Bart Spangenberg, co-founder and CTO of New-U, shares his personal health journey and how it led him to create a health tech company focused on employee well-being. He discusses the challenges of transitioning from a health background to tech, the importance of data privacy in health apps, and how behavioral science informs the design of their application. Bart also highlights the significance of building a strong remote team, hiring for culture, and the future goals of New You, including market expansion and integrating their services into organizations.

Timestamps

00:00 From Personal Struggles to a Mission in Health

02:49 Learning to Code & Building New-U

06:39 Lessons from Working with an Agency

08:49 What New-U does

10:59 Privacy by Design and Trust in Health Data

14:19 Digitizing the Dutch PMO: Compliance Meets Health

15:50 Leading a Remote International Development Team

20:04 Hiring for Mindset, Growth, and Culture Fit

26:29 Applying Behavioral Science to Product Design

32:36 The One Thing: Focus and Decision-Making in Leadership

About Bart

Health, you wish the best for your friends and family. However, sometimes we forget to take care of ourselves. That was me. Ignited by being not so healthy, I decided to turn things around. Health has fascinated me for many years now. This wonderful obsession has greatly improved my life, and I hope it will make yours phenomenal as well!

My mission is to help as many people as possible to take control of their health.

I found that this is achieved best through digital solutions. So NewU was born. Our enterprise builds digital health solutions for exercise, nutrition, sleep, connectedness, smoking, mental wellness and much more. Every day I am grateful that I can work with passionate professionals that share this mission.

You can wake me up to talk about technology, behaviour, UI/UX, high performance, design, habits or health.

Books referenced

• Designing for Behavior Change by Stephen Wendel

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford

• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin

• Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin

• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt & David Thomas

• The One Thing by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan

Where to find Bart

• Website: https://www.newu-app.io

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bartspangenberg/

Today's guest is Bart Spangenberg, co-founder and CTO of New-U, a Dutch health tech company transforming how organizations support employee well-being. Bart's story starts with something very personal, realizing he wasn't living as healthy as he wanted to.

So the wake-up call became his mission to help others to take control of their health. And in this episode, we're going to explore how Bart learns to code. Of course, he's technical to build his own products, how he leads a remote international development and how New-U is blending behavioral science with modern software design and how they bring it together. Very interesting. Bart, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me.

So first, you described your health journey as starting yourself from being not so healthy. What was the turning point for you? And how did that lead to founding a health tech company, New-U?

So you start right away with the most personal question, true.

Absolutely. That's work. That's where I knew you started, right? It's.

Now, I haven't been... In the past, I wasn't that vocal about this, but it's very personal, but I haven't made a secret out of it. But yeah, when I was in college I studied at the TU Delft when I was like 18, 19 years old and I got like a big problem with smoking a lot of weed. Let's just be very straightforward with it. And yeah, I just had a very dark period in my life.

So everything went downhill. And it took me a couple, like, five, six years to recover from that.

So I sort of made it my mission to share to get from those experiences to another place and brought me a lot of good things learned a lot of things and Yeah, from that, I sort of made it my mission to help others.

Okay.

Sorry? That's the short version.

That's the short version. I'm sure there's a long story and maybe we'll get into that a bit more as well. But because it's interesting, you started your studies, you're not a technology guy by background, right? You started your studies actually in human movement science. But it's.

Not actually right. So I studied mechanical engineering. I didn't finish it, but I got my propaedeuse. And yeah, after that, I worked as a personal trainer. For like couple years And then I was... Coaching people. And soccer players.

And then I had some soccer players and I had a good connection with them. And I was like, this is fun. Let me try to become like a strength and conditioning coach for Manchester United, Barcelona, something like this. And, Then I studied human movement sciences, met my co-founder Gijs, and then we decided to create a health app.

So your original background is very technical, even though after that you transitioned into more health and Yeah, fitness space. And then went back to tech. It's interesting. Yes.

