Mike Jalonen is the Founder and CEO of Habit Driven, a cutting-edge mobile app currently in development and set to revolutionize how people form habits and reach their goals. He is an entrepreneur with over two decades of experience building marketing and technology companies. Mike is also the Co-founder and Partner of AI Wizdom, an AI education and innovation school that helps people become proficient in AI.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Mike Jalonen talks about Habit Driven and how it will help people
How Habit Driven differentiates itself in the app marketplace
How Mike got into the app business
What’s the Habit Driven business model?
Mike speaks about habit formation and tracking for personal growth
Tips for building a promising app
In this episode…
At the end of the day, people are the sum of their daily practices. So revolutionizing how we approach habit-building is fundamental to achieving our goals.
According to Mike Jalonen, it's essential for people to eliminate guesswork or inconsistency in their habit-tracking routine. However, there are many habit-tracking apps available that are unhelpful. He recommends finding an app with AI integration designed to help identify, track, and improve habits for a happier and more productive life. With AI-powered assistance, the app can adapt to people's unique needs and goals, providing tailored recommendations and reminders to keep them on track.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker sits down with Mike Jalonen, Founder and CEO of Habit Driven, to discuss how people can thrive by improving their habits. Mike explains how Habit Driven helps people, how it differentiates itself with AI integration, its business model, and tips for building a successful app.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of our past guests have included Mark Firmin CEO of eTreem and Shelli Taylor, CEO of Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. Today I get to speak with Mike Jalonen and the founder of Habit Driven. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik! the leader in enterprise forms processing. When the last step to earning your clients business requires processing forums, don't ruin a good relationship with a bad experience. Instead, get Quik Forms to make processing forums a great experience and the easiest part of your transaction, visit quikforms.com to get started. Now, before I introduce today's guest, I have to give a big thank you to my cousin Michael Sterk who introduced me to Mike about 15 years ago, who knew we'd become such great friends. Now introduce today's guest, Mike Jalonen is a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of entrepreneurial experience building, marketing and technology companies. Currently, he is a Habitpreneur, who is passionately building a revolutionary app focused on helping people build better habits. Mike's vision is to empower over 1 million people to fulfill their potential through continuous habit transformation before the year 2025. Mike, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Mike Jalonen 1:38
Thanks for having me, Rich.
Richard Walker 1:40
Look, if you haven't heard this podcast before, I talked with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they build and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Mike, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Mike Jalonen 1:55
That's a great question. Well, I think we can all agree that we're the sum of the things that we do on a daily basis, and all those things come from the habits that we have. So our business helps people identify the habits that they have become mindful of the things that they do, and transfer those habits to better habits to improve their lives.
Richard Walker 2:18
So I mean, habits are conscious and subconscious, right? Are we focused on trying to change the little ticks and things we don't like? Are we trying to do things that are greatly improving it or just reinforcement? Which ones do you focus on?
Mike Jalonen 2:31
Actually, by definition, habits tend to be subliminal and things that we don't think about. They're the actions that we do when we're not thinking about what we're doing. But in order to create habits, to have your subconscious mind do the thing, we have to be aware of what we're doing. And in order to make changes, we have to track those habits. But after a period of time, there's really not a need to track habits that you do on a regular basis, because they are habits and at that point, the reason you'd be tracking them, it's only to ensure that you're improving on your journey. Right.
Richard Walker 3:05
So let's take a habit that I think a lot of people can relate to, diet. So many people want to change their diet. And is that a habit? Is that a routine? I mean, how would you put that into perspective?
