Jennifer Kruidbos is the Founder & CEO of Blawesome, a Founder Institute Toronto portfolio company providing a platform for wellness creators and their communities to learn, grow, and build culture together. Blawesome is a web3 creator marketplace network, with tools to help wellness creators to grow, manage and monetize their communities, including practice management structures and tokenized communities.
A career-long veteran of the mental health and wellness space, Kruidbos brings her personal experience hosting and teaching in-person wellness sessions, as well as experiences across the earlier iterations of digital wellness communities - those built atop the traditional big-tech social media and content sharing platforms. Together with her co-founder and CTO Christopher MacDonald, who was an early Bitcoin adopter and blockchain technology enthusiast, Kruidbos was ahead of the web3 wave in understanding how ‘tokenization’ could provide better underlying incentives for digital community groups, particularly in the wellness space.
Watch the full interview with Blawesome CEO Jennifer Kruidbos here, or read some of the highlights below:
Key Founder Insights:
- Challenges and Opportunities for emerging digital wellness creators and their communities
- Negative externalities of traditional social platforms + why wellness communities benefit from separate, dedicated digital spaces
- NFTs, tokenized community incentives, and web3's path for creators with even small-er dedicated audiences to build sustainable careers and practices
- Measuring positive social impact effects from digital wellness communities, and how such impact data might be applied to acheiving better outcomes
- Courses and structures on the Blawesome platform, and benefits from Micro-Lessons of distilled content (max 12 modules, 10 minutes each)
- Blawesome CEO Jennifer Kruidbos’s predictions for the future of wellness communities in digital spaces (including in the Metaverse!)
As Blawesome Founder & CEO Jennifer Kruidbos explains, there are 64 million monthly searches for wellness related content—but existing ‘web 2.0’ platforms don’t provide ideal digital spaces for building wellness communities. This is largely due to the growing evidence for social media’s negative side effects—ad-supported platforms, or those that incentivize user-generated content creation that features characteristic behaviors or performative aspects purely to feed the platform algorithm’s preferences, are fundamentally misaligned with the ethos that most genuine wellness creators are trying to curate within their own individual communities (like authenticity, openness, healing, etc).
Particularly, Kruidbos’s own experiences involved helping those with eating disorders, whose illnesses are often associated with toxic 'dieting' content that is widely prevalent across big-tech social platforms. She explains,
The inspiration for Blawesome 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 received questions about where to find really reliable wellness content for in-between the sessions. I do have so many wellness creators that I love on traditional platforms, and I could have sent them there—but meanwhile, every week these same teens were telling me that these traditional platforms had negatively contributed to their mental health, to their confidence, and ultimately had contributed to their eating disorders. So that was the moment where I said, ‘Okay has someone built a solution?' And there wasn't one yet.
So by simply moving their existing digital wellness communities off of the big-tech platforms and onto dedicated Blawesome communities, wellness creators can immediately cut ties to all the bad incentives associated with the big-tech social platforms. And as Kruidbos explains, web3 ownership provides even further positive incentives structures for creating sustainable, community-oriented and participatory rewards systems. But while web3 and crypto may be among the buzziest spaces currently in the startup world, Kruidbos emphasizes that wellness creators on Blawesome are less motivated by the tech than they are by their own core missions as practitioners and teachers, noting,
Our wellness creators are not gamers, they're not like ‘tech guys’—a lot of them are women, and a lot of them are what you would imagine: a fitness trainer, a nutritionist, a meditation teacher—they're not necessarily reading TechCrunch and staying all up to date with [blockchain] stuff, but what they are is very innovative, they're risk takers, they want to learn, they want to be on the cutting edge, they're a little bit rebellious, just like entrepreneurs—they are founders in their own right.
As the 'Creator Economy' moves from founder-led vision today to a user-driven reality of tomorrow, Blawesome is at the forefront of the digital wellness sector. It makes sense for platforms built around specific community niches (like wellness) to capture the benefits first from early network effects, letting them the build the self-sustaining momentum that web3 founders like Kruidbos envision.
For wellness creators, Blawesome has all the tools you need to grow and monetize your community—and for everyone else, it's where you can find your favorite wellness creators and practices, all in one place—to learn more visit Blawesome.life!
Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $1.85BN in funding, and building products people love across over 200 cities worldwide.
See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/reviews.
