The following interview is a conversation we had with Joe Schaeppi, CEO and Co-Founder of Solsten, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $39 Million Raised Power the Future of Human-Centric Experiences.

Joe Schaeppi
Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Brett
No problem. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Joe Schaeppi
Sure. Who I am, that’s always a tough one. But in the context of a Founder, my whole career has really been spent on how do you actually design experiences in ways that are healthy for people. I started out my career working in actually as an orderly volunteering in an Er in the United States, actually here in Minneapolis, and really noticed early on that a lot of the cases that were coming in there’s, a lot of mental health issues, things related to that. And a few of the older surgeons there actually knew my grandpa who was a doctor and said, joe, this is not what you want to do anymore. It’s not like it used to be. We end up working with insurance companies more than actually helping people sometimes and really said, well, how do you get upstream from that? So in the same way that we think of architecture and how we design spaces that may be higher ceilings, we know help people have better ideas, open spaces can be really healthy for things like lowering stress and stuff like that. 

Joe Schaeppi
So how do you do that digitally? And that sent me down a path of being a user experience designer. So I was a UX director at big agencies like McCann. I was the head of UX at BigFish games, and then I worked in clinical neuropsychology as well, so I was an adventure based psychotherapist. And all this comes together in pursuit of exploring what’s the essence of creating incredible experiences for people, architecting experiences that are in line with the best version of a person and their potential, as well as helping with their mental health. And Solsten was born out of that. Nice. 

Brett
Lots I want to dive deeper there on, but let’s go back a little bit and talk a bit more about you before we do. So is there a specific Founder that you really admire? And if so, who is in? What do you admire about them? 

Joe Schaeppi
For me, it’s a pretty easy one. I think it’s Walt Disney and just the ability to have a dream and be a dreamer, but also be a doer. There’s a lot of doers out there and a lot of people that can get stuff done, but if you lay train tracks in the wrong directions, things don’t always go well. And I think Walt kind of going saying, well, what could society really be like? And a lot of people said that Disney is like this fantasy world that they created. And one of the things he said was, well, people do commerce here. People talk, people shop, people eat, they do everything we do in normal society. We just built this around people and play, and that crosses over a lot of what we do at Solsten. But I think there’s a lot of founders that go and raise money and they create evolutions, and those are needed, and I think they’re important. 

Joe Schaeppi
But usually when you have some sort of thing that’s kind of a little bit of a revolution, you end up going up against a lot. And Walt’s story. And there’s a couple of books that I really like about him. One’s called The Wisdom of Walt. I think it’s a great story of a Founder who really saw beyond society as it is today and thought to himself, how can I leave something behind that enriches reality for everyone who would come after him? 

Brett
Nice. 

Joe Schaeppi
I love that. 

Brett
And outside of a Disney related book. 

Joe Schaeppi
Are there any other books that have. 

Brett
Had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be one of the classic business books or just a book that influenced how you view the world personally? 

Joe Schaeppi
Yeah, I mean, I think anything from Huxley is fantastic. Just the family he came from, the scientific minds. Most people are familiar with books like Brave New World but have never read like island or things like that. I think the odd of being a Founder, you’re dealing with ambiguity all the time, and you can’t go to business school and get all the outcomes or realities of how markets change and how realities shift. Yeah, there’s some things like you can cookie cut and processes you can maybe adapt. But at the end of the day, I think having a really sound level of deductive reasoning and being able to combine a lot of different ideas and string them together and create optionality for yourself. I always kind of describe it as like if you look at Michael Jordan with a basketball and he’s up against some of the best people. 

Joe Schaeppi
If you go replay games, that guy had many different ways he could pivot and turn and still score. That’s kind of like your job as a Founder, is to have those abilities. And I think people that teach you how to think like Huxley is very good at that and whether that’s my favorite, there’s other people that have their favorites, so that’s a good one. When I mean business books, it’s just like there’s so many. It’s like, where do you even start? I’ve really enjoyed more recently, like, the Finding My Virginity book, branson or I was on a podcast with Mark Randolph. He wrote a book called that will never Work. I think a lot of people that are around today, what I like to do is I like to read their books and talk to them. So to me, the most value actually comes from, like, for example, when I was on the podcast with Mark Randolph, who co founded Netflix Read, his book was on his podcast and before the podcast we sort of talked. 