Mike Jalonen 3:17
Yeah, that's a double directional. Most people think with diet, everybody's trying to lose weight, especially here in America. But the reality is, there are people that are trying to improve their energy levels that are people that are trying to gain weight, and gain muscle and things like that. So diet plays a important part. And there's a lot of apps out there that help people track their diet, macro and macro nutrition, things like that. My Fitness Pal, for example. And those apps are very specific to tracking a diet. And then there's other apps, along the same lines that are very specific to, let's say, tracking your steps, or your exercise your weight routine. Or if you do affirmations, our app intends to integrate with those very specific apps so that that data will feed into our app. But our app is much more along the lines of seven different pillars which are available on our website. So everything from financial habits to exercise and diet and things like that. So, at a broad stroke, there are very simple things like I want to intermittent fast. And so I want to make sure that I do that three times a week. And our app is very good at making sure that you do that three times a week that's flexible that you get to choose which days because one week may be different because you're traveling. But when it gets really specific to I want an apple to be when I want to eat an apple, I need the app to know that it's 90 calories and it needs to be recorded in a certain way. We are intended to integrate with existing platforms that have already done that, that have very specialized characteristics.
Richard Walker 5:03
Yeah, my wife is a big fan of My Fitness Pal. And she's used that extensively, among some other ones for diet nutrition. So that's part of where I'm coming from. I'm curious, though, is your product, a scheduler? I mean, describe it to me, what does it actually doing that helps people achieve better habits?
Mike Jalonen 5:21
Great question again. So just to be clear, on the App Store, or the Android Play Store, you'll find over 100, different habit-tracking apps, and many of them, they all operate a little bit differently. But at the core, what they're doing is allowing you to be mindful of the goals that you're trying to accomplish, and attract them over time. And make sure you stay consistent. So what's kind of unique about our app is, there's a set routine, a routine is just a series of habits that happen in a specific order. And so you may have a morning routine and night routine and a daily routine. And then sometimes you'll do things in the morning that you have to do at night, because you didn't do them in the morning. So the ability to be flexible in drag and drop habits and move them is really important. That's one thing that our app does that some other apps do, but not many, what makes our app a little bit different there as well. And some of the other ones that do this as we are integrating AI, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. What AI does, is it evaluates how your habits stack up and how often you do them. And when you miss them, and when you pass on them and all that stuff. And it will reorder if you choose to, it will allow you to reorder those habits in an order that makes most amount of sense. So that you're kind of ticking them off in the general order that you have. That makes sense there.
Richard Walker 6:52
Oh, that's cool. That's really cool. I mean, if you have an AI component, it kind of acts like a personal assistant, and a coach at the same time. So I mean, I'm thinking about like my own life. For example, I had some back pain, I took ibuprofen for too many days in a row, I got stomach problems as little result of that. I then said, oh, I'll take cayenne pepper, which did resolve it. And I did that while I was in pain, and just barely out of pain. And then I forgot all about it. And I wanted to make that a habit of my life. And I keep forgetting to do it. And I need that AI to tell me hey, you keep forgetting to do it. Go do it.
Mike Jalonen 7:26
You've got it. You got it just right. That's exactly. And obviously, there's plenty more applications for how we're using AI. But that was one of the original concepts. So yeah, right on.
Richard Walker 7:41
So Mike, I mean, our audience doesn't know my history with you. And I've seen you building companies and being successful in so many different ways. Why this? What made you say, I got to build an app? I mean, there's like you said, there's hundreds of apps out there.
Mike Jalonen 7:54
Yeah, if someone were to look at my LinkedIn profile, and try to guess what my next business was going to be, they probably wouldn't have perfected that Habit Driven was going to be the next business. Most of my business opportunities in the things that I've worked on, have been around b2b business marketing technology companies. It was in November of last year, I was sitting down kind of beginning to plan for what the new year is going to be. And it was just about the time that open AI, chatGPT came out. And I was enamored with even the first version of chatGPT. And I was thinking to myself, it was just a time in my life when I was looking at the next thing that I was going to do, but I didn't know what it was going to be. And I was thinking to myself, what is it that I can do that would bring good to people, that is something that would help me improve on something that I'm already doing in my life. And weirdly, on another monitor, when I was looking at my screen, I saw my very elaborate habit tracking Google Spreadsheet, which nobody else would understand what it is, except for me, because it's just grown over the years, to something that's just pretty convoluted, to be honest with you, but it works for me. And I'm gonna go to the App Store and go look at apps that exist out there. And I did. And I found that they were either way too simple, way too complex, or a lot of them were dormant, meaning they hadn't been worked out in a long time. And the technologies had changed and things like that. But not one of them had a mention of AI and I had this vision, just from playing with chatGPT for a few days, I hadn't visually, this could change a lot of different things about personal development and AI, can do a lot of different things in the habit transformation. So I took the Google Spreadsheet literally copied and pasted the rows and the columns that I told ChatGPT these columns mean these things, these columns mean these things. And I asked it to analyze and give me a summary of what it thought and I was blown away by it telling me things like well you tend to miss your morning with Mike because I had to tell it morning with Mike as an exercise routine that I do. But it would tell me which days I missed it. And it would correlate that with other things that I was doing. And I thought that was just brilliant.
