback for stress-pattern recognition and transformation. I am a personal growth coach and the author of the mentoring program “I’m Unstoppable”.
AW: Let me ask you first how you came up with the idea for your startup? What was the problem that you have observed and wanted to solve?
Wevoice.ai: Physical health as compared to mental health is much better understood and very well covered. The importance of mental wellness is certainly underestimated. Humanity still doesn’t know how to really manage our stress, anxiety, and depression and has a limited number of tools. People all around us experience burnout and don’t recover from it, as they know little about how to manage their own feelings and transform them, without having to bottle them up all the time. Nowadays people tend to over-worry, overthink, be oversubscribed, and over-stressed. Our solution brings emotional balance and facilitates wellbeing.
We started with the idea of helping people to fight loneliness and our target was elder residencies. But we soon understood that getting there during COVID is pretty tricky, and there can be a tech gap. So we started to find groups of people of this age and talk with them, where we realized that they need to talk and we started working on the idea of therapist/group training. Though during the next validation we checked assumptions on Therapy / Group Therapy / Sound Healing. And less presented was group therapy. At this moment we met our sound healer Carlos and Transformational Therapists connected with Sound. We aim to optimize human performance, navigate easier in times of overwhelm and stress and consciously removestress patterns and choose the path of a resourceful being.
AW: Your ambition is to help many people in the world to heal their anxiety and stress. Could you please explain in simple words what stress is from the scientific point of view? Where does it come from in our body?
Wevoice.ai: The biological stress response involves interconnections among the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems. The two most heavily studied stress-related biological mechanisms have been sympathetic arousal and activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis. Stress has become #1 killer today. And yet most people still drastically underestimate that stress is a key contributor to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, aging, sleeping disorders, cognitive disorders, mental clarity, concentration, productivity, creativity, and fertility.
Stress makes you breathe harder, and this affects the way you pronounce words, do pauses and how your voice sounds. WeVoice helps people identify their stress patterns via biofeedback, using the information our bodies communicate when experiencing stress. Our technology, based on voice recognition features (vocal biomarkers), allows us to evaluate your levels of stress or anxiety. Certainly, under stress our jaw muscles contract and perform differently and we basically produce different sounds, which allows the app to evaluate stress levels before and after using it.
AW: In your solution, you are combining a scientific approach to stress therapy together with sound and AI. What is the role of sound in stress healing?
Wevoice.ai: You choose how you want to feel: focused, productive, grounded, relaxed, creative. We help you to tune in via adaptive 3D Sound Healing to the brain frequencies that enable these states. It’s neurostimulation (IP rights & Clinical Validation by Neurobiofeedback).
We are developing an R&D project with Eurecat customer-tailored sound healing sessions, generated in real-time, based on your voice biofeedback and validated further with the clinical neurobiofeedback with MuArts.
AW: And what are the other elements of your solution?
Wevoice.ai: Our solution helps people identify people’s stress patterns via biofeedback, using the information our bodies communicate when experiencing stress. Our technology, based on voice recognition features (vocal biomarkers) allows us to evaluate your levels of stress or anxiety.
Another element of our solution is Tara, an AI-transformational coach, trained by certified experts in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) & Rapid Personal Transformational therapy (RPT), neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) to scale the impact. A good coach is oversubscribed – Tara is reachable anytime. She keeps you accountable, creating awareness around stress patterns recognition & interruption.
And finally, we provide neurostimulation via Adaptive 3D Sound Healing. Now you choose how you want to feel. Focused, productive, grounded, relaxed, creative. We help you to tune in via adaptive 3D Sound Healing by modulating your brain waves (IP) and Clinical Validation (by Neurobiofeedback). We offer customer-tailored sessions, generated in real-time, based on your voice biofeedback.
AW: Tara is the AI Transformational Coach offered by you. Could you explain how Tara works?
Wevoice.ai: Tara, indeed, is a conversational AI-coach, trained by certified CBT, NLP, RPT experts that uses different techniques to recognize your voice, transform it into speech, analyze it to get insights about the person she talks with, and guide it to a better state with the use of Adaptive Sound Healing.
AW: What makes your solution unique?
Wevoice.ai: Our solution has many unique features:
- Stress detection based on voice biofeedback,
- Voice AI-coach trained by transformational therapies experts,
- Coaches behind AI
- Customer-tailored sound healing sessions
- Clinical Development
- Journal / Progress tracker
AW: Recently you have graduated from Business Model Mastering – a Google for Startups Programme aimed at growing startups. Why did you realize that you need such a programme?
Wevoice.ai: We struggled with product-market fit, the best way to present our product, and sell it. We were wondering how to commercialize our solution as a premium service from the beginning, while we were still gathering the data and further educating our AI-system.
AW: What were the challenges that you wanted to address during the Programme?
Wevoice.ai: It was go-to-market, clinical validation, user-acquisition and retention. We had to define a robust business model, implement OKRs system, re-define and segment our target audience, analyze and select the most appropriate distribution channels, as well as detailing our customer buying behavior/process.
AW: What were the most important turning points during this Programme? Could you please share a vivid picture of your “aha moments” in the programme – what were your assumptions prior to the programme, what did you realize during the programme, how your business model changed as a result of the programme?
Wevoice.ai: First we realized how important it is to clarify your messaging. As founders, we have our story telling in our minds all day long, and tend to make it complicated. We want to explain every little detail of our solution. When you are targeting users, you have to keep it simple and nail down the pain you are solving. During the program we worked on our Brand Archetype, this helped us tremendously to refine our message.
