Sean Higgins is the founder and CEO of BetterYou, a product that “nudges” you to make better decisions and work toward your goals. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Techstars, a partner at Router Ventures, and previously founded VidGrid.
Top 3 Takeaways
- In schools across all grades, the presence of phones has changed everything from student focus to bullying and has magnified some existing issues, but also presents an opportunity to learn and behave more effectively.
- For businesses, managing employee wellbeing must now include digital wellness. This also presents both opportunities like more insight into personal health and challenges like invasion of privacy.
- Smartphone-based tools for managing digital wellness and tech addiction are mostly aimed at monitoring or gating app usage, but there is an opportunity around incentivizing use of and healthy engagement in good content.
Show Notes
- [0:40] What does tech addiction mean for schools and for businesses.
- [2:50] Does the fact that kids are getting phones earlier make bullying worse?
- [4:15] Teachers and counselors have a hard time dealing with tech addiction and the impact of students having phones.
- [6:12] Do incentives for keeping students off their phones work?
- [10:09] Most tech addiction apps on the market are for monitoring or gating use rather than encouraging beneficial use.
- [10:45] What Sean has learned about working with education from building BetterYou.
- [12:50] Where does the responsibility for student success with respect to tech addiction fall?
- [14:50] How business differs from education when it comes to device usage management.
- [21:32] Companies will tie in personal health and happiness with overall health of the organization.
- [22:02] What is the right incentive structure to encourage digital health within companies?
- [23:35] Does a company tracking its employees’ habits for their benefit infringe on privacy?
- [26:30] Trust will be one of the most important elements for brands in the digital wellness space.
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