So a lot of startup founders like you and Gijs, you're both, well, your background is mechanical engineering. You weren't a software developer, a software engineer. Gijs, absolutely not as well. You're co-founder.

So, It's very easy and I see a lot of I'd say more business founders that actually look for a technical co-founder and go down the routes to build their app, their idea, their startup. You went a completely different way, right? You actually learned to code yourself and went from there. Why did you do that? Why was that the right journey?

Well, I actually didn't at first because at first we worked with an agency. For quite some time, I think one and a half years. There were good things there, but a lot of, found out that you don't have a lot of control. It's pretty expensive. And the reason that I eventually learned the code. I had the idea a couple of times myself, but at some point... The pain and the barrier was just too high and I read a book, I got it from my brother. It was like a small book about this entrepreneur that learned to code himself. And I was like, let me just give it a shot. It was actually very good that I got into this course from Ironhack, it was called, like a web development bootcamp. And I had an amazing teacher there and he sort of Help me out of code. And that was like a big thing. But I struggled at first quite a bit because in the first month, I remember it very well. It was in April 2022. I decided to 2021. I think 2022. I decided to cope myself and I did these courses. I think there's these free courses from Harvard University, if not mistaken.

Like on and off I tried for a month but it was like horrible so I needed like a sort of a guide, like a master that could guide me the way because the initial barrier is quite high. You know, the landscape of software development is quite vast. If you understand how the landscape works, it's pretty easy to navigate. But at first, the landscape is really hard to navigate.

Like, Okay, how do you host? How do you write your first line of code? What is an IDE? Okay, how does syntax work? There's so many things to it, right?

So, All these basic things. I just needed something or someone to lay out the landscape. And that's where I got into this web development bootcamp.

And then after two weeks, We had to write like a little software program. A little game and I built like a game which was like a tower defense game and I was like this game is way more complicated than the app we have already running like we had a web app and I was like this will be alright you know if I just stick with this and trust the process then It will work out fine. That's a little bit of backstory there.

That makes so much sense. So going back to the first year and a half at the agency, tell me a bit more about that because I'm very interested in what works and what didn't work for you guys.

Yes, so we work with an agency. It was a Romanian development agency. And we developed a web application But it was kind of hard to navigate because, They didn't have any design skills in house. We didn't have We didn't even have any design skills.

So actually what happened during that first phase You have to imagine that Gijs and I, we just, we were in university. We were basically... Coaching people like one-on-one, but we didn't know anything about software development, nor did we know anything about app development.

So we were completely Blanco at first. So like, it was more like a ambitious, dream and just like that we just took it from there so it was really hard to interact with the agencies It was we felt that the distance between us and them was very big. We didn't speak the same language.

And then you run into all sorts of challenges that are just really hard to overcome and if you don't understand properly how much time a certain feature takes, you don't make the right decisions, I feel. So if you don't have the technical background It can be very hard to make an estimate on something.

Something simple might be complicated depending on the architecture and the choices that were made and something else might be very easy and Those things made it very hard. , So yeah, the communication was definitely a big challenge there.

That makes sense. And it helps hiring an agency if you have the technical skills yourself, but it needs most people hire an agency because they lack the technical skills.

So that makes the communication indeed very difficult. And you're right. Design skills are, Sorry about that. Design skills are... Important as well right and you an agency should have them or you need to get that somewhere else but yeah for an app like yours those are Critical.

Yeah, I am.

Tell me a bit more about New-U, the app that you've built and what it actually does.

And that's transformed a lot over the years, but New-U is basically an all-in-one solution for prevention, fatality, and connection. We have a web portal on which you can manage your vitality strategy for your organization. Set out all your researches that you want to do.

So that's health research, that's employee satisfaction, and directly implement the outcomes of that. So that is something that makes our product very unique in the market is that we have both the measurement and the implementation in one tool.

And then of course we have the star of the show, which is the mobile application for the employee in which they can work on their habits privately. And together with their co-workers.