Another great moment was when we were developing our customer (buyer) persona, this is a work in progress constantly. If we may give other founders a piece of advice, this should be it. Know your audience. Understand their pains, and build something useful for them.
To finalize, we also figured out that it’s very important to identify that your resources are limited, and therefore you have to join forces and find the most beneficial value offering to penetrate the market, and have all the team onboarded and with that unique focus.
AW: You operate at the intersection of science, psychology, and technology. Based on your experiences so far what do you think is the key to market success – scientific and technological knowledge or managerial knowledge? Or a combination of both?
Wevoice.ai: The most powerful mixture of all three and being in a position to deliver distilled knowledge, learnings and wisdom powerfully to our clients. Indeed, all three are important. You need psychology to understand people and be really valuable to them and it is one of our challenges to really understand them, otherwise they won’t talk with Tara. And on top of it to psychology it is also a behavioural thing, changing habits can be challenging and even people will see results it is not 100% that they will stay with you.
As of technology we believe that having feedback / analysis is very important, since if you can measure it you can improve it. That is why we checked for the easiest way to do it and voice helps us a lot. It is moving forward.
And as of science we have thousands of apps that propose something, but most of them do not have any evidence, so having this evidence is a way to go and prove to people that it works and for further B2B investigation it can also be very important. And in addition it is the way to innovate and find new ways of doing things, that is why R&D is an important part of our product.
AW: How is your business model changing now after that Programme?
Wevoice.ai: We got much more clarity and tremendously reinforced our business model. We have found our brand archetype and more opportunities and modalities in the B2C segment.
We segmented our buyer personas (Passionate personal growth chaser, stressed Mother and a business woman with work-life balance off) and found out more on best channels to approach them.
AW: Based on your own entrepreneurial experiences so far, what would advise/ recommend to startups at the beginning of their road?
Wevoice.ai: Establishing WeVoice has moved us to a space where we feel much more limitless & unstoppable than ever before. Fighting your fears and learning to leave them on the back burner, allows you to build something meaningful. A reminder, the difference between you and successful people is simply that they failed more times than you did. When you give yourself permission to fail, you really just give yourself permission to fly.
Give yourself permission to fly instead of staying in your comfort zone. This is the only way to build your confidence and excellence. Very many times people will tell you “it’s impossible”. Simply meaning that it’s impossible for them, not for you. If you keep asking the right questions, the right advisors will mentor you; if you will give excellent service to the world, the right partners will join in to share your vision and all the right investors will come to support you.
At the end of the day, it’s all about knowing what you want, having faith & guts to do it, being passionate, gritty, and letting go of your fears…one fear at a time. To have the results only 5% of the population have, you need to do what only 5% of the population does (rolling up the sleeves and getting the most important things done). Geniuses are made, not born. Do your excellence, do your best service, become unstoppable and unforgettable.
Be true to your wellbeing, the best time is now!
Connect with us:
alfonso@wevoice.ai
nataliya@wevoice.ai
anton@wevoice.ai
Test our beta-version: app.wevoice.ai
Agnieszka Węglarz: Thank you very much for sharing your experience with us. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
Agnieszka Węglarz is an independent consultant, business strategist and practitioner in B2B and B2C, as well as lecturer, speaker and blogger. She has over 20 years of professional experience working as manager in both large corporations and SMEs, where she was responsible for strategy, marketing and business development. She uses her long term executive experience and training expertise to assist companies and their managers in building their business strategy using a workshop methodology. She specializes in business modeling, segmentation, value proposition, sales and marketing strategies as well as consultative selling. She runs her own consultancy business, as well as cooperates with Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw as the leading expert in Business Model Mastering – a Program for European startups providing founders and their teams with a structured approach to run their company and accelerate their growth. Agnieszka is an author of many business publications. You can read her writing on her business blog on www.agnieszkaweglarz.com and watch her business content on her YouTube channel – Biznes Ring by Agnieszka Węglarz. You can contact her by writing to: agnieszka.weglarz@g2m.biz.pl or directly by sending a message via LinkedIN.
Nataliya Storozhylova
PhD in Nanomedicine (Spain) & Pharm innovation (France), R&D, ex-Mindvalley Scientific advisor & Innovator, transformational coach, 12 ys of professional experience. Nataliya is a scientist with the gloves off, an innovator and scientific advisor in the space of stress-management solutions, & biohacking & for longevity and a co-founder of WeVoice. She develops innovative tech solutions for the wellness and mental health industry, based on biofeedback, emotion AI, CBT, NLP, RPT and creates the shortest transformational journeys for stress-pattern recognition and transformation. Nataliya is the author of a mentoring program “I’m Unstoppable” and a personal growth coach. Ultimately, she is a world citizen, and has lived in 6 countries across continents.
Alfonso Paredes Saavedra, WeVoice CEO and Co-Founder.
Alfonso has a business administration and management background, strategist & visionary with eight years of experience in the Medical / Biotechnology industries and four years in R&D Sound & Emotion-AI. For WeVoice, Alfonso is delivering massive value to the clients & a company business growth. Being a leader for the WeVoice team through the best practices supports the most healthy and empathic environment for professional team growth.
Anton Melnik, WeVoice CTO and Co-founder
Anton Melnik is a remarkable creator with ten years of experience in AI development. Anton provides a scalable technical solution from basic (human-intensive) to full automation (AI-intensive) that serves across all departments seamlessly: marketing, sales, customer success, etc. Anton provides the latest AI-coach technology based on analysis of vocal biomarkers, which helps provide unique and personalized sound healing sessions to WeVoice clients.