NatWest Back Her Business has provided £5,000 of match funding
FidlLeaf: Wellbeing + Personal Growth Platform
London, England, United Kingdom
Aim
We are building a wellbeing platform with a difference! It combines Nobel Prize nominated science with tailored support to help you thrive.
Hi!
We are Sophie and Adam, and a year ago we started developing an online platform where people could understand what makes up their own wellbeing and discover ways to develop themselves that would help them to thrive, both personally and professionally.
Despite 'wellbeing' being such a hot topic at the moment, we feel that a lot of people don't really understand or have a good awareness of the key components that make up their personal wellbeing. We want to change that and we want to turn 2020 into your year of #personalgrowth.
How we got started:
We met at a ‘Meet Your Co-Founder’ event in the basement of a bar in East London. Quite frankly, neither of us ever expected to meet our co-founder there! Sophie had come with an idea to take the science she had been working with for ten years and turn it into an online wellbeing platform - she had a vision that it would be like an individually tailored self-help book, brought to life!
Adam had been working as a software developer and had the itch to work on something new and with more purpose. We got chatting and it was meant to be! We started sketching out the idea for FidlLeaf on napkins in a pub and squeezing in hours outside of our day jobs to work on the platform.
Our expanding vision:
Originally, we aimed to provide FidlLeaf to companies as a tool for their staff, but when Covid hit we realised that many people would be having their own wellbeing challenges, or using this time for self-reflection and thoughts on their future. So we decided to make FidlLeaf accessible to anyone wanting to work on themselves and develop, and not limit it to those people lucky enough to have it provided through their employer.
Back Her Business gives us the opportunity to reach a wider audience and we are really grateful to be able to use the crowdfunder platform to launch our business.
FidlLeaf is an online wellbeing and personal growth platform. It gives you awareness of what makes up your own wellbeing, and measures those areas using Nobel Prize nominated science.
Once you’ve learned about your results, you’ll be able to see where your strengths lie and which areas might benefit from some focus and development. *This is the clever part!* Most people don't know where to start when it comes to personal development. FidlLeaf will raise your awareness, so that you can understand exactly where to focus to make a difference.
"Using the Self Awareness Tool alone - Yale University Leadership Excellence Course saw an improvement in their wellbeing results of 15% in 6 months"
But that’s not all - In your FidlLeaf hub you’ll find carefully curated content to support each wellbeing area. So whichever of the 10 areas you’re looking to develop, be it assertiveness, self-esteem or dealing with stress, there will be plenty of podcasts, videos and articles which you can get stuck in to, take notes on and save to your library for reference as you deepen your understanding of the topic.
Then, when you’re ready to start working on your personal growth, you can use the Personal Development Plan within your hub to set yourself goals, log the steps you need to take to reach them and track your progress as you develop.
How it works:
FidlLeaf is for anyone who is curious about their own wellbeing and wanting to develop themselves.
- Do you want to take stock and understand more about behaviours that could be impacting your wellbeing?
- Do you want to progress and achieve at work?
- Have you read self-help books that just don’t address your needs, or you’re not sure which ones to read?
- Do you put effort into the health/fitness side of your wellbeing but not your mental/emotional side?
We believe that personal development is a life-long journey, and that FidlLeaf will be useful for anyone, regardless of where they currently are with their wellbeing. It’s a support system that you can come back to again and again to build positive behaviours which will impact on every aspect of your life.
FidlLeaf supports you to:
- Learn how to cope with stress
- Build self esteem and confidence
- Understand what will fulfil you and give you a sense of purpose
- Spot the signs of burnout and deal with it early
- Develop assertiveness skills
- Look at self care in a more holistic way
- Find direction in your life
- Create strategies to be less self-critical
- And so much more!
Our featured reward:
£50 - One Year’s Subscription to FidlLeaf.
You get to be one of the first to experience the FidlLeaf platform with a One Year Subscription. Use the Self-Awareness Tool to measure your 10x wellbeing areas, understand your results and begin your journey in personal growth with our content library and development plan. This price is more than 25% off what our annual subscription will be after the crowdfunder.
Buy One, Give One:
£90 - One Year’s Subscription to FidlLeaf for you and a friend with a little discount thrown in!
What could make a more thoughtful present than this?! This reward has everything in our featured reward but is for you and one other. Why not treat someone to a year’s worth of personal growth? Perfect for a friend, partner or family member. It would even make a fantastic Christmas present!
Every Little Helps Pledge:
£10 or £20 - A pledge to help us hit our target.
We appreciate that funds may be tight for many people right now and so we wanted to create a few pledges which don’t break the bank but which will still help us reach our goal, and we will hold this amount for you as credit for the next 12 months, should you wish to take up a subscription later on.
As was our original vision, FidlLeaf is the ideal workplace wellbeing tool for companies looking to support their staff, especially in the current climate.
Many companies struggle to find a wellbeing tool that:
- Is rooted in science
- Offers continual development over time
- Appeals to Millennials and Gen Z
- Isn’t solely focused on mental health (as they find that it can alienate some staff)
- Isn’t a one-time initiative
- Isn’t too gamified or too corporate
- Gets to the root of people’s wellbeing, rather than focussing on perks or one-size-fits-all group activities
- Tackles the personal stuff, which is usually what gets in the way of performance at work.
