How Cutting-Edge App Experiences Unlock Human Potential with Ariel Poler

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like My First Million. Today, we'll be breaking down how cutting-edge app experiences unlock human potential. To drop these value bombs, I are brought to Ariel Poehler, into EO Fire Studios, internet entrepreneur, mentor, and investor. Ariel is passionate about human augmentation and mental health. He and Stanford psychiatrist Dr. David Spiegel co-founded self-hypnosis app Reverie to make affordable care available to the masses.

0:38And today we will be talking about innovation and mutual value, a huge problem with apps these days, how to leverage the power of community to drive growth, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ariel and our sponsors. Sales Evangelist, hosted by my friend Donald Kelly, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales right now. A recent episode you should definitely check out is the five ways to do daily outbound with LinkedIn.

1:16Listen to Sales Evangelist wherever you get your podcasts. It's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire. That's netsuite.com slash fire. Ariel, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I think most people think that to be successful, you need to have a vision and a plan and a great idea.

1:58And often successful people sort of describe their success in that context. But in my experience, it's a lot of revisionist history. I think that to be successful, you just got to put one foot in front of the other and make a little bit of progress one little bit at a time and work hard to help people around you. be passionate about something and often that with a little bit of luck gets you there. Boom. And Fire Nation, we're talking about how cutting edge app experiences can unlock human potential, literally and figuratively. Ariel, you have a passion for human augmentation and mental health as well.

2:34Tell us how this passion has developed over the years. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it started with my passion for science fiction and reading all sort of the crazy things that could happen. And so I started exploring from a technological standpoint, well, what is more short-term and what's more viable? And I started looking at optics and exoskeletons and helping and getting involved with some companies that do that. But then serendipitously, I met Dr. David Spiegel. And what really struck me when I met him was that with hypnosis, which is the area that he has focused on for decades, without the need for a lot of technology, without the need for science fiction, hardware, anything like that.

3:23He was making so many people's lives so much better. And so that sort of like made me take a twist and go towards the things we can do now, more accessible with the technology we already have to help people around us. Well, this passion, it did lead you to co-found the self-hypnosis app Reverie with already chatted about Stanford psychiatrist, Dr. David Spiegel. Let's talk about how this partnership came about and kind of go deeper because the reason why I think this is an interesting question, Ariel, is a lot of our listeners here today have ideas and they know that they find the right partner or co-founder that doors can open, things can go forward and ideas can happen.

4:06in a very progressive way. So kind of give us the strategy you use to make this happen and any pieces of feedback or thoughts or advice you can give along the way. Absolutely, and I do agree. It was really interesting. So I met David at this conference, and when he first told me about hypnosis, my initial reaction was, yeah, hypnosis. I had the same stigma that I think associated with hypnosis that most people have. But then he started telling me about the great things he was doing, and he's an incredible individual, so I was just blown away. And I think one of the key aspects of what led us to create Reverie and everything that we've done is he asked me for help.

4:45He said, Ariel, you're a techie. Can you help me try to take what I've done at Stanford Hospital and maybe build an app and help more people? And my reaction wasn't like I've seen many other people go like, hold on a second. How are we going to do this? What's in there for me? What are the equity? I said, sure, I'll help you. And for, I think, over a year, I just started helping David informally. And because I wanted to be helpful to him because I thought he was doing something good and coding, getting my son to help. And for a while, it was just very informal. And that's something that I've done many times in my career professionally when I've ended up working with amazing entrepreneurs and amazing companies.

5:25It's just informally start trying to be helpful and see where you go. Sometimes it doesn't lead anywhere and sometimes it does. and what we found was also, the other thing I should say is that I also wasn't sure if this was going to be feasible. Can we really take David and put him in an app? So, help him put an app, run a clinical trial, and the results were great. And it's like, oh, wow, okay, let's do another trial. So, we started with the smoking session, then we did chronic pain, good results. Okay, let's take it to the next level. It was a very natural and incremental approach to validation, making sure we're working well together, little by little taking the project to the next phase until we finally realized, okay, this is just really powerful, really good.

6:11We have to scale it. And that's when we started looking at let's build a little team and let's raise a little bit of money and build a company. So, yeah, it was a great combination of having the world's foremost expert on the clinical use of hypnosis, the clinician. But David had zero experience in business and technology. And then the fact that we connected at a personal level and I brought my experience building Silicon Valley companies, technology and finance and the two things sort of like just gelled. Fire Nation, you can take away a lot from this process. Be a person of value. I love that quote by Albert Einstein.

