After losing my father in law to suicide and almost losing my dad, my wife and I decided to tackle men's health in a non-traditional way.
The wellbeing and wellness community is flooded with offerings that attract more women. Many preventative healthcare messages miss the mark with men as they are instructive and require men to admit they have an issue.
We decided to approach preventative health messaging with a evolutionary psychology approach. Instead of telling people to see a doctor, seek support, talk to your mates, we built a program and community that gamifies the first steps.
Many men don't have a diagnosis, won't seek one and pride themselves in being tough, resilient and 'unbreakable'... even when they're not. Who can blame them, this is the message delivered by society for thousands of years. Rather than fight against established societal expectations, we decided to work with it, in true Judo style.
Working with social signalling and status related drivers, we've built a global competition that incentivises behaviours that lead to healthier minds and bodies. In doing so, our goal is to attract men who wouldn't normally do a wellbeing program.
Our men compete monthly on 10 behaviours as part of our science-backed, World's Healthiest Habits framework. The result is our members taking daily action on activities like, having a consistent bedtime, meditation, reducing sugar intake, going screen free before bed, spending time in the community, drinking only water, intermittent fasting, catching up with others face to face.
A positive side-effect of this competition is a growing offline community where members get together to undertake social exercise.
We use an AI assisted personal scorecard tool we developed as a mechanism to capture attention, provide education and feedback to prospective users.
Five years into the development of Wellteam, we're eager to share our learnings, insights and challenges to add a different angle to the preventative health space. An angle that is built specifically to engage men, while being mindful to not exclude anyone.