So it's really separated in two sections. A private gamified a habit formation part like state of the art kind of gamification and a organization part where they can manage everything for their organization from events to bookings to research. Tune a fee to Initiatives, everything challenges.

So yeah, it brings everything together. Sleep, nutrition, like all the subjects, right? Exercise, mental wellbeing, smoking, alcohol.

Like we have always had this dream not to have like all these separated apps, but yeah. Because we believe that fat. You can only do it right if you cannot lose weight. You cannot have exercise program on one app and then you're eating program or another one. It needs to be integrated.

So it started off from that philosophy. But that's New-U in a nutshell.

Cool. That makes a lot of sense.

So your customers then are the employers.

Right? Yes. Yes, both.

Yeah, we sell to the companies and then of course the users are both the companies, often HR managers, and then of course all the employees of the company.

Because, and I like that you say that the employee can actually decide what information they keep private and don't. I mean, I can imagine that most employees don't want to share any health data or about their alcohol usage or something like that with their employer.

So fully understand that that's private and you have to fully gamify it for them. So it's quite a, I'd say you store quite a lot of sensitive personal data. Yes. How do you... How do you actually make sure that that's all secure and properly stored? Because that's quite another level of technology. Over just a regular app.

Yeah, it's like, first of all, we just store the data in such a way that there's no way that the employer can access it. So from all the accounts that the employer has, they can never access it.

So it's really separate. The user really owns the private data.

And then for the public parts, That's like partly integrated with the company. All the statistics are aggregated so you cannot trace them back.

So that's a very important part. And just with all features, we just think privacy by design. How can we make sure that every feature... Is private because it's such an important part of our organization that it's part of our project management funnel.

So we have that as a step. In our project management funnel to analyze privacy. Yes, those are a couple of things that we do to ensure it. And in terms of communication, right? Because you can build a system that's really private and all that, but the user still needs to know that.

So in terms of communication, we do a lot of things, emphasizing it, In presentations, emails... When you come onto the application, it's immediately explained, very often repeated. It's been a big banner

Yeah, because it's a really big bottleneck, you know, for employees. It can really... Scare them away if you don't communicate it properly.

- Yeah, no, and I understand because we have in the Netherlands at least we have these apps where you can share your health data with your insurance company. There's no way that I'm going there, right? There's no way that I'm sharing my health data, how much I exercise or how much I sleep or whatever with the insurance company.

Like when health freeze is over, that's not going to happen. And I understand why they would like it, but no, right?

So I can understand how important that is for you as well.

It's super important. And yeah, at the end of the day, you just need to make sure that, you know, like I How can I say, like we always put the user first.

So it comes in when it comes to privacy, but in terms of like making decisions for health. I'll give you a very simple example, right?

So for example, you can engage your app I make it very engaging. And you can go really far, for example, with things like streaks. You can nudge people to do another walk and do something like this just to get more points.

Right? And there are actually applications that done that and completely defeated our initial purpose.

You know, that people get up at 1 a.m. In the morning to go, well, we would never do such a thing. No, because it's health first, it's user first. And that's the same with privacy. It's very important for us.

Yeah. - No, makes sense. And recently you've added PMO services. I had to actually look that up what it is because it's not a project management office. For those that are maybe not Dutch or people that are Dutch like me that have never heard of a PMO, What is that and why did you add that as well to your services?

It's funny that you say that because we got quite a lot of response from like, we ran like advertisement campaigns and we got like these replies. So yeah, we are one. No, that's not what we mean. No, it's a Dutch thing.

So that's very important. So in Dutch law, we have a law that actually mandates that you do a periodic health research for all your employees. Offer that. And it's dependent on what type of work you do in your organization. It's actually, if we strictly speak, PMO is not mandatory, but Pago is. Now, let's not get into that too much.

Yeah, it's just different things that you have to offer as an employer. And the great thing about New-U is that we offer those research sessions. It's research. You get your results on a personal level. You get the aggregate results on your group. On the company level, but you can directly implement the results.

