Why we’re building NOAN
During covid our lives, like those of everyone else around the world, were upended. Areas of our lives that had existed solely in the physical world shifted to digital. One such area was sport and our health and wellness. Remote coaching became a core part of our lives, working with sports coaches or fitness instructors via digital channels came to feel natural and, to be honest, something we were surprised we hadn’t done before.
A small team began to develop: a surf coach in New Zealand, a fitness coach and a physio in the UK. Each of them were providing high quality coaching via apps, seminars, audio and one-to-one sessions. Like us, they were all playing in this new digital world for the first time, having successes and some failures as they fumbled around trying to make it work.
As digital strategists ourselves working with global brands at a C-suite level, we had fascinating conversations during this time with our personal coaching ‘team’ about the challenges they faced running what were essentially online digital memberships.
Each had been an expert in their field, but their specialities weren’t in membership, CRM or content - they were experts in sport, health and wellness. The reality was, just like many global brands, they were struggling to join the digital dots as they transitioned their in-person business online. Strategy was locked away somewhere in a pdf. Execution was all interactive and online.
Many large scale brands have the same problem, because teams are often built around siloed individual skillsets, whereas membership businesses need to be focused on a connected experience for the user. Large scale brands solve this problem by calling in the consultants to help them see the big picture and connect the dots - so a question arose: Why couldn’t small businesses get the same help?
Small business owners can easily access the platforms they need to develop a connected experience, whether that’s Squarespace, Shopify or Mailchimp etc. But the reality is they lack the knowledge of how to structure, build out and manage their experience. And that’s to be expected, right? It’s tricky, and it’s not their area of expertise.
Support for small business owners in this space is patchy and often inaccessible on their budgets. The knowledge they need is locked behind large consultancy fees, or within teams working for individual global brands that have worked on these areas over the past ten years.
We realized that if we were to solve for those users’ needs at scale we had to develop a single platform that gave them the knowledge they needed, whilst enabling them to seamlessly build their business assets. We also needed to solve for time poverty. Entrepreneurs are overwhelmed with tasks, and as they begin to grow their businesses, often don’t have the cash to scale their teams, because the workload starts to ramp up before the revenue does.
NOAN delivers on all those problems. It walks users through all the strategy they need to scale and grow a connected brand experience via the power of generative AI, through expert-developed workflows. And then it stores it and leverages it, allowing them rapidly and easily generate content that’s on-brand, in line with strategy. It saves them enormous amounts of time. It saves them enormous amounts of stress, and it gives them a far greater chance of getting their business to grow successfully.
As we build NOAN we’re excited about helping the businesses that drive our economy with world-class strategy and thinking, because helping them scale helps every community. And when a user turns around and tells us ‘I could have cried with happiness’ - as one did recently when they realised how much time NOAN was going to save them – we feel we’re on the right track.