Richard Walker 10:12
So wait a second, you're introducing something I hadn't even thought of, which is you're tracking your habits, you're already tracking it. I mean, me, I would just say I want to do this exercise. You're actually saying whether you did it or didn't do it every day?
Mike Jalonen 10:28
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And for the last several years. Yeah. It's part of my DNA now. I mean, don't get me wrong, we all fall off the wagon. And some days we don't feel well.
Richard Walker 10:42
But we don't admit it, we all put on this document.
Mike Jalonen 10:45
It's okay. There's a philosophy behind it, too. But the reality is, seeing what happened when I was able to do that opened up my entire world to this vision of an app that not only gives insights, right, what we just talked about is what I would call insights, I give it data, and it gives it back to me, as a software developer, we don't need to create custom reports or things like that, there's Dashboard components, but you can ask, we call Haby is our habit coach, that's included, that's their AI coach that's in the app, you can ask Haby anything you want. And because of the language model, it's able to understand what that is, and respond accordingly. But that was just the beginning to be honest, that's just what got me excited. The more we moved into it, the more I realized the potential to get this app in a lot of people's hands. So as we know, I mean, you've been in software even longer than I have, the marketing component to even b2b b2c, really, there are different strategies. But if the company can't help enough people to sustain a revenue model to grow and improve, then it doesn't much matter. So I didn't want to just create an app that was good for the few I wanted to create something that can be distributed easily and efficiently and cost-effectively. And so in my mind, I was thinking of all these great content creators, all these great authors, YouTubers and whatnot, respected people that bring good value. And I wanted to take that content. And I want to bring it into the app. So if you didn't know what habit to create in order to reach your goal, you could learn from the app, you could ask questions. So Jack Canfield, for example, is really good at affirmations, and teaching people about affirmations, and you expressed interest in affirmations, would you like to learn some more about that, and these are some suggested habits. And here's the further resources. So I figured if I could get content from these individual contributors, and they can all be on a platform, these are curated by the company, the parent company's life apps. So this is our first flagship product. The idea would be that Jack Canfield, for example, we want to promote this to his base, he has a very big base. And I'm just throwing names out there, not necessarily saying that we have a connection to these people, both a Tony Robbins as well wanting to do that. And so the rising tide floats, all boats, people are coming to use an app, because they're told about it from the person that gave them all the content that gave all the education, but those people didn't have a tool for their clients or their base, to actually take the information you're giving them and track and see and monitor and get better and improve on it. So now, those were the first two reasons insights and training this channel and trainers contents, people can be educated and so that the content creators can get to those people and give them this tool. Those were the first things that popped into my mind.
Richard Walker 14:05
There's a couple of things that crossed my mind like this is ideal for a friend of mine, Kala SOTA. He is an expert on getting the right amount of sleep and building longevity in your life. So he teaches people how to sleep properly. And so I have the struggle. My kids keep me up my work keeps me up. My lifestyle choices keep me up. And I have to actually Set Reminder go to bed. And this might help me do that. Because it might help me track that and plan for it and then prompt me. I presume it's going to come up with notifications and such right.