So you can actually do something with the results. So there are many of these survey tools on the market, but often they don't have a good follow-up. And with New-U, you can just immediately start building your healthy habits, start a health program. It seamlessly integrates.

So it's more than just the mandatory survey fulfilling the legal requirements, but you can actually do something for the health of your employees. Wow.

And that's what it's about, right? So, yeah.

Let's get a bit more into development, right? Because you started with an agency, you started to code yourself, but now you have a fully remote international engineering team.

I mean, I think they're all over. Last time we spoke, where are they based and how do you actually manage them across time zones and different cultures that they have?

Yes. Yeah, we have a great team.

So I met our technical manager during the bootcamp, actually. We were in the bootcamp together and we had a good click. We helped other students in the evening with, if they had other questions, we always stayed around, did some extra work. And we had a really good connection.

So then after the end of the process... I asked him, hey, you want to join our team?

I think four and a half years or something like this. So that's great. He's based in Zambia. We have, Two engineers from India? Great guys as well. We have a QA engineer recently joined the team from Zimbabwe. And we have two designers from Nigeria phenomenal designers. And I think that What brings everybody together is the mindset and attitude. I think we have that... I think that's the most important thing for us in general with hiring is that New-U is about becoming the New-U. That's what it's about. That's where the name comes from, right?

So it's about... And if you as your assistant or your support that helps you to become who you want to be, you know, That's the story. And everybody shares this mindset of becoming better, So... Everybody has a great work ethic. Now you asked specifically about the, how we manage across time zones, right?

So we do We have our opening every day. So that's just CET time, Central European time. And You can work a bit async. But in principle, we work at the same time zone. , And from here and Nigeria, it's one hour time difference max. And Zimbabwe and Zambia are actually the same time zone.

So it's pretty easy. So that goes quite smoothly.

It's nice that you don't hear a lot of, I don't see a lot of businesses that hire developers in Africa, but indeed from a time zone perspective in Europe, That's really useful to hide there.

Yeah. Yeah, and I don't understand why because they're great and do a phenomenal job. I think there's a lot of good ethics there, good work ethics. Of course, you've got to find the right people, but that's with everyone, right?

So, Yeah.

So when we talk about your developers and designers and QA engineers building their New-U, are they all like healthy, fit, conscious of their lifestyle? Do you actually talk about that with them as well?

We do talk about that. There are always things that can be improved, but yeah, in principle, yeah, we do. Everybody's into sports. Of course. We try to maintain like a healthy work-life balance.

So that's a good thing. But yeah, we are not like every week in the gym together because that's not possible. But we do, for example, we have on Monday, we have our opening with the whole team the Dutch team and the remote team. And we do our little exercises together.

So yeah, definitely.

Wow. Cool.

So you actually do physical exercises together with the developers as it's very good I've never heard of a an exercise stand up on Monday morning yes that's the first time nice.

Well. We go around and then someone says, okay, 10 squats and then we go along so yeah It's Yeah, it's true. Burpee is the only forbidden exercise.

Really? It's like...

Too bad. Keep it rough, Mark. Burpees are not good. I know. If you're in a suit.

I hate burpees, but I understand why. I've done them quite enough. Nice.

So when you actually go out and hire people, right, you're looking for talent engineers or designers or QA engineers. But you're looking for people that have this background or this vision and have the empathy that understand the wellness part. How do you actually hire for both the technical side as well as the empathy or vitality side?

Yes, that's a great question. We recently hired a Dutch lady, a vitality coach. Great lady, she...

Yeah, phenomenal. So I think that when it comes to like hires, right?

So I think for me... For us, we look at a couple of things. So first of all, when we put like a remote job post online, We have infinite job applicants. It just keeps coming.

So you just don't have the time to screen everything. And so far I've done all the screening myself.

