💪🤓PUML Startup Story!🏋️‍♂️

Hello friends! As PUML Ambassador I'm proud the project has just got covered by QLD Government site in startup story!🙌

The Office of the Queensland Chief Entrepreneur is an Advance Queensland initiative funded by the Queensland Government and driven by the state’s entrepreneurial community. Their goal is to cement Queensland’s reputation as Australia’s #startupstate with the talent, community, outcomes and deal flow to prove it. Their office is the first of its kind in Australia.

Read the interesting article: 👀

Gold Coast founded PUML Better Health has a vision to make the world move more. With its sophisticated health and fitness rewards platform that improves mass participation in activity and sport, it is doing just that.

The team's story starts back in London when co-founder Damien King was working on his first startup, BeeLiked.com.

“I was doing all the tech while still managing a large team of engineers at Virgin Media. It was the ultimate side hustle, but after 18 months of late nights and far too much coffee and Red Bull, I started to notice my health decline,” Damien says.

“I wasn’t involved in any sports and had no time for weekly exercise. It was a slow decline, but I started to feel more lethargic and I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, high cholesterol and major visceral fat.

“It wasn’t overnight but I had slowly become sedentary and the increase in stress from startup life and long hours lead to a gradual degradation of my health. It was only then that I realised the importance of having a regular exercise routine and the difficulties of being motivated to do that when you still feel young and healthy.”

Damien had always wanted to work on a platform that helped improve people's motivation in activities and sports and that could track their data to analyse improvements or a decline in health and wellbeing.

In 2012, he exited his first startup and it wasn’t until 2016 that he began to focus on healthtech, firstly by securing IP with a patent, then by releasing Possible Fitness, an app to find personal trainers and coaches in your area.

In 2018 he joined forces with Adam Samuel from Zippy Rewards as a co-founder and together they began developing PUML Better Health, a platform that would ultimately deliver this original vision of making people move more.

“PUML Better Health is that platform and has the ability to have a real global impact on helping people form a regular exercise routine,” Damien says.

“Living a sedentary lifestyle is now one of the worlds biggest health concerns. A lack of activity greatly increases the impacts of stress and overall wellbeing, and ultimately can lead to lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

“With PUML Better Health we aim to make the world move and help people secure their own fitness future, through physical activity and sports participation. There is a remarkable opportunity today to transform people’s health as we are at the convergence of major trends.”

He says those trends include:

A global sedentary epidemic, where one in two adults in OECD countries is overweight or obese and as a consequence people are dying from preventable diseases
A movement towards privacy and data ownership, where people now understand the importance and value of their own data and are starting to take back control
Blockchain technology where digital currencies can be used as a mechanism to transfer value for rewards, and private and public chains can be used together as a secure and protected data repository for health and fitness data
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are advancing to the position where they can now have a real impact on preventative healthcare when married with clean and predictable health and fitness data. This modeling can be used to predict early diagnosis of potential medical conditions and detect signs of early symptoms.
After the minimum viable product (MVP) was launched Damien and his co-founder Adam Samuel have been most excited about the adoption.

“Our current members love being rewarded for being healthy and active. Our MVP has already delivered over 150,000 gym check-ins in Brisbane alone and rewarded members with bottles, shirts, personal training sessions and more,” Damien says.

“We have clear data that shows an increase in engagement and participation, and this has been the catalyst to developing our blockchain version that will enable mass participation and will work for councils, corporates, gyms, yoga studios and governments who want to track and improve people's activity.

“The biggest highlights have included being part of the University of Queensland’s Hype UQ Spin Accelerator Program earlier this year and then participating in the world’s first blockchain accelerator based out of New York University. This was a huge achievement to be recognised as a world leader in blockchain sports and to have exposure to major sporting mentors.

“We have now opened our pre-launch campaign and have had over 3,500 users pre-register from all over the world in the hopes of getting the first blockchain-enabled mobile app, where they can earn crypto and rewards for completing healthy activities like step challenges and gym visits.”

The biggest challenge for the team so far has been developing a distributed application on blockchain, while the technology is still in its infancy.

“Many protocols are only recently moving out of beta and the documentation is often poor,” Damien says.

The company has grown with investment from Brisbane Angels and key high-net-worth individuals that have domain experience in health, technology and blockchain.

“This has allowed us to develop our technology and be positioned for a major seed round by a global venture capitalist from Asia. We are currently setting up an office in London and are looking at commercialising our corporate wellbeing offering into major UK startups and scaleups in 2020,” Damien says.

“We are starting pilots with key startups and scaleups in Australia that take health and wellbeing seriously.

“We are also hosting the Better Health Awards in 2020 that will see employees from different companies compete to be the most active workplace.”

As the team completes their trials in 2020 they are looking for innovative councils and corporates to adopt the platform and make a real impact on people's lives. Later in 2020 they will look to commercialise their product into the UK market and expand globally.

Source: https://www.chiefentrepreneur.qld.gov.au/stories/puml-better-health

PUML Website: https://puml.io/ 🏋️‍♂️⛹️‍♀️🚴‍♂️🏋️‍♀️🤸‍♂️🤾‍♂️🤽‍♀️🤼‍♀️🏊‍♀️🏌️‍♀️🏂🏄‍♀️🏄‍♂️🏌️‍♂️⛷🥅🏈

Join PUML better health Telegram channel: https://www.t.me/pumlofficial