Debswilder

Health psychologist, Deborah Wilder, doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d rely on ready-meals. With a background in medical publishing, Deborah is passionate about wellbeing, but when her son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, home cooking became a nightmare.

Type 1 diabetes is treated by self administering insulin several times a day and it’s up to the patient (or their caregiver) to work out the doses based on the amount of carbohydrate they eat and drink.

“It’s really frightening” says Deborah, “because overnight you have to learn to play the role of a health professional. Doses are constantly changing and if you use too much insulin, then it can be fatal.” Figuring out carbohydrate content of home cooked meals was a nightmare, and Deborah and her family soon fell into a routine of eating packaged foods which are labeled with nutritional content, “because we felt safe” she says.

It was this that inspired Deborah to set up Health Apps Ltd. The company’s first app, Cook & Count, helps people to measure all kinds of nutritional information in their home cooked meals, helping them to better manage their diet and diet-related health conditions.

Simpleweb has recently teamed up with Cook & Count to create a new, scalable version of the app based on the existing MVP. I caught up with Deborah to find out how exactly this health psychologist with no technical background came to found a tech startup…

From medical texts to Goldman Sachs

Deborah spent a while working as an editor in medical publishing, working on several mental health and diabetes books (“I didn’t know at the time that was informing the rest of my career” she says).

‘It was soulless because it’s just making money for money’s sake, without actually creating anything”

She soon found herself working in a contract role in the presentations department for mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs, a job she enjoyed with a “dynamic working environment” but which she ultimately describes as “soulless”. “I like the fast moving stuff” says Deborah, “but it was soulless because it’s just making money for money’s sake, without actually creating anything.”

Deborah eventually ended up following her heart, studying for a degree in psychology while at Goldman Sachs, followed by a Master’s degree in health psychology.

Deborah ended up taking on academic roles researching health behaviour and health risk communication, looking at how to help people make healthy decisions. It was this research that sparked her interest in health behaviours.

Going solo in the app business

It was when Deborah’s son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes that she became inspired to start Health Apps Ltd. I point out that while most people in her situation would wonder why there wasn’t a reliable, easy way to calculate carbohydrate intake, very few would quit their day jobs and pivot their entire careers to fix that problem.

“I get frustrated when things don’t make sense or time is being wasted”

“It was like a coming together of these different strands of my experience” says Deborah, speaking of her background in medical publishing, investment banking and health psychology.

Deborah’s academic work had scratched an inquisitive itch, but the pace was slow and the work often unrewarding. She recounts one time working on a 10-year feasibility study, working out whether some kind of research would eventually be possible. “Right from the beginning it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t feasible” says Deborah, “and I get frustrated when things don’t make sense or time is being wasted”.

It was during her time as a project manager at the Forestry Commission, that Deborah began working on Health Apps. “I was working on the app in the evenings and weekends and I was really tired” she says. “In March 2013, the NHS launched the NHS Health Apps Library and for me that was the key, the turning point.” It was this trigger that made Deborah decide the time was now and she immediately went about setting up a company.

Raising money and building an app company with no tech

Deborah remortgaged her home to pay for the development of her MVP, hiring a local, Bristol-based UI designer, and an offshore development team to build an iOS app.

“It was through WebStart that I got my further investment”

Next, Deborah applied for, and won, a local enterprise grant, before joining WebStart Bristol, a local internet startup incubator. “I was working on my own and using off-shore developers and I wanted some mentoring. As a single founder it was quite difficult because, while you can bounce ideas off friends and family, they’re already putting up with you, paying for you all the time, and maybe they don’t want to be talking about [my startup] the whole time as well. WebStart was great for mentoring and I got a bit of investment as well. It was really good to meet other people in the same situation and it was through WebStart that I got my further investment.”

A bit of a blip

Before she raised more money, however, Deborah had a “bit of a blip”, wondering if she should continue with the business. When she left her job at the Forestry Commission, Deborah had given herself two years to start making money. As her deadline crept up, she started to reflect on her decision.

“It was quite tempting at that point to just jack it in, but it didn’t feel right”

“I had started doing some psychology consultancy work because I needed to earn more money” she explains. “Then I got really busy with that, earning quite a lot of money… It was quite tempting at that point to just jack it in, but it didn’t feel right. My heart was with the app and the thousands of users already relying on it.” Deborah was getting a lot of support from people who were currently using the app and many contacted her to thank her and ask for versions of Cook & Count to be made available in their countries.

“Sales carried on without me doing anything” says Deborah, “so I really felt that I had already established an interest, established a market and my heart was really into it. So I took a bit of a breather for a few months.” It was when she decided to really go for it that Deborah bought on her next investor.

Once she had the cash, Deborah started looking for support with the app. “There’s lots of things that I wanted to do with the app, particularly to build a back-end so that we could make the content more dynamic, communicate with our users, make it a lot more powerful and expand the app in loads of different ways. I had all these plans for it…. and with that investment I then started looking for development partners.” It was at this point that Deborah teamed up with Simpleweb.

Entrepreneurship and happiness

Deborah is surrounded by entrepreneurs, with her sister, partner and several friends all running their own businesses. “I got a lot of support” she says, “which is really, really important, particularly in the first couple of years. I spent two years not earning any money and it’s really, really tough.”

“You have work out how long it will take to break”

On the topic of money, Deborah is the first to admit times can be tough as an entrepreneur. “You have work out how long it will take to break, you know, whether you can carry on or not.”

When I ask her to explain more about how she felt in the earlier days, she says that while she was sensitive at first, she soon toughened up. “You have to be thick skinned, because you’ve got to carry on evolving and believing in yourself.” She remembers recently her son asking her why she had to be so cocky. “I’m not” she said “but if I don’t believe in myself then who else is going to? I think that’s what makes people succeed, just being able to carry on despite what other people are saying, or despite the risks.”

“If you’re doing something that you really love,” says Deborah “then you do find the time because it doesn’t feel like going to work… I’m very happy and that’s the most important thing.”

Deborah’s parting advice to entrepreneurs is to “be brave, and be yourself.”

You can find out more about Cook & Count, including download links, on the Health Apps website.

If you have a product or startup you’d like to discuss, get in touch with Simpleweb today.

Image: Courtesy of Deborah Wilder

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