Targeting Gen Z and 40-Year-Olds With One Health Brand

0:00We are building nutrition products that when paired up with any other medical treatment can be one plus one equals more than two, maybe three in ideal case. This experience, then how did it help you with EloHealth? I became a heavy user of healthcare system when my first son died in 2010. You know, that's when I decided to go out of gaming and start building healthcare companies and started investing in healthcare companies. What would you say has been your marketing philosophy around everything that the company has been doing? You need to have a point of view. Like, why do you exist as a company?

0:33And then you're going to start building the story. Like, what is this about? Is there a certain demographic that you feel is more predominant? One is the people who turn 40 or, you know, 35, and maybe they have kids. And they're first time thinking, like, maybe I need to think about my health. I don't want to burn the candle both ways because, you know, I want to be here for my kids maybe 30 years now. And the other one is the Zenzi, who are the most active people who are now eating well. Many of them don't drink alcohol anymore. They are living a healthier life and they want to be different from their parents.

1:08Hey, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Andres Figueira and I'm going to be your host for the day. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, helping fast-growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and global perspective to every role. So if your team's looking to grow with proven remote talent, just head on over to theglobaltalent.co and see how we can help. And today, with me here, I am speaking with Ari Tulla, CEO and co-founder of EloHealth, a smart nutrition company that's turning food from the leading cause of disease to medicine by harnessing personalized nutrition, AI, and the power of at-home testing.

1:53So Ari, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing? Hey, thank you. Great to be here. It really has been a very interesting profile, the one that I looked through in LinkedIn about EloHealth, Ari, because I have not seen a company doing the same thing as you guys, since I feel this is a company that tailors food for other food companies in order to make it healthier. Would that be the angle? And just so that we can give the audience a bit more context, please let me know if I'm wrong and describe Evo Health in your own words. Yeah, so we are building nutrition products that when paired up with any other medical treatment or lifestyle treatment can be one plus one equals more than two, maybe three in ideal case.

2:44So think about some of the examples that are concrete today. We started in personalization of supplements. Think about powders, pills, gummy vitamins. And in that market, we realized that most people, they eat some type of pills like multivitamin or omega-3 or whatever people normally take. And they often don't know if they really need to do that. So people just do it because their mom told them to do it or they heard some podcaster talk about it. There's nothing against you, but that's what people often do or they read about it somewhere. And we realized like five years ago that most people are taking supplements that are actually not needed and some cases they take things that are not even good for them they may be harmful and we wanted to build a better system and start learning about this so we launched a system where you take a blood test looking at your blood biomarkers you can do a finger prick at home You send a kit into our lab.

3:56We analyzed it. Then we paired up you with the coach, a dietician, a doctor, and then you go through the data. And then that person is then giving you AI-designed nutrition plan. Like, what could you do to improve your blood biomarkers, like your cholesterol or your vitamin levels and so forth? And then we prescribe people custom-made supplements. It could be a pill pack or it could be 3D printed gummy vitamins or powder, what you need. And that was kind of the beginning. We had about 10 ,000 people who went through the system. Some people, many people had issues with the vitamin D levels that was too low.

4:36Not so much, you know, in Brazil, but, you know, maybe in the Northern Hemisphere, people don't have the sun and so forth. And some people, you know, they had issues with their blood sugar. Many people have diabetes today. Too high LDL cholesterol. Those common issues. And we then started to tackle those by giving you, you know, vitamin D is too low. We give you vitamin D. Pretty simple, right? And then, of course, you know, in some cases like LDL, you know, we give you berberine or blood sugar. We give you berberine. So there are certain things that can be done. Of course, you know, the supplements are supplemental.

5:08And then the coaching helps the people to make better decisions. Like maybe I say it's the way I eat my breakfast. I don't maybe eat that type of food anymore. And I can get better. So anyway, that's the learning we spent about two or three years doing. And a couple of years ago, we had enough data and learning that we knew that, you know, if you have certain issues, we can fix that. And the funny thing I already said in the beginning that, you know, many people were taking things that they should not have been taking. And we basically had these sessions with people and we always asked them, what are you doing today?