Mike Jalonen 14:38
Oh, yeah. But I would be honest with you, you have an apple right, your iPhone. Apple Health does a great job with that. And right now you can take advantage of that. Now the reason I say that is because we're planning to integrate with Apple Health. So there's already a tool for that but in order to get that information you need to go back to Apple Health and that doesn't correlate to your diet or your exercise, or your sleep patterns or things like that. That does a little bit. So that's why what I was saying earlier is we're integrating with all these different individual habit trackers to get all of your data in one spot, and then use AI to help you understand what's actually happening in your life.
Richard Walker 15:18
So the only thought that came to my head when you were talking about this is the business model. And you know me, I love business models. And I'm thinking, wow, you have like this really black and white, fail or succeed type of measurement. If your customer really gets a lot of value out of this, they'll never want to leave. If they get no value, they're not going to pay. And it's all about them achieving their goals, which is really super well-aligned, right? I mean, I love having a product that's aligned with my customers goals where I get paid with, they achieved what they want. This is really cool, Mike, so this is what made you want to start it. But I mean, come on, entrepreneurs have ideas all the time, you could have kept going with your spreadsheet, why keep driving? Why invest so much time and effort and money, I'm sure to get this out there? How did you come up with this goal of a million people helping them achieve their potential?
Mike Jalonen 16:09
I have to be really honestly, this is the first business that I've ever created, where I didn't start with a spreadsheet to see how much money we would make or what the target market was, or any of that stuff, the initial concept was just pure amazement for what we could build that doesn't exist out there. And in the back of my mind was it's a low-cost startup, we're talking hundreds of 1000s of dollars, not millions of dollars, we don't need VC funds or anything like that it's self-funded. That the concepts for me was the worst-case scenario is I'm going to have something that I can use for the rest of my life. And for my close friends, who were part of the product design phase, because we didn't start building anything. Until we spoke to a lot of people. And then we did smart, we design screens and ask people like, is this going to take too long? Should we be able to do this shortcut? Or do you feel like that these steps need to be taken or? So we did all of that upfront. And then I went back, of course, before we started committing significant amount of time, which is more valuable than money in a lot of cases. Before we even did that, went back and then did a spreadsheet and see, well, how many people do we think that we can help and we started looking at, what is the personal development space, how many people actually contribute? What's the drop off rate, obviously, it's pretty high. It's really good on January 1, and on January 10, all sudden, the user base continues to go down. And that's why a lot of these apps by the way, like you can buy a lifetime membership for 30 hours, or you could pay $10 a month. And also we try to do that. That's not our plan by the way, our plan is, if it doesn't bring value, you shouldn't use it. And that's it, we don't want to do those kind of things. So long story short, when we went back and did the math and pulled out the spreadsheet, and then looked at the channel opportunity, along with some other value options that we have that we haven't talked about yet. We felt like if you were to take the top 10 influencers in personal development, and they were to be able to offer this to 1% of their entire base. It would be 50 to 70 million people easily worldwide. So those are the kinds of things it's interesting. The whole target market all that we just had to make sure that there was a big enough market. We're not trying to define our market share or anything like that, our mission is to help people.
Richard Walker 18:43
I'm with you on that. I really am. Because I mean, I'm in the forums business. How many forums can we add to our library? We're almost at 40,000, we could be at 400,000, we could be at 40 million. It's not about how big the market is. Is it big enough? Can we have a big enough impact site? I love that way of thinking. Now, Mike, you know I wrote a book on how to change. It's called It's My Life! I Can Change If I Want To. But do you have a copy? I have a copy.
Mike Jalonen 19:06
I literally have it. It's always been on my desk for I don't know, how many years ago did you give me 10 years ago?
Richard Walker 19:16
Yeah, I published it in 2011. So of course, I'm passionate about enabling people and empowering people to be their best version of themselves, which I think stems from change. So I want to debate this with you a little bit. Is a habit, a routine? Is it a belief? Is it deep-rooted? Is it on the surface? How do you see this psychologically manifesting? Your app is helping I think build the structure the routine to make it repetitive and therefore become natural? How do you really view a habit in the person's mind?