Joe Schaeppi
And it’s amazing when you have that person’s book and are able to ask them some questions specific to your business, if you have the opportunity, it provides this level of richness. So, yeah, I kind of would leave it at that for now, but I read a ton, so no shortage of recommendations there. If someone’s looking for something specific, nice, I love it. 

Brett
All right, let’s switch gears now and let’s dive deeper into the company and the product line. So I see three different products there on the website. Could you just talk us through those different products? 

Joe Schaeppi
Sure. So the way to think of Solsten Holistically is basically it’s your operating system for creating human centered experiences. And so if we sort of break out our products, you can kind of think of it as early on, maybe Microsoft had Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel and all these different products. And that’s your productivity suite. So our product Traits, that was our very first product. It’s used for live experiences. So what it is able to do is through a combination of adaptive psychological assessment. So just think of that as like the act, but it’s understanding you psychologically and adaptively through that, along with basically all this enriched behavioral data that we procure and mostly through games. And I can get to why that’s important in a bit, but through that, those two things and the telemetry between them, we’re able to predict the psychology of a given audience and create different groups. 

Joe Schaeppi
So think of them as like think like groups or like minded groups of people really going far beyond demographics and behavior. So you’re actually able to understand your audience in real time and then personalize that experience to your audience in real time. So it works through an API, you’re able to understand different traits. Like maybe one part of your audience is really altruistic, so you want to give them things in your experience where they can help other people. And then all of a sudden our user is like, whoa, completely. That’s like going from, I don’t know, MapQuest to Google Maps. It’s like the experience is going far beyond the experiential expectations of your audience. Engagement changes it’s better. So we use Traits to really allow companies to understand their audiences in real time and then create experiences that we know that they’ll actually really love. 

Joe Schaeppi
So that’s what traits is navigator every time we measure a psychological profile. So most of this happens in games. Not many people know this, but 3 billion people in the world play games every single day. Only 4 billion people have a smart device. So when you put that into perspective, three fourths of the global population that’s using technology is a gamer, and that number is just going up and up. It’s like 100 million more people every year that are being added to that. So it’s just how we’re evolving from media interaction. We went from radio to television and television to games. Interactive entertainment, because it’s two way, is just from an engagement perspective and from an attention perspective, it’s just far more enriching. It’s also healthier for you, passive entertainment. There’s tons of studies if you ever want to go read all about it. Whether it’s passively scrolling on your phone all the way to TV, it typically doesn’t help when it comes to things like anxiety in the long run. 

Joe Schaeppi
That being said, when we go into games, we basically send out these psychological assessments. People triple opt into them, they’re anonymized, so we never attach anything we do to that person’s real identity. And then they’re given a unique ID that they can control that from or opt out. But what happens as a part of that is you end up in a database, and it’s the largest psychological database in the world. So, for example, when Eminem’s was like, hey, I think we might want to get into this gaming business, we can punch a button and say, here’s 40,000 people that said they liked Eminem’s, and here’s the different psychological groups. And here’s their motivations. And here’s the type of Features they like and here’s The Type of games they like in movies and IP, et cetera. And then you can start designing this experience to them. 

Joe Schaeppi
And then we have testing services as a part of that. So as you’re designing and you go, oh, we’re thinking of maybe these ten features, or updating this part of the experience might be really interesting. We’re actually able to when you do that sort of testing and we can do the testing for these companies as well. We can identify the features and which psychological groups they resonate with. So like understanding the full potential, what’s the biggest potential of your market? And what’s so cool about that is you’re basically not using your development costs as your research budget. You’re kind of the job of an entrepreneur. You’re actually getting to know where you’re going in the future, and when you get there, you’re able to actually greet and meet your ideal audience rather than if you build it, they will come, which is not necessarily true. 

Joe Schaeppi
You’re able to actually build it and know who’s going to be arriving there. So what’s cool about Navigator is most of the products that launch using it end up going on to being successful, like over 95% of them. And then our third product is called Frequency, and we have that in beta. Right now. We’re really taking our time to create the most intelligent digital asset manager in the world. So what it does is when you upload images into it, so think of like Dropbox, Google Drive. What it’s doing is it’s tagging what’s in the images. Most of the image recognition software out there is built off of only real photos or like real pictures. So when you upload like art or game images, it won’t really know that’s a wizard and that’s a box and that’s a bag and that’s a hat. It needs to be trained off of this stuff. 