5:41And people were taking like 15 different pills. and our dieticists told them that don't stop doing that because you are harming yourself and that was maybe more important than giving them the right things because you don't want to do harm on on people but anyway that learning was then taken into account and we we decided to go more into health care and that when we started to really be you know food or supplements as medicine in a way that we went into fertility treatments for example and today we work with a lot of the clinics in the US where we are providing supplements for people who go to IVF, for example.

6:14And that's really powerful because, you know, people already take prenatal vitamins or such. We make them better. We make them more personalized. We also now starting to work more in the weight loss where a lot of people, they take Ozempic or other drugs for weight loss and they do work. They're mad sick almost. But we help people then, like here's an example. We just start creating this new product that we call CLP1 protein, which is not the drug. It's just a companion for people who want to take, you know, more protein so they don't lose muscle mass. They can take all the supplements and kind of the micronutrients are there so you don't get deficiencies.

6:52So it helps you to feel better when you're taking the medicine. So that's the idea of a one plus one equals more than two. And we also work in like, you know, longevity, think about sleep, recovery, and so forth. So that's kind of what we do and it's long answer but you know we've been kind of going through many stages to learn and build products that are really helping people actually to get better outcomes and we are trying to be very scientific in a way we approach this. Wow I love that and I understand now how you describe it's one plus one equals two or more so it's like something that helps out the other things that you need in order to achieve the best results for your body and your else okay that makes it a lot more clearer and Ari how long was it before in between you having completed all the studies you needed to understand that you finally had a proper product that you needed to market and from when you had your first customer or consumer per se was it a long gap or or were you already um was like the best marketing you could do was do the test for these people and the quizzes to understand how they were and then they were just consumers because you had the solution to the issues that arose.

8:03Yeah, we had, I mean, like you said in the beginning that, you know, you haven't heard about this type of thing before. We were called the first company to do this blood test based approach with AI and dieters. And so it was very complicated to build. And we didn't even know what to expect, because people were not ready for this. Nobody was looking on Google, like, I want to find blood based supplements. Nobody had done it before. So when When you are first at something, of course, you always are facing the problem that, you know, you have a small megaphone and you can tell your friends about it.

8:36But how do you get people to know about it if they are not looking for solutions? So that was really, I think, a challenge for us in the beginning. But, you know, in the first, you know, few months we had, you know, first hundred users. So we got, you know, people we knew in a local community in the Bay Area, for example. We got these very active kind of biohackers who came to this. But we realized in the end that there's not like a massive market who wants to pay$100 to$200 a month for this. There's maybe a million people, but not like 100 million people who want to do that today. And I think that was five years ago.

9:11Today, I mean, you may know and you may follow this. And you have a lot of companies doing blood testing that are now scaling up fast. You have more apps that are doing it. You have, you know, like Aura Ring is now collecting blood as well. So it's becoming more normal. But we were one of the first companies to do this outside of the medical setting. And it was pretty, pretty new to people. But for us, I mean, the goal was never to be the biggest consumer brand. The goal was to really be a platform that can power. So we can build this for, you know, we could work with Aura. We already work with Aura on some capacity, building products that are helping people, you know, have babies.

9:50and we pair up the Oura Ring to get the supplements and do something really cool there. So that's interesting. But, you know, ideally we want to play with like, think about like Equinox or Peloton or big brands like that who already have a huge population using their product. And, you know, you could pair up, let's say, a Peloton and then the recovery products from Peloton. So after every ride, you know, the person will tell, hey, let's take, you know, protein to recover. That makes a lot of sense. And none of them have done it yet, But I think in the future, a lot more people are going to do this.

10:22One plus one equals more than two. Also, not in healthcare, but also in wellness overall. And Ari, is there a certain demographic that you feel is more predominant into who you cater to? Or is it a general amount of the audience that you say, hey, yeah, I got young people, older people, middle-aged people? Or do you feel there's like a certain specific demographic that you serve? Yeah, there's two categories, I think. if you think about more broadly who are interested about what we do. One is the people who turn 40 or 35, and maybe they have kids, and they're first time thinking, maybe I need to think about my health because I'm not here only for myself.