We believe we’ve hit the mark on all of the above, especially after our extensive research of other wellbeing tools out there. Our vision was to create a tool that people wanted to use inside and outside of work, that didn’t feel like a work tool.
We created a reward specifically for companies: £500 - The Team Subscription:
This reward gives you 10x One Year Subscriptions for ten lucky team members (you can add more if needed!) and they will have full access to the FidlLeaf platform, including the Self-Awareness Tool to measure their 10x wellbeing areas and begin their journey in personal growth with our content library and development plan.
That’s not all. We’d like to offer you a One Hour Wellbeing Workshop (hosted virtually of course) with Sophie, where she will kick-off your wellbeing initiative with a practical workshop looking at what wellbeing is and share tips and strategies that staff can use to start to think about their behaviours and emotions and how they impact on their performance. It will be a great introduction to the FidlLeaf philosophy and you are free to invite as many of your team as you like. *See the FAQ’s for more on Sophie’s credentials.
Let’s not stop there! We will also provide you with a Team Report once the ten staff members have started using FidlLeaf. This will be anonymised to protect their confidentiality, but will give you an overview of the common wellbeing issues in your team and help you gain insight to inform any further training or initiatives if you wish. We will talk through the report with you to help you understand the common areas where your team is struggling, as well as where their strengths lie.
This reward costs less than what most companies would pay for a single workshop for their team… but you’re getting an entire year’s worth of development, plus deeper insights than you would ever get from a staff survey or one-off event.
So what are you waiting for?
Pledge now for your company reward and help us to reach our target.
You might wonder how we’ve got this far without any external funding - so do we sometimes! It’s mostly down to dedication, grit and a lot of late nights working.
We made a conscious decision early on to not go down the road of raising capital, as we didn’t want to have to make decisions based on the funds someone else had put into the business. We are SO conscious of the integrity behind what we are doing and want to keep it that way. Also - none of the funds raised will be going to us personally. It will all be used to help further the business.
By partnering with Back Her Business and Natwest, we can drive more publicity to our launch and get set up for what happens next. Here’s what we’re planning to do with the money raised:
We have some serious long term plans for the FidlLeaf platform. The obvious plans involve bringing in a wider team and developing the platform into an app.
- We want to create more relatable media around wellbeing and personal growth, including podcasts and YouTube content, for FidlLeaf users, but also for anyone to access.
- We want to build a diverse team and give opportunities to younger people to work with us. We are conscious that if wellbeing should be accessible to all, then we need to help people to feel like they are being represented, and for us this means diversity in our team as well as the content we provide.
- Finally, we know that the data we capture within FidlLeaf will be incredibly useful in understanding more about wellbeing to help inform policies and strategies in the future. The data from the Self Awareness Tool has been used in many research studies before, but by capturing more detailed information we will be able to learn what the typical wellbeing issues are for different age demographics and potentially more. We hope to learn what specific types of content make a difference to people and build the most effective personal growth platform on the planet. Big goals for us!
Our real driver will be knowing that someone who used FidlLeaf was able to recognise a strength in themselves that they’ve never realised before.
Or that someone who was heading towards a mental health issue was able to catch it and get support before it became serious.
Or that someone realises that they have all the signs of burnout and takes action before it affects their work performance.
Or that someone becomes aware of how their self-critical nature is driving down their self-esteem and works towards being less tough on themselves.
Hearing stories like these will be our true mark of success.
When will I get access to FidlLeaf?
We are confident that you will get access within 30 days of the crowdfunder closing!
Is my data secure?
We take data and confidentiality very seriously. All of your information is confidential and will never be shared with anyone else. We will keep employee data and results confidential from the employer, providing the employer only with anonymised reporting.
Our research is taken from anonymous and aggregated data making it completely untraceable to any individual.
What’s Sophie’s background?
Sophie has worked with the science behind the FidlLeaf platform for over 10 years and is a member of the Institute relating to it. She has delivered feedback of the self-awareness tool to hundreds of people and has conducted research for organisations such as the Major Projects Association looking at how wellbeing impacts on performance.
She has hosted a six-series podcast, authored an Amazon best-selling book and has delivered presentations at many conferences on wellbeing and the power of self-development.
What’s Adam’s background?
After leaving university, Adam decided that he wanted to help people to find and buy cheap train tickets in the UK, and set about trying to create a website to do just that. That project wasn’t to be, but it set him on a path to becoming an expert in web development. More than 10 years later he has worked on projects for Google, the BBC, and UK and US government departments, as well as helping to grow a London software company from 5 people to over 100 people in less than 5 years.
Having experienced the impact that personal development has had on his own life, and having mentored others through his professional work, he now wants to apply his technical skills to helping other people to develop themselves and grow. FidlLeaf is the perfect calling.
How valid are my results?
The science behind the Self Awareness Tool has been through over 30+ validation studies and is proven to be more accurate and valid than assessments such as Myers Briggs or the Enneagram. It’s also proven to be unbiased against any ethnicity, gender, religion, race or age. Providing you take the assessment with integrity, understand the instructions and are not influenced by anyone or anything, then the result will be valid.
Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to say a great big thank you to anyone who takes the time to pledge, share the campaign and follow us on social media. We appreciate it SO MUCH!
We look forward to updating you as we go!
This project successfully funded on 4th October 2020