Joe Schaeppi
So we’ve been training this for three years off of basically marketing images or art, and then realistic stuff too, so everything will get tagged. And then what we’re able to do is connect it to if you have a navigator audience, which is the psychological database that you can just query, or a traits audience, which is your customers. What we’re able to do is you can upload any piece of art, image marketing, ad, video, and it will actually predict how much that’s going to resonate with a specific group in your audience. So effectively you can use it for everything from doing marketability testing, looking at different marketing ads, optimizing those ads to we work with most major game developers. They’ll use it to create like in game assets or art assets, or skins or new guns or things like that. And they’re actually able to know before putting a lot of effort into them what’s going to likely resonate with their audience. 

Brett
Wow, super fascinating. And then is this just for gaming or do you have plans to take it outside of gaming at some point? 

Joe Schaeppi
Yeah, the game we’re playing right now, if you think of Solsten, it’s kind of like early on Google was like, you know what, we’re going to index the entire Internet and we’re going to make it searchable. What Solsten is doing is indexing all of the behavior on the internet and making it basically predictable from a psychological perspective. So we’re effectively building out the cognitive layer of the Internet. In order to do that, you have to be in games. Because effectively you look at all of the behavior that can happen across the Internet, the vast majority of that behavior is in games. Everything you can do outside of games, you can do in games. Everything you can do in games. Jumping, running, swimming, all these things, these don’t happen on Facebook. So what we do is effectively we’re logging all this. We’re using that to predict psychology from that anonymously, of course. 

Joe Schaeppi
And that being said, think of it as kind of like an Nvidia, where Nvidia was like, how do we really make the best graphics cards in the world? Well, let’s go to the place where graphics cards are used the most, which is the gaming industry. So they did that, optimized it. So gaming is really our enabler. It’s not the endpoint. We have a healthcare part of the company where we’re actually taking some real games through clinical trials. But when it comes to traits and navigator, were very specific for the last four years about who we worked with outside of gaming. Like Gofundmeancetry.com, people that we knew were going to be dedicated to building. They cared about human centered experiences. They cared about audience. Those are the companies we worked with in the past in the space. But now we have a fun list that we’re rolling it out for every vertical outside of gaming over the next year here, starting with groups in the healthcare side of things. 

Joe Schaeppi
But we’re also in just general apps, fast moving consumer goods. So if you have a human as a customer, you probably should be using Solsten. 

Brett
Nice. So a pretty large target market for you then. 

Joe Schaeppi
Yeah. 

Brett
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Joe Schaeppi
And what would you say you’ve gotten. 

Brett
Right in terms of your go to market? It sounds like you’ve gained a lot of traction. You’ve captured the trust and attention of big companies. What have you gotten? 

Joe Schaeppi
Right? Yeah. Our first customer was Hasbro, which was kind of fun. That was off of a prototype and there was no proof of concept. Everything from the start was paid for. And if I look back, what are all the things that we did pre pandemic? Because we started this in 2018, so it’s about five years old now. And step by step, how did we get to this point? I think it’s an extreme level of focus and I know that’s cliche, but we had some amazing opportunities outside of gaming because actually there’s not bigger budgets outside of gaming, and the use cases that we run things for are much more sensical in a lot of ways. Take a note of this was new to the gaming industry when we really stepped in. And a lot of it was gaming companies going, hey, we already do all this, and then using Solsten and going, wait, we don’t do any of this. 

Joe Schaeppi
But really understanding where our moat needed to be and our moat. Like, we had competitors early on who were in gaming and also bigger companies not going to names, who tried to buy us out or copy some of the stuff were doing and go to games. And I think really knowing your beachhead market and just being the horse with the blinders on your eyes and just getting so good at serving that audience and that space and creating and just optimizing around, learning. I do some angel investing too. And all the founders say like, well, my company didn’t work because I didn’t get investment, and our competitor got investment. And I’m like, well, are they serial entrepreneurs? Have they had exits before? Oh, yeah, that’s not fair. It’s like, well, that’s kind of how life works, and you’re in your first one, and you got to make sure that you’re really showing the value and those proof points. 