Mike Jalonen 19:52
You know, a habit by definition is just a task that you do without thinking about it. Frankly enough, that's all it is. And I think as we met and routine is just a set of habits that you do in a particular order. A lot of these words get entertained a lot. What the purpose of that habit tracking app is, firstly is to be mindful of things that you want to do that you're currently not doing. I don't need to set a habit that says, wake up and brush my teeth, I've been doing that my entire life is literally the first thing I do after using the restroom, like, literally goes in that order. It happens every day, it's the same thing. If you were to observe somebody that ties their shoes, everybody does a little different. Some start with the right some start with the left, but you do it the same every single time. You don't need to track those, things you need to track it. So you know what, I want to change my diet. And I want to do intermittent fasting again, to use that example. Or I want to make sure that my calorie count is under 1500 calories a day in this particular scenario, whatever it may be, if you're not doing that now, the first thing you need to do is be mindful the things that you need to do in order to do it. And until it becomes a habit until you do it without thinking about it tracking it becomes very important. And some of these are moving targets like one of the problems with people who undergo this habit transformation processes, a lot of times, they're like, okay, I'm gonna start going to the gym tomorrow, I'm gonna go to the gym five days a week, I'm gonna go an hour a day, I'm going to. And so there's a lot of science behind habit transformation, the idea for people to do that kind of thing and stay consistent on it and start from scratch and get there and actually be successful with a big grandiose habit like that, and having 10 of them on top of it that they never had before, the chances of success are very small, it may be on day one, you get up and you put some shoes on that you usually don't put on, you put those shoes on, because those are your gym shoes on. And you don't even make it to the gym. But you can check off the box because you got there. And then the next day, maybe you get in your car, and you don't even want to go to the gym, he's like, all right, I'm gonna at least open the door and shut the door, I got a gym, then the next day... Baby steps, baby steps. So by the way, that's some of the education that you get through some of these apps. And so I think for habit formation habit tracking app, the goal is not necessarily to it's not a to-do list, that we have lots of to-do list. This is a mindful thought process that helps you transfer and transform where you're at now, to where you want to be by changing your behaviors. And if you don't track it, it won't get, I shouldn't say it won't, but the chances of success are much less.
Richard Walker 22:36
So one of the reasons I love the concept of your app is going back to my book, I believe that the best way to change is to understand the belief that's driving current behavior, and change that belief to a better one that encourages and supports the new behavior that you want. It's like you talking about going to the gym to lose weight, or to get into shape or to I don't know, be able to do a marathon, whatever it is, whatever your goal is, you have to first believe that you can do that. And you have to have the right belief around why you're doing it. Otherwise, the pain is too great. No matter how many times you're reminded to go to the gym. If you haven't believed in the rationale to go to the gym, it's really hard to get there. But at the same time, there's another way to form new beliefs. And that's with an app like yours, it's just to do the work. I think Tony Robbins said that if you are not feeling great, and you stand up, look to the sky of smile, you do that enough, you can't help but feel new energy and feel better and feel more positive. And it's the same thing. I think, if your Habit Driven app is helping me be mindful of the things I want to accomplish, even if I haven't reconciled why I want to accomplish them perfectly, you're still going to help them get there.
Mike Jalonen 23:43
Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said about what you mentioned as well, though, I think identity-based thinking like, if you're just going after the end goal and saying I want to lose 50 pounds, or 10 pounds, or whatever it may be, that's kind of an uphill battle to stay on that path once you've reached there. So you need to change your identity, I'm the kind of person that is this weight, whatever it may be. And then I'm going to the kinds of things that that person does. And then you can use our app to ensure that you're doing those kinds of things. If you're already doing those things, you wouldn't need this app for that purpose, right? Because you would already have been there. And so I definitely believe that goal-oriented habit tracking is the surface level, the real juice here is people changing their identity and then understanding what does somebody who is 165 pounds as an example, if that's your goal, what does that person do? What are the things that I could do that that person does? And that's how you get there. It's not I need to lose 15 pounds. So I'm going to do these things, those don't stick to me.