So it takes a lot of time, but I think it's worth it, you know, to invest in this screening process because. You know, it's... It's 90% of everything. If you can get the right people, So first of all, I look at mindset, like growth mindset.

Someone needs to be a believer in that they can change their own outcomes and that they have full control of their own skills and abilities. They're not being led, they lead their own life. I think that's very important. Second, do they love what they're doing? Do they really enjoy programming?

You know, can you call them in the middle of the night? I don't do that, but like hypothetically speaking to talk about an engineering problem and will they enjoy that? Vitality coaches, do they love vitality? Designers, can you chat about design forever, right?

Like that's very important. So, Of course, you know, in programming, it's very common to run a lot of tests, but with other types of jobs, we run a lot of tests regularly.

So just anything, If you can think of like two, three tests Just to get... Make sure that people are skills and they're taking feedback well.

So we test always these two things. So share a ton of feedback, even if they're doing great. Just to see how they pick it up. Are they great team players? That's four.

So can they work in a team? Are they not cocky? Are they like nice people to work with? Can you tell? Can you just crack a joke with people?

You know, it's very important, I think, to have something like that because you spend more time with them than with your wife or with whomever. Like, you spend so much time together. That's a very important thing. And coachability, I already mentioned a couple of times, but can people take feedback well? So very important thing. And then I have my sixth one. I forgot about it.

So maybe I'll come back to it later. But like, these are the core things, you know, if you do those well, then, You get a look. Long ends, in my opinion.

It's a very good list. And I like that you have the same list for like engineers or vitality coaches that the list is almost the same except for the skills.

Yeah. What is number six? It.

Is culture fit. So if it matches our culture, right?

So if people are into sports and health and, If they believe in the vision, it's, yeah, that. But yeah, it's the same list, I think. For me, yeah, it took me a long time to get to this list, but it works really well.

Yeah, and it makes, especially for you, I mean, it makes sense across the board. I think some of these you can just copy to any other company, but of course, like the culture fit and the health mindset, right, that is very specific for you. Is that hard to find in developers and software engineers or? Not as much as I think.

I would be lying if I said that it's this, did I go as far with the health for the vitality coach as the software engineer? But... I don't think it's that hard because someone that has a growth mindset often has takes care of their own body and mind.

Love that. This podcast, my podcast editor is actually in the Philippines. And almost every call that we have, we talk about, I mean, I go to gym regularly. He goes to the gym regularly. We talk about sports and about, I see about me, about the exercises that we do and about how we push ourselves. And we talk quite a bit about that versus like, I mean, of course you talk about all the work in editing as well, but it actually comes up in our conversation as well.

So it's really nice. And he does like, he's a video editor.

How did you screen him? If you had to add to this list, what would you add to it?

So how I screen, I think the first one is actually For me, it's culture fit? Like, can I have a normal, open, friendly discussion with somebody, right? Are they, can they level with me? Are they like, so you have, and it's very much a personality thing. Do they have like an open personality? I don't know if that makes sense. I think for me, that's one of the most important things that we can have an open discussion that is not afraid to talk about things that go right or that go wrong.

So. Yeah, I think that's...

You can be a friend with someone, sort of, right? So you can sort of Maybe friend's a big word, but you can.

Connect. Instead of it just being a transactional... Conversation, right? You do this, I do this. And that's, yeah, I don't enjoy working with somebody like that, right? It really needs to be a bit more and go a bit deeper. And of course, I mean, it's hard to be friends across time zones and across like thousands of kilometers. But yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we can't. That's hard.

Yeah, we can't go to the gym together. Like you said. That would be nice, but yeah, not going to happen. It's really hard.

I actually need to visit the team in like a month.

Where, in Africa? India?

Yeah, Boats.

Wow. So you're going to do a big trip.

Yeah, I go to Nigeria first and then to India and then...

Nice Wow.

Our deaf from zombie joining in India so Yes.

Okay. I see.

Yeah, because he's your lead developer. Of course, he's your technical lead.

And one of our devs is actually getting married. So...