Joe Schaeppi
And I think that’s something we did from early on too. Like, people have always paid for Solsten. They have paid quite a bit, I think if you’re in the B to B space like us, that gave us a lot of optionality. We also always played our strengths, like, between my Co-Founder and I, legally were able to operate in the US. And Europe. So we just always put job descriptions up. That’s how we ended up in Berlin, was, who are the best people that we can find that are from a space perspective? That’s why we moved the company. We started it in Stockholm in the same little place where Spotify and King, who makes Candy Crush, we started it in the same little kind of, I guess I don’t want to say crappy, but it was cool. It had a lot of character. So we started in that same community, and we moved it to Berlin because we just focused on talent and culture fit. 

Joe Schaeppi
I know culture fit seems ambiguous, but here’s maybe something that’s interesting because we do a lot of psychometrics. We have our employees. It’s optional, but when people would get hired, they take our own psychometric assessments. And we started tracking the traits of people that did really well at Solsten. For example, our engineering team, people with high levels of straightforwardness, tended to be always our best engineers. So we started basically looking for what are the trait profiles that we see having a lot of success at Solsten, and what actually comes from that is an incredible amount of diversity, which is also kind of cool. Like, we’re from over 30 different countries now, so when you optimize around attributes, it sort of opens a lot of doors and it reduces a lot of bias, actually, because I think a lot of founders go, well, I’m looking for culture fit, and what they’re really saying is, I’m looking for more people like me. 

Joe Schaeppi
And when you’re able to focus on those attributes from a cultural perspective, you can really start to understand who’s going to grow and be really effective within the business. I actually wrote a Harvard Business Review article a bit ago where I did this at. It was my Co-Founder’s past company, and we organized their teams around kind of psychological groupings and they ended up spinning out four startups. I think two have had exits already. So really successful compared to your normal data. But I think those are like some of the things that we’ve done well, there’s a lot we haven’t. And maybe that’s it too. The stuff we haven’t done well. I think one of the things that’s interesting about if you meet people at Solsten, we really put an emphasis on psychological and emotional resilience and learning. And why I say that is those two things are tied together. 

Joe Schaeppi
Back when I was a psychotherapist, I’d have some people who would come to me and say, I wish I had. 

Brett
More psychological safety in the workplace. 

Joe Schaeppi
And there’s no shortage of articles talking about psychological safety. What they don’t actually talk about is workplaces that have the highest levels of psychological safety actually are teams that have the highest levels of emotional resilience. It makes sense. Like if you’re emotionally resilient, you’re much less triggered. Like when I was a therapist, I used to tell people, like, you can’t be triggered if you’re not loaded. So if you’re loaded, you got to figure that out first. And if you build a team off of developing emotional resilience and learning those two things. This is something like, I think Bezos said a while ago, and I’m going to paraphrase it. He said something like a lot of people, when they came to Amazon as we started succeeding, they said they kind of acted like they had to be right a lot because a lot of the senior executives were right a lot and it gave the wrong impression. 

Joe Schaeppi
Because if you actually looked at why early on, a lot of those people were right more often than not is because throughout their entire career they had been willing to be wrong more and embedding that from a cultural perspective, the kind of the combination of resilience and the willingness to be wrong. Because ultimately I think if you have a very crystal clear vision, which what Solsten has, and it’s been pretty big when you have that and then you allow for a culture that’s willing to be wrong, you actually just create a culture that is going to learn the fastest. And then the off gas of that is you end up being right more than the people who are trying to be right and not be learners. And to be a really good learner requires resilience. So I think so those are some of our secret sauces. 

Brett
Nice. That’s super interesting and really good insights, I think, for our listeners. Now, if we just look at this space in general, how does trades compare to something like the Myers Briggs assessments that seem to have been around forever? 