Richard Walker 24:49
Right. I was gonna ask you something else about this. So you obviously care a lot about the customer success, but I also know you care a lot because you're a technologist at heart too, you care a lot about the customer experience. How did you go about designing this app to be different than the rest of the apps in the world and to create an experience that was actually intuitive and easy to use and makes people want to keep coming back to your app? What are some of the techniques that you came up with?
Mike Jalonen 25:15
Well, those two things are obviously very closely aligned. If the experience sucks, people stopped using. I don't know how to be more simple. Especially this app was designed to be used almost as much as your text messaging app on your phone. I mean, news throughout the day, I personally track 40 Habits a day. That's me, that's crazy, Mike, that doesn't mean everybody does that, or should do that. So the user experience is extremely important. The speed at which the news moved from screen to screen is important, the ability to create, we kind of follow the apple mentality, just keep it really simple and easy to understand. But the ability to drag and drop cards and remember what those cards were for the next day, when you get up, or if you only did it one day to not change them for the following days, using the AI and things like that were really important. One very interesting one, we'll see how it goes. In the next couple of weeks, we're releasing this to our family members, which was the original ability for people to be part of this at an early stage and, and get a lifetime membership. We're introducing it to them, and we'll get some more input. But I think one of the most interesting parts is, I can say that I did red light therapy today. And that's great, right? Like red light therapy can help you in five different goals that you have, or 10, or whatever. But if that's it, and I leave it at that, and it's just I did it, or I didn't do it, it's one of the four types of tracking habits that we have. The challenge with that is I didn't provide any feedback. I didn't provide any notes. I didn't provide any camera, I didn't provide any voice. So we allow people to tag their habits. There is no requirement you can do just yes, no, and I did it, I didn't do it, I drank five glasses of water, that's a quantity, or I did 50% of what I was supposed to that's a percentage, you can do all those things. But if you take the time, and energy to actually record video, or audio, video or notes, AI will help you understand what you were feeling when you did certain things like that, and so now you can start understanding why you did or did not do things. So we want to encourage people. So I'll just give you an example of the dashboard has things that we call habit cards. And these are the things that you can move up and down and create and teams and do all that great stuff. If you just swipe right, it says I did it, if you swipe left, it says I didn't do it. Just there's a little snack bar at the bottom of the app to add a note, if you add a note, you're gonna forget a lot more value, because all those notes are going to be attached to that particular habit on that particular day. And it allows you to analyze and the way that you can do the notes is really simple. You don't have to just type it, you can record it, you can just take it off your camera roll or whatnot, we did a lot of those things that we literally went through every single app on the App Store. And we liked this, we don't like that we'd like this, we like that, but we don't like the way that it does that. And then we layered on AI on top of it, which we couldn't really go look at another app that did that. So that division is at the end of this, this won't be available in the first release. But I can be sitting in bed at the end of the night and say you know what I really just didn't enjoy going on my jog. I forgot to drink as much water as I used to, was that as opposed to I don't know exactly how much I did, I can do a really good job tracking it today. And I'm really looking forward to going on my run tomorrow. But I'm nervous because I've got a breakfast meeting before that. And it would automatically go start changing and turning the quantities and doing whatever it needs to do. And you can just have a dialogue with or it can ask you in a chatbot format. So those are the directions that we're going. And this is a user experience that people, especially people that use chatGPT or any chatbot for example, love, like it's free-flowing.