11:06I don't want to burn the candle both ways because I want to be here for my kids maybe 30 years from now. So that's one big group of people. And the other one is the Zenzi folks who are the most active people who are now eating well. Many of them don't drink alcohol anymore. They are living a healthier life and they want to be different from their parents. So those are kind of two categories. And of course, we work heavily in women's health and women are the ones who are really, I think, driving the adoption. Men, like you and me, we kind of tend to do what our spouses are telling us to do. I mean, they know more about this.

11:42And in healthcare overall, many of the healthcare decisions are made by women. they didn't own the pocketbook for the family anyway. Yeah, I can vouch for the fact that my girlfriend is the one who recommends me take all these different supplements or something that's new. And she's like, yeah, you need to take magnesium to sleep. And I'm like, do I though? I think that's where Elo Health could help me have a counter argument against that and say, I don't actually need it. I think magnesium for you before you go to sleep will only do good. So I mean, she's right about that. Amazing. Thank you for giving her the reason then.

12:21And Ari, okay, in terms of, I know then that Elo Health and what you've been doing has been going on for a while. And what would you say has been your marketing philosophy around everything that the company has been doing? Maybe it has changed from how it started to what it is now. But if you could tell us about the process and how it has evolved, it would be really cool. Yeah, I think this is an interesting company because we, you know, If I go back a little bit, so I started my career in gaming, making video games in the late 90s already. I spent a stint in big tobacco at one point. I was running the Lucky Strike brand in Northern Europe when we had the Formula One team, the Bar Honda.

13:07So very different marketing, like brand marketing with very little you can do because it was basically banned, the marketing Europe at the time. And quick question here that doesn't have anything to do with it. What game did you work with? Like, I'm an avid gamer, so I'm just curious. And back in the 90s. Yeah, so in the 90s, I mainly worked on these first multiplayer games called mods. It's called multi-user dunces. They were like precursor of World of Warcraft, basically. Okay, wow. I was one of the top players in the world, and then I became a game maker. So I was building the games as well for a few years.

13:47And then after I was at the World of Tobacco for a while, I got back into gaming. So I went to Nokia. And I was doing the games marketing, leading it in Nokia for the N-Gate device, the side-talking device. I remember that one. We built some games you may have heard about, like Snake and others. So you may know that one. Snake? Ari, you had to do with that? That's crazy. You know how much time I wasted in school playing Snake under the desk while I was supposed to be viewing class? Oh, my God. That's a classic. So we took that game and we took it 3D. We made it more exciting. And we did work with like 40 different game IPs.

14:32So we built our own IP. We had our own publishing studio. Like, you know, Sony has their own. Ninja has their own. So we built our own games. and we also worked with other companies to build their... So we had Call of Duty, for example. We had Lara Croft. We had Asphalt. Many of these games that people know, FIFA, NBA. So those are all games we built on that platform. So I was involved working with EA and all these big gaming companies as well. Oh my goodness, that sounds like a dream for a gamer. You were top in the world. You started making games. You started working with the biggest brands.

15:07That is so nice, man. But I think what is maybe more relevant, why is this relevant for this, because we go back to Eloy, is that at the time, so think about it. I was working on the first games online. This was before people had email. In 1994, we were building the first games online. And that was really, really early, of course. And then later, when we were working Nokia, we were building games for mobile. And we were just about to launch the first smartphone. This is before iPhone and Android. So nobody had really played games before. And you remember the first games were on the Nokia devices, the Snake and others.

15:47Those were like pre-embed games. You didn't buy them. They were already coming with the device. And you only had a few options. So we built the first game store, first app store before iPhone came out. And my task at the time was to define what gaming would be on mobile. So it was all about building this new world. we didn't really know, like, is gaming different on a PC or different on a console than on mobile? So we were working on a lot of these ideas. And same thing happened again at Ello. In the beginning, we had to think about, like, how do you take to market something that is so new that people don't know about it?