Joe Schaeppi
Sure. Well, I think we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants and if you look at kind of clinical psychology as a whole, cognitive psychology really didn’t start coming to fruition until the 1960s. It wasn’t that before 1960, we didn’t believe people had brains and couldn’t think. It was just that we didn’t know how to measure any of this stuff. So the 1960s was sort of the onset of when questionnaires and psychological assessments were born. And the Myers Briggs was, I think, a really interesting off gas of that early on, related to your 16 personality types and all this kind of stuff. One of the challenges is with the Myers Briggs, so it’s better than a flip of a coin, but it might as well be closer to astrology. And I know there’s some people that are probably going to be really mad I said that, but the reality is, from a scientific perspective, we can’t do really good test retest, whether it’s astrology or the Myers Briggs reliability. 

Joe Schaeppi
It’s called your Chromebox alpha is what we use to calculate it. And what all that is in simple terms, if I measure your personality type for the Myers Briggs now, and if I measure it in a year from now, it’s going to change. And it’s not for all people. But the questions that make up the Myers Briggs and the types that are there, they’re not really super reliable. Whereas maybe shift gears and talk about something like the MMPI, which is used in clinical psychology to diagnose and look at everything from personality disorders to depression, anxiety, et cetera. In the clinical world, our reliability scores need to be above 0.7 at the very lowest. But a lot of these tests are like zero point 85, sometimes 0.9, which is not great, it’s better than nothing, but it’s basically saying that if we retest it now and in two weeks and then two weeks after that, we’d still get about 85% of the time, the same results for depression. 

Joe Schaeppi
A lot of the stuff from Myers Briggs is like in the 60%, so it’s better than a flip of a coin and that’s why people kind of see it and they go, yeah, I can see that, but it’s not good enough. And it’s definitely not good enough to be able to predict any sort of psychology from if you’re playing the game and not using questionnaires, because you need to use those as baselines. And when it comes to the Myers Briggs in particular, you can’t use that as a clinician. So, like, when I was doing clinical psychology and if we wanted to look at personality, we would send something out like it’s called the Neopir, if you’ve heard of Ocean or the Ocean model, like the Big Five. So it’s a clinical version of that. So that’s what we would use more likely. Or there’s another tool that’s a little bit more clinical called the Pai, that looks at personality as well. 

Joe Schaeppi
So these tools are a little bit more clinical. The problem with all these tools, though, is they’re static. So if you think of like, we develop the ten best questions to measure Extroversion. It’s going to be the ten best questions based off of a large population, where what we do at Solsten, we actually do adaptive testing. So we’re able to amass a really big item bank. And it’s like if you started taking one of our questionnaires, Brett, it would actually be delivering you the questions that are the most reliable and valid for you to measure something like Extroversion. And it’s learning about you as you’re taking it. So what that means is you’re going to end up with like, let’s say we got your profile, you’re going to end up with a lot of these traits that have really high levels of reliability or validity. 

Joe Schaeppi
So Myers Briggs, I think they did a lot. There’s an interesting book called The Personality Brokers. If anyone’s back the books, if they’re interested in the history of the Myers Briggs and what it’s about, you could check it out. But yeah, it’s definitely a relic of the past at this point. 

Brett
Makes sense. And I love diving deep into different industries. So that book sounds like a perfect book to read. 

Joe Schaeppi
Yeah. 

Brett
Now to go back a little bit, or maybe we should have done this at the start of the call, what’s experience mean to you? How do you define experience? 

Joe Schaeppi
Yeah, so as human beings, we have these five senses, and those are the things that we experience reality through. Of those senses are vision. Our occipital lobe is about 30% of your brain and which is dedicated solely to vision. So when people say, I’m a visual person, you might as well just say, well, that’s redundant because being a person means you’re visual as long as you are obviously not blind or impaired visually. Which in that case it’s really interesting because the parts of your brain, like your olfactory parts of your brain or other parts that are dedicated towards, like, hearing, they’re going to take over parts of that homunculus of your brain to become more perceptive, which our brain is so adaptive, it’s incredible. But when it comes to experience, most of us, we experience reality through what we see. And so when we think of experience at Solsten, that’s part of why we work in games, is you’re still really limited to your experience of reality if it’s just visual. 