Yeah. Nice.

So are you joining for the wedding? Are you invited, or not?

Yes, I am invited. I'll be if you're watching. Thanks for the invite.

Wow. Yeah. Nice. I was invited to a wedding in the Philippines, sometime ago or I think two years ago, but it was, yeah. A bit far for flights to actually go there. Stuff. It's really nice to be there. I did get the invitation. Going back to the technical development side, Your background is mechanical engineering and then behavioral sciences, but you have a lot of passion for UI, UX and habits, right? How do you bring your behavioral science into the UI, the UX, the design, the application. How do you bring all that together? That's a really.

Great question. I think that... If I look at the things that I consider things we do in the app.

So it's health science. It's behavior science. Of course, technology and then design. When we just started out with New-U, we were really on the science.

So science. We made all these science overviews and ways to apply it. I wrote my thesis on what BCTs, behavioral change techniques, are effective in mobile applications and what works and what doesn't work. I was really very heavy on the... On the science part.

So that has always been fundamentally integrated in New-U. And I think that it starts with when it comes to these science things, it's the big thing and the small things.

So for example, right? Like if we talk about the big things, self-determination theory. Maybe you're unfamiliar with this, but dominant theory in intrinsic motivation is based on the three principles of autonomy, relatedness and competence.

So you want to build an application that focuses on three things. How can I build some, make someone autonomous to Just let them decide what they're going to do. How can I integrate elements of relatedness?

So that is the social part of New-U and competence. How can we make them feel like they're getting better at something?

Like they're progressing, right? So just focusing on these three elements on the higher tier of fundamental theories and ingraining that through the application is great.

That's why, for example, I don't believe in applications that do extrinsic rewards, like things where you earn like coins and you can spend it in a shop I don't believe in those kind of application. And I think, that, yeah, New-U would never adopt such features because they're just fundamentally flawed, right?

So the... It's both on that level and on the small level. Then you get more to like, U.X. Kind of things like, okay, Gestalt principles. Okay. How can you design something? How can you nudge something?

So nudging theories, You can go very far with push notification, optimization, all these kinds of things. So there's so many things to it. But I think when it comes to anything, right, if you want to be great at something, Get the fundamentals right.

So reason from first principles, make sure you understand very well what works, why it works, how it works, and then try to integrate that and get to a more practical knowledge step by step. Yeah, that's, There's a lot to it, but I think that's the key of it.

Wow. I never realized that there was so much to actually, I understand why, right? For getting people to exercise more and live a healthy life and for vitality. And I never heard anyone that actually applies that to just mobile applications or web applications, which is really cool.

So if somebody wants to learn more about The theories that you just mentioned, are there specific books you'd recommend or where should they go?

Definitely. There's a really great book. I've got the... It's Designing for Behavioral Change. Designing. For behavior change It's from, yeah, this is a great book. It's from Stephen Wendel. I really enjoyed that.

So that brings things together, both the design part and the... More theoretical part, I think that's a great one to start with.

And that goes into more of the design elements or more to the, like the.

It's a pretty, it's a good read, you know? It's a bit technical, as in, science heavy, but gets practical. I think it's a good book to start with.

We're going to put that in the show notes for sure. So people can find it. I'll put a link in.

So the other thing, somewhere at the beginning, and I was going to ask this question, but I got distracted by the agency discussion. You said there was this other book when you started to develop, when you decided to develop code yourself on this bootcamp, and you actually read a book there as well that helped you. Which one was that?

Yeah. So when I learned to code, I didn't really learn from a book. But there's a book, actually, I think you made a post about it. That I learned a lot from was the Phoenix Project. Great book.

That one. Yeah. That was one.

Yeah, but yeah, and of course classics like Clean Code, Clean Architecture, those books help, Pragmatic Programmer, those books really helped me a lot. To understand more the fundamentals of programming and just being a professional as a programmer, not necessarily as a CTO, but like more as a programmer. I think are very good reads, must reads in my opinion, if you're starting to code.

