“We all know what it’s like to set resolutions and big, unattainable goals. We also know what it’s like to fail to change, due to how unrealistic big goals can sometimes be.”

Ever set a goal to start hitting the gym 7 days a week, then find you fall a bit short? That’s where MeYou Health’s free Daily Challenge web application comes in. It breaks down healthy living into one small, attainable challenge each day, and rewards you with points and badges as you gradually make steps to improve your well-being – and share your accomplishments with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Launched in 2009, MeYou Health, a social well-being company, has created a suite of free mobile and web apps that transform social networks into support systems to improve people’s well-being. Recognizing that people are overwhelmed and often fail when they try to make big, unrealistic health changes, MeYou Health suggests daily small actions and enhances social ties to inspire meaningful, lifelong change.

Founder Chris Cartter has more than 25 years of experience in the health and well-being industry, and most recently served as the CEO of QuitNet, a wildly popular online smoking cessation program he co-founded in the late ‘90’s.

MO:
Can you tell us more about your personal background and how it eventually led you to founding MeYou Health?

Chris:
I came to MeYou Health by way of Healthways, Inc. through the acquisition of QuitNet, the online smoking cessation company I founded. Once I joined the Healthways, Inc. Internet Innovation team in 2006, I helped shape the company’s Internet strategy. During that time, it become apparent that Healthways, Inc. wanted a channel by which they’d be able to reach out directly to consumers. That’s when the idea for MeYou Health began to take shape, and in 2009, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Healthways, MeYou Health was founded.

MO:
One great thing about MeYou Health’s website and apps is that it doesn’t give its users unattainable goals but instead simple action items. Can you explain the philosophy behind this different approach?

Chris:
We all know what it’s like to set resolutions and big, unattainable goals. We also know what it’s like to fail to change, due to how unrealistic big goals can sometimes be. At MeYou Health, we’re rooted in the belief that healthy small actions can create behavior change that is not only attainable, but also sustainable. In particular, Daily Challenge asks users to do one small healthy action every day alongside family and friends, the people around them that matter most. There’s research coming out of Stanford University from behavioral researcher B.J. Fogg that supports this approach. We’re also leveraging the latest behavior change research from James O. Prochaska, Ph.D., and the social networks findings of Nicholas Christakis to create products that not only make behavior change approachable through the idea of small actions but also we make it achievable by turning social networks into support systems.

MO:
With the thousands of health apps on the market, how have you been able to distinguish MeYou Health?

Chris:
MeYou Health is a social well-being company that has the support of one of the largest health and well-being improvement companies in the world, Healthways, Inc. We offer a freemium product, Daily Challenge, which is available to individual users and also with premium content to employers. It’s our ‘open-social’ platform that enables users in the employee setting to connect (and sometimes even have healthy competition) with users outside of their employer. This enables all users to have the social support of those who matter most to them throughout the experience.

Additionally, MeYou Health employs a talented team from diverse backgrounds, including game design, social media, and clinical research in order to develop products like Daily Challenge that are engaging and effective.

MO:
From the MeYou Health website it appears that there are a variety of features you can use to track health. Talk us through the user-experience using MeYou Health.

Chris:
In Daily Challenge, we use an abbreviated version of the Healthways’ Well-being Assessment tool called the Well-being Tracker for users to measure and monitor their well-being on a daily basis. We incorporate gaming mechanics and social sharing features into our products to serve as a way to track progress and engagement through points, levels, virtual goods, and the involvement of one’s own personal network without a lot of cognitive load. Unlike some of our competitors, ours are not goal setting products that require individuals to set their own goals, but rather provides an experience of accomplishing one small thing each day and sharing how you did it with a community of others also completing the challenge.

MO:
I really enjoyed reading about the Community Clash feature on the website. Can you tell us more about how this works and why you decided to include that specific aspect?

Chris:
In 2010, Community Clash was created in response to a White House led challenge, the Community Health Data Initiative (CHDI). CHDI is “a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health.”

Not surprisingly, our solution was to create a game. Community Clash is a health data game designed to take your typical “wall of statistics” and make it easy to discover the meaning of the health metrics that characterize communities. Our goal with Community Clash was to create a fun way to interact with data and, along the way, learn something about yourself, your friends and your community that might motivate you to act.

MO:
What is the revenue model for MeYou Health? Do people pay for the app or are there advertisements? Or both? Why did you choose this specific revenue model?

Chris:
Our web and mobile products are free to consumers. So you can download Monumental, our stair-climbing iPhone game, or Munch 5-a-day, our healthy eating app, for free in the iTunes Store. Daily Challenge is also free for consumers, where they can sign up using Facebook Connect at www.DailyChallenge.com.

Recently we launched Daily Challenge Tracks, offering users premium content in the form of specific sets of challenges for 28-days around targeted areas of well-being. Users may gain access to these tracks by earning enough tokens within the free product, or they can (soon) pay themselves for the premium content if they have not earned enough Tokens in the system to unlock a Key to the Track of their choice. In our business-to-business model, we will be offering premium content to employers so they can provide Daily Challenge and Tracks to their employees.