Building a Wellness Practitioner Marketplace

Challenge

Wellness practitioners face the challenge of connecting with wellness seekers on a platform that aggregates healers and their diverse modalities in a holistic, full-service way.

During COVID, numerous at-home wellness platforms emerged, creating a crowded market. Our task was to develop a sustainable, adaptable model that could meet evolving market demands. The goal was to build a digital hub that addressed key issues: increasing awareness, establishing credibility, ensuring quality curation, and providing revenue opportunities for practitioners while supporting IAM ONE's business objectives.

Solution

IAM was established as a subscription-based marketplace connecting teachers and students to develop well-being practices. The platform allows students to discover teachers, learn from a health and wellness content library, buy well-being educational courses, and book one-on-one healing sessions. IAM was built to fill the gap in wellness digital education and support knowledgeable teachers looking to move into the digital product sector.

Results

IAM gathered 33 teachers across the critical 8 pillars of wellness and created over 78 original pieces of content to share to subscribers looking to curate their morning practice. Utilizing the teachers’ personal media platforms, we aggregated marketing efforts on a low budget to reach over 3 million people in one week in our target demographic with cross-social activations.

To help showcase the unique range of modalities offered, we positioned our live experiences in key wellness cities working with local facilitators, musicians, and cultural spaces. The experiential events demonstrated the quality of teachers and curation of the platform in an intimate community experience. Most events were attended by word of mouth from previous event attendees in cities across the world. Subscription activity rose 150% after each event proving the impact of community activations.

Both customers and teachers shared high regard for their experiences with IAM. Teachers felt supported and received new clients from the booking features and students explored the variety of offerings and curation of self-practices. Moms were the most active customer spending on average 15-30min on the platform. However, the founders decided to close the company during their Series A because vertical-focused modality businesses were dominating the paid advertising channels and making the cost to enter the market too high.