EP148: What Our Founders Learned From 100 Conversations with 100 Practitioners
EP148:What Our Founders Learned From 100 Conversations with 100 Practitioners
Have you ever wondered who the creators are behind Meal Garden?
Today, we’re bringing you a very special episode with Meal Garden founders Jeff Lougheed and Vlad Chernenko who are here to talk about what they've learned after having 100 conversations with 100 practitioners (and how Meal Garden plans to continue building a better experience for clients).
Whether you use the tool or are interested in learning more about the tool, this will be a super valuable episode for you to learn more about the context behind Meal Garden.
PLUS get some exclusive insider information about what’s to come in 2022!
How it all started…
Having previously worked together producing software in the public transit industry, Vlad knew Jeff was the perfect man to partner up as he was (and is) a very successful salesperson, leader, coach and was currently exploring the concepts of ‘Design Thinking’, a powerful way to create solutions for hard problems.
Since Vlad only had experience in the developing field, he brought Jeff to help with the business side of things.
Like Vlad, Jeff was curious and had a passion for technology that moves the needle in terms of social benefits. Their interest lies in mission-critical, vertical market software a.k.a. systems that are uniquely designed for a specific audience, and the software Vlad was pitching to him met that exact need.
100 conversions with 100 practitioners
After years working with vertical markets, we knew one of the first things we needed to do was a root cause analysis with our target audience.
This is the approach some of the best products and greatest innovations have followed.
So, they set out a goal of having conversations with 100 customers in 90 days to find out what drives them, what they need or are trying to accomplish, how the software is helping them, and what areas of their business they could do better in.
Their biggest learnings were:
It’s hard.
There are a million things to do and as a practitioner, you have to make decisions every day around where to spend your time. A big part of this was nutrition. Creating ‘solutions’ for clients can take an enormous amount of time. It often feels disproportionate to the other things that need to be done and contribute to the success of your clients and, the health of your business.
It’s more than Degree’s and Certifications
Most practitioners are ‘operational’ in nature. Their education and training are focused on patient care and/or helping people identify and solve health-related problems.
Most programs don’t provide enough training around building a business, foundational things like marketing, sales, etc.
So, when they embark on creating a life they love and establishing themselves as independent practitioners (wellprenuers, etc.) they often feel like they don’t have the right skills. And, they start searching for help in sales and marketing and customer success.
This leads to the last learning;
Sales and Marketing can be confusing and overwhelming
There are two issues at play here, the first being everyone has a system or a process and if you follow that process, you’ll be rich.
The second is social media makes it easy for everyone to look like a success, no matter what the reality is.
At the end of the day, all these pressures add up and more often than we’d like, lead to burnout and ultimately quitting.
There are +300,000,000 people in the US and Canada and less than 200,000 practitioners, (far less if you remove those working in traditional health care, which is in a constant state of crisis, on both sides of the boarder. )
This said to me ‘no one should be failing here. There is ample opportunity for everyone to achieve their goals.
~ Jeff
There was clearly an opportunity to help, so they set out to answer the question ‘how’?
They decided there was an opportunity for technology to help in three ways:
Make it easy to create and share meal solutions
This turned out to be harder than they thought, but based on member feedback, is working. You need to provide personalized pathways for your clients, but it can’t eat up 4-5 hours of your day, per client.
Improve ‘feedback loops’
Feedback loops are an important part of any behavioral change effort. Currently, feedback loops are either siloed (a separate tool) or are long (each visit).
The shorter a feedback loop, the easier it is to provide support ‘at the moment’.
(Think of feedback loops as diaries, journals, alerts, etc.)
Build a sales and marketing engine for practitioners
Today, more than 50,000 people visit the Meal Garden domain a month. These are all potential clients for practitioners. Generally speaking, anyone who engages with Meal Garden content is looking to improve their health in one way or another.
Applying the learnings: The Meal Garden Platform & Community
Technology is important but understanding how we can actually help our members change the habits of their clients s just as important. When it comes to behavior change, besides the coaching element, a big factor is the feedback loop.
This is where many existing systems fail their customers.
Think about it; you provide a PDF to a client and schedule a check-in. That’s a long feedback loop. At the follow-up stage, clients get into a position where their natural human instinct kicks in and they say exactly what the practitioner wants to hear.
How do you fix this?
You shorten the feedback loop. You change the focus of the practitioner from finding and creating to coaching and supporting.
“Health coaches have a superpower - nutrition. So put that at the center of your selling efforts and if you want to teach more people, the most effective way to do that is digital.” - Jeff
Meal Garden is built to help Practitioners focus on the things that matter
To do that, Meal Garden needs to be better than a PDF and more accessible than a PDF. Our members need to feel comfortable providing digital resources to any spectrum of people including someone who maybe isn’t that comfortable with a computer.
Big buttons, good workflows, and just overall really easy and enjoyable to use.
In doing this, the feedback loop closes which means you can get better momentum around changing behaviors.
It’s the idea of slowing down to speed up.
“Small microhabitats are what cause a shift.” - Kiki
Providing a tool that makes it fun and enjoyable to engage with helps set up a practice that makes it easy for practitioners to focus on what matters, without sacrificing the things that help clients achieve their goals.
How the name ‘Meal Garden’ came to be
The goal of the company is to help people with healthy eating. People go to a garden to get something natural and healthy that’s good for them. In this case, it’s not just about picking one fruit or vegetable but rather picking a meal.
A garden is not a place where things just grow and you go and take it. It needs to be cultivated, and you have to make an effort in order to reap the fruit in the garden.
Similarly, how practitioners need to invest time (seeds) in collecting and preparing the information, knowing what to recommend, and doing this prep work so when the time comes, it’s super easy and not time-consuming to craft a client's plan.
“We’re trying to provide a tool where practitioners with nutritional knowledge can cultivate their garden and invite their customers into the garden to eat healthier.” - Vlad
A look ahead…
The platform will continue to focus on three core principles:
Make it easier to manage the data
Provide better feedback loops
Attract an audience
What we're really looking to do is to push out to things like communities and groups.
We also want to connect the 50,000 people visiting Meal Garden, that are looking to live healthier with the Meal Garden Professional Community. Ultimately, let practitioners practice and automate as much of the sales and marketing as possible.
Finally, we’ll continue to seek out conversations within the community, from a root-cause lens to understand the barriers out there and to implement technology in ways that will break down those barriers.
Another thing we’re doing is looking at adjacent markets (Martech, AdTech, Learning Platforms, Executive Coaching, Consumer Entertainment, etc.) and bringing these lessons and best practices to the health industry or ‘wellpreneur’ industry and making it easier for everyone to build businesses they love which inherently makes the world a healthier place.
Key Takeaways
How Vlad and Jeff came together to build and run Meal Garden
Biggest surprises from 100 conversations with 100 practitioners
3 Major areas Meal Garden will address to help practitioners:
Making it easier to organize data
Providing better feedback loops about client behavioral changes
Ability to attract clients and grow your business
A practitioner’s superpower
The reason behind the name Meal Garden
Upcoming goals for Meal Garden to continue making the product more intuitive with 10-20 conversations a week
Inviting your feedback: What value did you get out of this podcast episode? What could we have done differently to make it a more successful listening experience for you? What questions do you wish were asked or elaborated on further? Let us know! Email the host directly: kiki.athanas@mealgarden.com