6:51Try not to become a person of success, but rather a person of value. And I made a lot of mistakes in my life, chasing success, trying to become a person of success, only being focused on success, but not really being a person of value, not just providing value to the world in a consumable way. So how can you do that for other people, for somebody that it would really make sense for you to do that for, provide value. Now let's talk about Reverie. How is this innovation and mutual value that we're talking about right now at the very core, the very heart of Reverie? All this form of Western psychotherapy, it's been around for the longest time, but historically it's been limited because there are few people that can do it and a few people that can do it well.

7:38Now, what we have been able to do is to take what David does and package it in an app in a way that anybody with a smartphone, Android, iOS, anywhere in the world can benefit from. And it only takes 10 minutes. It's crazy. We have people who, after 10 minutes, stop smoking or finally get to sleep well after years of not sleeping well or controlling their pain. So taking something that wasn't scalable because David is just one person in a single session at Stanford Hospital with him or with any other clinician costs hundreds of dollars. being able to take that and putting it inside a mobile app and then distributed that so that you can try it for free.

8:32And if it works, keep using it. It has been just super powerful. Fire Nation, it is powerful when innovation and mutual value are combined. And I love the results that they're already seeing with an app like Reverie. And there's a lot more to talk about on this topic and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Happy 2024, Fire Nation. Q1 is here, and that means new goals, more growth, and upgrading your day-to-day workflow. While most sales folks are stuck in the mud of manual scheduling, digging into data, and tracking down leads, let me share a better way to win so you can get a jumpstart on your year.

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12:22You actually take another approach. You believe that with the right user experience, the users can achieve their goals and solve their problems. How did you do this with Reverie? How did you implement this thought process? Yeah, absolutely. The goal was not, oh, let's have the app with the most bells and whistles or the most content. It was, can we recreate the experience of somebody at Dr. Spiel's office, but with an app? And when you go to David's office, he's not showing you lots of choices and overwhelming you. He's just saying, okay, what are you going to help with? And you might say, you know, I'm having chronic pain or I'm having anxiety or I want to quit vaping.

13:04So it's OK. Well, let me hold your hand and guide you through it. So that's what we try to replicate. Ask up front the users, what do you need help with? Then once they tell us, try to as much as possible hold their hands and just have sessions. Keep them short because, you know, people are busy and so on and also attention spans are short. Let's keep it short, but powerful and meaningful. And indeed, what we're seeing is that over 80 % of our users and in some exercises, over 90 % of our users are reporting that a single 10, 12-minute session significantly lowers their anxiety or gets them to crave smoking or alcohol or vaping less.

13:49So that simplicity and that immediacy of results is something that we have found to be particularly powerful. You don't have to do this for weeks or months and for hours to get the benefit. And you don't have to answer very long questionnaires or spend lots of time digging. But you go in there, you tell us what you need help with, and we already have an exercise. the key is that that exercise even though it's very simple and short is a result of decades of david's experience and i'm sure you've often heard that to do something long sometimes it's easy to do something short to write a short compelling story that's the hard part and that's where david's experience come in in making it simple easy and effective so what would be one piece of advice for our listeners who maybe are running a different business you know maybe they have an app, maybe they have a process, a funnel, and they know that they're just offering too many choices, they're creating confusion, overwhelm, etc.

14:52What's one piece of advice you would give to Fire Nation? Rather than force the user to make a choice, the app or you as a developer should make an educated guess of what is it that the user wants to do and propose that to the user. Now, give them out. Obviously, you don't want to keep them locked into something. But if you do that over time, you get better and better at suggesting something that works for users. And it's okay if it doesn't work and the user is corrected. Users appreciate that you're trying to solve their problem, that you're trying to simplify their life, as opposed to that you're putting the work on them.

15:33So take ownership of understanding, trying to understand, doing your best effort at providing to the user what you believe they're going to want. Leveraging the power of community can be such an incredible opportunity when it's done right. So talk about some of the ways that you've leveraged the power of community to drive growth within Reverie. The most rewarding part of this project is just the amazing feedback we get from our community. So many people that just have so much benefit. And I can think of at least a couple of ways. One is that we get feedback that says, oh, my God, you helped me so much with this or that condition.