16:24And it's, you know, there's no blueprint I can copy. I can't go and take a case study because nobody had really done it before. So those are always interesting moments in marketing. And, you know, we failed mightily at Nokia. You know, we spent a billion dollars and we built these games and, you know, we had millions of people playing them. But we never succeeded to a level that what iPhone now is. But just to think about the perspective, like I was giving a talk at the conference here in San Francisco, maybe 2007, 2006, about mobile gaming. It was the first ever mobile gaming track in the biggest gaming conference called CDC, Game Development Conference here.

17:0220 ,000 people come every year. All the game makers are here. And we had like 100 people in a small room talking about mobile gaming. And we were talking about it and like, how big could this be? And we said that, you know, there may be 100 million people in 10 years who play these games. You know, there ended up being 4 billion people. Now gaming, so mobile gaming is bigger than music, TV, and books combined. I did not know that statistic, but I am sure of it as well. I have no doubts it should be that way. Oh, my God. And some of these people that we built these first games, they then built later Rovio, Angry Birds, my friends.

17:40They built Glass of Clans and Supercell. So those are the games that came out for the same people, like my old friends I met when I was in high school. That is so cool. You're just mentioning all the games I've ever played. Okay, I don't want to stray away from the actual topic at hand. And so then this experience, then how did it help you with EloHealth? Yeah, so I mean, I really believe that, you know, in the beginning, you need to have a point of view. Like, why do you exist as a company? And our kind of tagline was that, you know, we want to turn food into medicine. And yes, we haven't yet doubled in the food.

18:19In the future, we may go and do like meal delivery as well. But today we are in this sort of a world of, you know, supplements because they are easier to send to people. they take they are they're not personable like food food goes bad in five days supplements go bad in maybe a year so you can you know store them easily and and then it's about building a trust that has some authentic value so we spend a lot of time thinking like you know how do we name the company and elo came up uh pretty early and and we wanted to kind of do something that has a omas to my native Finland where I'm from. And elo means, if you say elo, it means life in Finnish.

18:58If you say elo, it means happiness in Finnish. So, I mean, those are both really good words and a story for a brand. And then we had my dear friend who actually built the brand for Aura, built the brand for Supercell. So his studio came in and built the brand for us, the elo, and tried to make it like a modern, exciting brand. And an Elo brand today is no longer kind of the most important thing in our company because we can also white label. But it was a really nice start. And we got a lot of, you know, positive feedback on the fact that we were able to build a brand that people felt are trustworthy, modern, and exciting.

19:34And then those are kind of principles. You have a reason why you exist. You have a brand that you can stand behind with. And you can believe in yourself. And then you're going to start building the story. Like, what is this about? And of course, in today's day and age, I mean, the founder or the like insets and story is quite important. And, you know, I've been telling the story around the world for many years. And the same story helped me build two previous companies as well. So I built companies in, built a doctor finder company, one of the biggest ones in the US, that you can find doctors online and book online.

20:11And then I was building this company that was basically building doctor networks. so we are now the de facto company in the u.s when you build a network of doctors you can be a health plan health insurance company you can be a government agency you can be a hospital system so when you hire doctors there's other tools to do that and that's now a big company almost a thousand employees so that started from my own problems that we have we had a hard time getting getting a family with my wife and it took us you know 15 years and our first son didn't make it and you There's a lot of twists and turns.

20:43And that was kind of the starting point for me that I became a heavy user of healthcare system. And when my first son died in 2010, that was the time when I decided to go out of gaming and start building healthcare companies and start investing in healthcare companies. So it's been a really interesting 15 years that three companies came out of it and we've been investors in almost 100 companies now. Wow. Wow. And I really I'm so sorry for your loss, even though it was a long time ago. I still understand that that is never easy, but it really is beautiful how how you how you pivoted due to such a hard and heavy issue with your family.

