(Ep 39) JOON -> Unlocking better wellness benefits for employees 🌱
Jon Shooshani | Co-Founder & President
Hey friends,
Back again with another edition of The Founder recap - this is Episode 39. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.
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Mission control:
Learn -> Founder favorite resources
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And who am I?
I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.
Let’s get it.
This Week’s Episode (Ep 39) 🌱
Guest -> Jon Shooshani, Co-Founder & President of JOON
Mission -> JOON (joon.io) is on a mission to maximize the physical, mental, and financial health of the ever-changing workforce
Episode available on -> Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Website
In this episode we talk with Jon about…
👶 The origin story of JOON
🤔 How to know when it’s time to pivot your startup (from Avo -> JOON)
🍏 How Joon enables wellness benefits for employees
🧑🏽🤝🧑🏼 How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and why it’s important
🔮 Exciting emerging trends -> mushrooms, plants & connected fitness
🍞 Brainstorm of the week -> DTC bread subscriptions & cloud kitchens
Summary 🔍
What is JOON and how did Jon get started?
Jon is a first time founder, having previously started Avo, a wellness based consumer spending card that pivoted into Joon in 2019.
After onboarding their first 500 cardholders onto Avo and analyzing the max savings they could enable for customers overtime, Jon and his Co-Founder Sebastian decided to hard-pivot the business into a wellness benefits program for employers.
JOON is a corporate wellness program that makes it easy for companies to offer flexible benefits around wellbeing.
Employers get the freedom to choose wellness and lifestyle options that are meaningful to them and the JOON software automates the reimbursement process to eliminate the administrative burden.
JOON currently offers spending categories across fitness, food, mental health, family care, education, donations and student loan repayment.
Today, JOON has seen rapid growth as companies shift their priorities to employee wellbeing in light of the pandemic.
JOON’s sweet spot is high-growth companies with 50-1000 employees that are either:
Currently enabling wellness benefits through a clunky, manual or expensive process
Looking to ramp up access to wellness benefits in the future
🚀 Here’s why I’m a fan and excited about the future for JOON 🚀
Health and wellness has never been more important to employees. While the Covid pandemic rapidly accelerated the “work from anywhere” movement, it also shined a spotlight on the importance of mental, physical and emotional health.
There has also been a proliferation of new health and fitness companies that have emerged as better solutions with cult followings - think Peloton, Y7 yoga, Eight Sleep, Calm, etc.
Prior to JOON, if companies wanted to offer reimbursements to employees for these types of services, it required a heavy lift and manual verification processes. The hassle and headache often deterred small -midsized companies from enabling the benefit.
JOON offers a turn key solution for companies who want to provide wellbeing benefits to their employees. For the company, they simply work with the JOON team to select categories that matter to them - this could include food and health as well as student loans and child care. JOON handles the rest.
The wide range of options and flexible onboarding suggests that if the emphasis on health and wellness continues growing, so will JOON. I’m super bullish on the space and their solution.
Jon’s Startup Manifesto 📜
What’s a Startup Manifesto?
During each episode, I ask all of my founder guests this question:
If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?
Here’s what Jon had to say:
Prioritize your own wellbeing – you need to have your cup full in order to effectively give and support your employees and customers. We’re seeing a shift in leaders and CEOs talking about mental health and shifting from growth at all cost to mindful, sustainable growth.
Find ways to be generous. In today’s world, it’s harder to take someone out to dinner or coffee, but those gestures still matter. Don’t hoard your relationships – if you think people should be connected, connect them. It will come back to you.
Take time to be strategic vs being tactical. You waste time if you don’t take a step back to look at the bigger picture to prioritize what needs focus and the most attention.
Don’t waste time building things no one wants or cares about. In our first company, we spent 6-12 months in product development. With JOON we spent 2 months to build an MVP. With JOON, we weren’t married to the product, but were instead more focused on creating a vehicle to most effectively fulfill our mission.
Have a strong and genuine why. Doing something that is purpose driven can make it a little easier. When your back is against the wall and you feel like giving up, having something that’s larger than yourself and your team is the best type of motivation.
What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔
After reflecting on my conversation with Jon, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:
Sometimes, you have to pivot 👍🏽
Picture this…
You come up with a revolutionary idea.
You’re stoked.
You’re hesitant to do a deep competitive assessment because you fear someone has thought of the idea before and is already years ahead of you. But you do it anyways.
Why?
Because this is the one. This is the idea that is going to change everything for you.
You start looking around and you can’t find anything on the market like it. There are a couple of things that are similar but you know where your point of differentiation is.
You’re starting to get really excited.
You team up with a friend or colleague, spend a few weeks on strategy and start building.
You go heads down in stealth mode for 6 months and pop up ready to launch with a robust, novel product.
You can see it now, thousands of customers on opening day. Press releases. Revenue. Growth potential.
And then you launch…and nothing happens.
First, you get that initial wave of friends and family support, but then little to no growth.
You’re trying to plug the product everywhere you can, but adoption is not what you envisioned.
After 2 weeks of low traction, you collapse in a heap and wonder what happened.
The likely answer…you built something that people didn’t want.
At this moment you have to decide, do we put our heads down and try to brute force forward or do we pivot?
Unfortunately, this story is all too common when building a company.
I can’t say if Jon’s story was exactly like the above, but he faced something similar with Avo.
After a ton of R&D and an exciting launch, he and his Co-Founder had to face the facts that the product and business weren’t what they’d originally hoped.
And he was crushed because he had spent a lot of emotional energy getting it to that point.
But now he and Sebastian are crushing it with Joon.
What was the difference?
With JOON, they started with what the market wanted and followed the money. Companies were willing to pay hundreds per month to enable wellness benefits for their employees. Brands were only willing to share a few percentage points as rewards on the consumer spending card.
With Avo, Jon and Sebastian had to spend lots of time negotiating vendor deals that might not work or appeal to users. With JOON, Jon and Sebastian prefer to form partnerships with brands, but they don’t need them for the product to work.
There’s lots of other examples in their case for why JOON is a better business bet than Avo. The most important part - JOON still enables them to focus on their mission.
As hard as it is, sometimes pivoting is required.
Sometimes, it’s the only thing that keeps your company alive.
Wrapping it Up 📕
I hope you found this interesting and inspiring! If so and you want to help support our journey to bring The Founder to millions of people across the world, here’s a couple things that would be really valuable to me and the show:
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Till next time ✌️
Kallaway
Want more? Check out other companies we’ve featured on the show!
— 📖 36. Toucan | Taylor Nieman
— 🙋♀️ 33. Farrynheight | Farryn Weiner
— 🛌 30. Eight Sleep | Matteo Franceschetti
— 🌵 25. The Sill | Eliza Blank
— 🥦 22. Levels | Josh Clemente
— 🧑🦰 17. Kombo Ventures | Kevin Gould
— 💍 11. The Clear Cut | Olivia Landau and Kyle Simon
— 🥘 7. Kettle & Fire | Justin Mares
— 🥾 2. Thursday Boots | Connor Wilson
See any mistakes? Let me know (kallaway@thefounderpod.com)