16:15What about this other condition? I have a phobia of flying or I know people who are trying to quit vaping. Or most recently we were getting a lot of feedback of saying, you know, I need to I need help dealing with grief. So listening to our community. And so what we've done is listen to the community. and then with David develop exercises and solutions to address what the community wants. So rather than we say, hey, here's what we think is useful, let the community, once you have it, tell us what is it that they need. There's also been just support among the community, the testimonials, I think, to make people feel that they're not alone, that other people have the same issue, and that also in terms of the numbers of people that we help, that gives reassurance to people, wait a minute, I'm not alone, this works, and other people are evidence of that.

17:10Now, user feedback, I mean, it is critical to improve experiences within your app. I actually call it the curse of knowledge because when you've created something, you just know the thing. You assume that other people know that thing. So you always need to bring new people to a device, to an app, to a product, to a service. Watch them go through it on their own. talk to them. What was confusing? What was easy? What did you like? What didn't you like? How are you doing this with Reverie? And what can we learn from your success? And maybe any failures you've had? I couldn't agree more. You constantly have to be seeing how your app or your software works.

17:52And I mean, we're doing it in every dimension we can from getting experts in the industry. So I think that that's also something very helpful when you have people who've been there, done that. They've learned over years of working with other apps. So for example, one of our board members used to head product at Headspace. So he learned a lot. And so we're trying to capture that. We're trying to do surveys of our users, focus groups of our users, talking with people like, you know, organizations like Apple and Google getting their feedback. like consolidating as much as possible. You know, an early failure was a very first, I don't know if failure is the right word, but definitely a limitation.

18:33Our very first app was done using Amazon Alexa because it was all voice. And we figured, okay, that's a great way to start. It was simple. Yet the infrastructure just was not there to help us package it and make it seamless for the user. Each exercise had to be separate skills. It was hard to track users over time. And we probably stuck with it a little too long until we realized, no, we need to build an app, build it from scratch, build it natively so that we can provide the absolute best experience, which is what we're aiming to do. But as you say, this is a never-ending effort. Or just this morning, we were in a meeting where we got amazing feedback on little things that we might have missed about the way the UI is presented, about some choices where there might be a little too much text.

19:25So constantly getting feedback and iterated and improving and doing A-B testing. That's the other thing I would say. Sometimes it's not intuitive. Sometimes it's not clear exactly what's going to work best. So you put more than one option on the table on the app and you measure what's being received better by the users. And sometimes, honestly, those little tiny tweaks can have such huge ramifications on the positive or negative side if you do it wrong. So it's so key. Ariel, you've given us so much today. What would you say is the one key takeaway that you would really want our listeners to get from our conversation today?

20:03We are on a mission to help, we believe, hundreds of millions of people with this incredible technique. So I think the one ask I have is, you know, any of your listeners, either them or no people who could use a little bit of help with with with with the anxiety, could use a little bit of help with eating better or with dealing with a pain or any of these other things to. I would encourage him to give Reverie a try because it's just people constantly we just get people so surprised and so in a positive way about oh my god why was this the last time that last thing that I tried why did I have to try so many things before this is such a powerful and easy thing to do so yeah we hope that people discover this and can benefit from it and you know we already have tens of thousands of people who are doing it but we believe hundreds of millions could benefit So that would be my most important message is to help us share this amazing tool with the world.

21:10And if Fire Nation wanted to learn more from you, connect with you, if they wanted to get a call to action from you about your product, your service, Reverie, what would that be? There's our website, which is at Reverie.com. There is the app, which is available as Reverie, both on the App Store and on the Google Store. and then we're also on all the social networks whether it's as I am on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Instagram, etc. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with AP and JLD today so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Ariel, A-R-I-E-L in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up.

21:58And Ariel, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you, brother, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Ariel for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk.

22:37The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Sales Evangelist, hosted by my friend Donald Kelly, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales right now. A recent episode you should definitely check out is the five ways to do daily outbound with LinkedIn.

23:12Listen to Sales Evangelist wherever you get your podcasts. It's time to check out NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, and more. Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist designed to give you consistently excellent performance, absolutely free at netsuite.com slash fire. That's netsuite.com slash fire.