Nice. So, and you're still... Learning.

I am. Yeah, I'm reading now a couple of books on... Two books actually on architecture.

So I'm just trying to sharpen my sharpen the saw. When it comes to architecture, because we use Firebase Still.

So, yeah, but we need to, at some point switch to, it works very well for us, by the way, but at some point we want to, we are already migrating some features right now. Moving to a more scalable architecture. Getting into that is a very important step for me as a CTO.

Yeah, I can imagine. Firebase is very nice. At some point, it starts to get expensive when you start to store too much data and use it too much.

Exactly. And there's certain limitations on the backend side that are just... A bit annoying here and there.

So for that, we need some different technologies to work around it.

Nice. One more book question. A couple of years ago, you gave me a book, The One Thing, right? And you're running a startup and there's so many things that you need to do. And there's like endless possibilities of the next step that you could take or the thing that you make it better.

So how do you decide what is the one thing that needs your attention that you're going to focus on?

Great question. So I think that there should be a hierarchy in your goal structure, right? As a business framework, we kind of adopt OKR system.

So it's like, We do it a bit. In our own way, but like, so it's, That immediately sets hierarchy. And so then, and then, okay, is it signal? Is it noise?

Like what contributes to this objective that we have for the upcoming quarter? Does it not? Let's not do it. That's a simple thing. I think that when it comes to decision making, It's good to have like a effort value balance feeling with everything, right?

So, okay, how much efforts, how much value you continuously evaluate, and you balance these things out. I like less is more in general. I know that if my team watches this, we'll probably say, Bart, you never apply that. You always do a long mix, but like... Just because I love what I do very much. But like, yeah, it's generally better to do less.

So to do one thing at a time, And, do less, focus more, it's generally better. Yeah.

So just if you have one thing that you know that works, just do it. Go for that. Trust the process. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I think that's Jeff Bezos, but that works really well.

Yeah.

Love that.

But to be honest, like as a, from a CEO, like managing director perspective, it's you spend a lot of time on rearranging and organizing ideas like that's I think the main thing that I do every day is... Organizing ideas. My girlfriend calls me an idea hoarder. I'm just always sort of sorting ideas and making new criteria to make decisions and then Making these matrixes and just weighing things out and trying to reason why something is better than something else. Useful thing by the way I learned this from my dad is to just when you have to make a decision assign different criteria to something and just score everything And it will give you a score.

So, and then.

And then your feeling will... Tell you something like okay this is not good or good and you need to figure out, is it your ego? That wants you to do this thing because you like it or for whatever reason.

And then you can actually reason with that. Because if you don't put it on paper, you cannot verbalize your thoughts. It doesn't work. I think when it comes to decision making, falsification is always more important than verification.

So scientific thinking is key. Just try to falsify the idea as much as possible. If you cannot falsify the idea, then it's a good idea. Otherwise, if you haven't spent the sufficient amount of time falsifying an idea. Then you didn't think enough about it, in my opinion. Especially if it's a big decision, right?

So, falsification over verification any day of the week.

Nice. Nice.

So... And about the future, right? You guys have been building New-U now for three, four, five years, I'd say. Yes.

Somewhere like that. Where do you see the future of Abbey Health going?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the future of New-U definitely expanding to different markets. Europe, maybe potentially the US or other countries. English speaking countries. We're not limited by languages, but Culture is different.

So when it comes to near you the content is definitely culture tailored now that could be turned into an abstraction, but that's not the case right now. So that would have to be turned into an abstraction first.

Yeah. I mean, it's a dream of mine, Mark, to have a top 10, top 5, top 1 application in the health section of the App Store and the Play Store. Maybe with New-U, maybe with a different... Brand or... We will see, but like definitely some dreams there. And I just try to make the app as good as we can and make impact on as many people as we can. We set the goal to impact like a million users. I think we'll suppress that goal very soon and then we are going to set a bigger goal but just tried to help as many people with their habits as possible and use our a sort of strategy to expand to new markets.