21:25And then it's just a noble cause now that kept you going, that kept you going. And after I'm hearing you speak, Ari, about how you started in gaming and what you did and even what Elo Health is and the companies before, I feel like you've always been a pioneer, like creating these new companies in these new areas where nobody is actually very clear about what they need to do to succeed. So that is very, very cool that you're able to just tackle these new, what's it called? I want to say these new spaces in the industry that nobody knows they were needed. But then it's due to problems that you face that you create a solution for.

21:59And I think that's what always makes like the best business is when you find an actual problem that is affecting you. and then you try to solve that because always it always happens as somebody else is going through that same thing and it's so nice to actually find a solution so congratulations on that the story is very um what's it called um i find the story very appealing and and i can really empathize with it so and and it's it's important like you know you may not be telling the story on your website front and center but it's a story that you tell when you are hiring people or you run a company and it becomes kind of the cornerstone.

22:36And in a way, it's interesting that, you know, having now hired, I don't know, a thousand plus people into healthcare and we often hire from other industries. And it's so fun to bring somebody from like Instagram who works on the app and optimizing people's addicts in there to get them to healthcare, do the same thing, you know, in a positive way. And I feel like a big win every time we get people hired from like Google or somewhere that, you know, they are doing one thing really well, optimizing your addiction again on something. But that's when you bring that talent and then you do something good with it.

23:11I mean, that's been a big reason why I've been talking about these things publicly. And I think there's a really, really fun book. My friend wrote recently, it just came out. I was just reading it yesterday. I'm not normally plucking a book, but you know, I was just reading it and it's me and my customer and AI. And it's all about the fact that, But his thesis is that he's been building big companies that we all know. And some of them are public now. And he's been really influenced. But he is predicting that we're going to have 450 million people about who will be unemployed in the next 10 years because of AI.

23:48450 million people, more than people in the US and Brazil combined about. So that's a pretty big number, right? and if that happens I mean we can get depressed about it or we can look at in a way that these people are often very capable these are not going to be like you know factory workers they might be lawyers and doctors so and they are highly educated so what they will likely do is that they're going to be like that sucks but then they get you know up from the bull straps and then they're going to build something new and these people are often going to build new companies using AI. And they help focus about how do you actually build a new company?

24:27How, like, like, why would you do it? Like, because it's been, I mean, you know, this last 10 years, 15 years, it's really cool to be an entrepreneur. You know, I've been an entrepreneur since 98. I've been a CEO for many, many years. And, you know, people look at me and I'm like this sort of a dude who did it many times. Yes. In my native Finland, you know, I'm known quite a lot. But, you know, this is something that it's not really easy. It's not really fun work. I mean, my friends who work at Facebook and, you know, whatever, Google and OpenAI, they probably make more money than I do currently.

25:02Maybe in the long term, I hope I make, you know, some money as well. But, you know, it's really fun to work in a big company when you can have a big impact. And you don't need, you are not liable of everything. As a CEO, as a founder, I'm liable of every moment of the company. So the question is like, like why would these 450 million people, what would they do? And it's not just about like starting a company to make money, that won't work. But you have to start a company because you have a real passion of something. There's a real problem you feel, or you have a real urge to do it. Because when you build this company, my last best company took 10 years to build.

25:35And that's a long time. And you're not going to do 10 years of anything if you don't have some excitement or reason to do it. I understand that. And I really see the value in that because I've spoken with a lot of companies and that is one of the common denominators between all of them, between founders and whoever's at the head of it. And it's the fact that it's not just about making money. It's about providing that solution to a problem that you're passionate about. So for example, I'm right now looking how to hit my protein goals. And when you showed me that supplement for the protein that you guys have, I'm like, oh my goodness, I could actually use this and it's super useful and now you have a potential customer who believes in what you do that i've never actually seen an ad from you guys or anything like that but it's because the solution to the problem is actually hitting home and i think that is like so so cool um and ari i would also love to know um how since you've mentioned like you have the you have you built the company that would look for doctors and you have elo health right now and you've been a founder several times what is your team looking like at elo health right now like how many people do you have under you helping you with all of this are you a remote first company or do you try to have like a physical location how does that work yeah it's a good good question so elo we started it just before covid and um and we we had um so last three companies i have started with the same co-founder.