Richard Walker 29:11
You just reminded me of a principle. You're familiar with the 2% rule. You remember that. Thinking of the 1% rule right now? Or is it the one, well, I think it's 2%. But it can be 1%. It's if you eat a Big Mac every single day, you're not gonna die tomorrow. But over in the long term of doing that you're gonna have bad arteries and you're gonna get fatter, these are poor choices, you consistently make their small choices, right? And if you made the opposite choice, a small, incremental beneficial choice, you would see incremental improvements with big changes over a long period of time. I'm hearing you talk about your habit app where if you do the activity, but you make no notes, you can't go back in time and remember how you felt, you can't remember what you struggled with, because eventually you're going to change if you do it, but it'd be nice to hear that feedback from the past that you gave yourself And to see the triumphs that you overcame and the struggles you ever came to get to this point in the future. But also, I imagine, if you're doing that, you're going to be able to correlate that with other users potentially, where they can all come together. Everybody is at this stage, they're struggling with this. And then you give them better feedback. Like, hey, this first week is really hard at the gym, etc, I'm still optimistic about what you're building here, Mike.
Mike Jalonen 30:25
I'm so glad you brought that up. Because that leads to the fourth way we're going to use AI, which I didn't even think about. It was brought to my attention from other people, we have a very small chat based server on discord, which is a terrible name for a champion servers. Anyhow, regardless. So here's the idea, when I originally created this, I'm a pretty driven person myself, that's where Habit Driven came from, like, I'm just very tenacious, and I don't expect a lot of people to be in, that's not always a good thing. But nonetheless, I was just thinking about creating an app that was able to help put all this together, the AI component was great. But the reality is, I think 50% of the company is an app and 50% of the community. And because we are learning from, we were helping, we never shared data from one user to the other or anything like that, of course, we don't sell data, none of that.
Richard Walker 31:28
Is my actual weight loss.
Mike Jalonen 31:29
No, or that you want to lose weight for that matter. But you can opt in to AI matching. And so here's something that's really important. There's a lot of components to habit change that makes them effective. One is making sure that you don't bite off too much that you can't chew. One is your environment. If you're trying to quit drinking, you probably shouldn't be hanging out at the bar very often, those kind of things. But another one, another big one is accountability. So you're either accountable yourself, or you have an accountability partner. And ideally, it's both. And so imagine, we're upwards of a million users on our platform globally across the world. And you have similar habits to other people. And we know that obviously. So if you opt into the service, we can match make you using AI, to an accountability partner to help you be the most successful you can possibly be. And this is one of the most exciting things because I see a lot of these habit-tracking apps out there, and they're just pure technology. The reality is pure technology is not going to solve the problem. This is a effort that requires a personal touch as well. And so we believe that we can foster a community of people that have like-minded interests and connect people. And that's more of a December, January timeframe, rollout. But starting on day one, as people are using this app, we're helping them build their database, so that they can find those people if they wish to do.
Richard Walker 33:05
I love it. I love this concept. Look, we're gonna have to wrap up here. But I do have another question. Before we do that. I wanted to ask how should people connect with you? What's the best way to find you?
Mike Jalonen 33:16
I think every single social media platform work. On the website, there's a little bio about myself, and there's my Twitter and my LinkedIn profile, I would suggest Twitter is probably the best way to leave me a message.
Richard Walker 33:32
Okay, cool. So here's my last question. Given that you started an app for habits, who has had the biggest influence on why you wanted to build this product.
Mike Jalonen 33:42
I would say there's been many, but without doubt, I've probably read the book a dozen times, it would be Atomic Habits by James Clear, he sold over 10 million copies. I believe the book is four or five years old. He does a lot of social media, shout-out and then just great insights that go well beyond the book. James has a way in a methodology of taking and aggregating a lot of what other people said before him. And he's self-mentioned this, that he's done his own research. And he's aggregated, but by all means, James Clear's Atomic Habits has been, by far the most inspirational, influential and educational tool and author and I would love to meet him someday. But yeah, that would be the driving force.
Richard Walker 34:36
I'm sure you will get that chance. I can imagine that this product takes off so well that he becomes at least a user of it and sees it and sees the benefit of it. At least that's what I hope for you. Really, truly awesome. Like this is so great. I want to give a big thank you to Mike Jalonen, the founder of Habit Driven for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out Mike's website at habitdriven.ai and don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion, and we'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today.
Mike Jalonen 35:15
Thanks for having me Rich. Great to see you and I can't wait to visit.
Outro 35:20
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