And you're now going to the markets through employers. Do you see a point where you're going to go direct as.

Well? To you mean B2C?

Like I said, it's definitely a dream, but we don't have any concrete plans. But definitely in this lifetime, I will... With this team or with another team get there. I prefer to do it with this team, of course.

So we'll see what happens.

So his lifetime is quite a long time still.

I was young still. So that's.

Fine. You've only been doing this for four or five years and you've already used quite a lot with New-U.

So there's definitely room for growth in the future.

We have some time, so it will be good. Yeah.

So and then if you go to tech leadership this is something that i ask everyone that comes on here what's the biggest you're building a mission driven product right which i love what's one the biggest lesson that you've learned over the past couple of years that you just wish you'd let down earlier biggest lesson you've learned when it comes to tech leadership over the past couple of years that you just wish you had known at the beginning well.

And sorry i missed your first sentence mark what's the.

For me, it's a bit funny, but build it in-house. Yeah, you need to have your software in-house. That's definitely, yeah, it is a work.

So, and then I understand that, right? And then we have a lot of business founders. What would your advice be to business founders, right? Business founders that are wanting to develop something themselves that have a great business idea, but just maybe don't have the technical skills themselves. What would your advice be for them?

I think it ties into... My vision of business in general, if you want to make it big, like it's the same, right?

So if you want to walk fast, walk alone, if you want to walk far, walk together, I think you need to find a great partner to work with complementary interests So it's not necessarily the case that you need to have a certain skill set. I think any skill set can be learned. I think it needs to be something that someone else wants to do. But you need to find yourself a good co-founder. I think that's key. In some sort of way. Maybe there are different ways. But...

Yeah, you definitely need to get out there into the world and find someone. And if you cannot find someone, then you need to do it yourself.

Yeah. Like you did, but still it requires, because vibe coding is nice, but there's a lot of skill to be built to be able to manage that and build production ready, secure code like you did.

Yeah, and I think maybe you can get a long way nowadays. It's different, right?

So with all these great new tools that you have on the market and all these AI, generative AI tools, which you can just... Get an app out pretty fast but if you look into the code base you know it's wishy-washy often still.

I mean, it might transform quickly in the next couple of years. Who knows? And maybe you get away with this approach for the first year and then Could be a thing, you know, plan B, do that, then get a good... Tech lead, hire that person, make sure you find someone that you're really close with. Maybe not found the company together, but like give this person a significant stake in the company and work it out that way.

You know, that could be a route. But in the end, I think you want to have a person in the heart of the team that has an ownership stake in the company. Otherwise, too fragile.

And owns the technology stack. Nice. And finally, last question. What is your one thing going to be for the next quarter or the next 12 months? What are you focusing on?

That's a great question. We are focusing on, we call it the Sequoia Highway project.

So the Sequoia Highway, the Sequoia is one of the biggest stream, it's not the biggest stream, I think it's the biggest stream by volume. And we are working on just in general making the New-U an integrative part of any organization.

So making sure that any organization integrates with New-U in a way that it really contributes to all their processes in terms of vitality, right? So that organizations don't have to worry about health anymore at all. If they work with us, we will ensure that New-U, that vitality is integrated into the organization in research, in, wherever they want to implement it. If it's one-on-one meetings, if it's like workshops, if it's like events, wherever, right?

So that's our thing. We build that highway and we call it a highway because we like to move fast, but it's a long journey. We have some things ahead of us.

So, And yeah, New-U is becoming like some reason that we call it Sequoia, like some You have these apps like they just have, you're Dutch, so you know, like the beschuitje with the one thing in it. That's not New-U. New-U is a big...

Software product. There's a lot of features to it. And everybody can plug and play at what they like But that's what we're working on right now is making the app an integrated part and making it as valuable as possible.

Cool. Nice. Bart, it's been incredible. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you.