Joe Schaeppi
It’s why when you watch surfing on a TV versus when you do it in real life, it’s so different. And everything from biochemically to the memories you create. And then I think that’s kind of an interesting next step is thinking of experience through memory. So games, part of why were in this sort of attention economy and why a lot of people are going into games is people want deeper levels of experience. It’s the same reason why people went from the radio to black and white TV to colored TV. Nick Swartzen, one of my favorite comedians, he has this joke where he’s like. Yeah, I have this friend who’s like he’s just like that p***** off movie critic who you can’t show him a movie that he’s not displeased with new whatever comes out. And he’s like, yeah, it sucked. He’s like, can you imagine if we played Transformers in a black and white theater in the 1930s? 

Joe Schaeppi
Like, people would be losing it. They’d be like, calling emergency. They’d be all over the place. And it’s our experience that we have in life in terms of if you look at fundamental human motivations, one of them is Flow more good books. That’s the pretty obvious one. But if Mile Mahali six Semihali, I think I can ever pronounce his name properly. But flow the kind of the Godfather of flow. It’s a core motivator for human beings. And a lot of when it gets triggered is when our challenge is just slightly higher than our skill level. And if you look at people’s disposition to flow, so their ability to enter deeper levels of flow states, when you add in sound, touch, smell, the more that you add in from experiential from a sensorial perspective, the more likely you can basically create a flow state. So that’s part of why things like surfing are able to really induce flow so well, because it’s just so immersive. 

Joe Schaeppi
There’s water and waves and ocean and all these smells and sense. Your senses are just firing on all cylinders, and you really kind of end up in that zone. And so for us, experience is the culmination of all those things and how we enable human beings. So it’s not just the things happening. It’s two things beyond that. It’s how we remember them. So that’s all we are as people, is the moment we’re in and the collection of memories from the past moments. And oftentimes, if you think of the most memorable moments in your life, they’re tied to two things. One is flow. They’re tied to immersive realities, where your senses are your touch, smell, sight, all these things are being triggered. And that in conjunction with your values. If you look at just write down your top five peak experiences and then write the values that were there, whether you value nature or family or creativity or whatever you value, and you’ll start to see a pattern across all of your peak experiences. 

Joe Schaeppi
So it seems that some of our aspects of personality, which could include values we have combined with those experiences, they really boil down to what our peak experiences are. And then those are the things we end up remembering, and those memories end up being our life. And so experience kind of wraps all into that. And at the end of it’s also something that we believe people should be the driver of. So that’s part of why Solsten exists, is how do we put you in the driver’s seat of your experience? Rather than we don’t think instagram, for example, should be really driving your experience. It should be the best version of yourself. Being able to interact with technology in a way where you’re in control, where you can opt in or opt out but kind of turn on sort of a Google Maps versus a map quest and being able to pilot your experience whether it be digital or not. 

Brett
Amazing. Love that Joe. We’re getting close to being up on time here. So I want to end just with one final question and that question is what’s the future of the company look like? 

Joe Schaeppi
Let’s paint a picture of what it. 

Brett
Looks like maybe three to five years from today. 

Joe Schaeppi
Sure. So we already work with pretty much every major gaming company, but what you’re going to see there, I think as a consumer is one of the realities is a lot of games that you log into and likely experiences. There’s going to be the ability to opt in through your Solsten ID and control whether that experience personalizes to you or not. Everything we learn in healthcare, we’re mapping back to our overall experience. So let’s say if we see somebody who’s really open and has high extroversion and altruistic and we see specific features that actually improve anxiety for them, decrease depression, et cetera, these are the features that are going to be more likely to get surfaced. So how do you actually if you think of your device right now and ask yourself, are you the best version of yourself when you’re on your device? I know I’m probably not. 

Joe Schaeppi
I’m much better version of myself when I’m with friends and outside and in nature. But what’s going to happen is the technology that we’re leveraging, if we get everything right in gaming and if we keep doing things the right way, what we’re going to see is the technology we use is going to start to feel a lot more like Google Maps versus MapQuest. And from a company perspective, if you have a consumer facing product and are looking to understand your audience, it’s our hope that you would put your trust in us to understand your audience. And I think the reality is best quoted there by there’s a few pretty visionary people that we get to work with. Like one used to be the head of Call of Duty, which is a pretty popular game. And one of the quotes that was said there was basically in three or four years from now, like Solsten is an advantage right now if you use it. 

Joe Schaeppi
But people, consumers, experiential, expectations are changing and evolving and getting better and better that the companies that don’t use Solsten within the next two to three years are going to be at a major disadvantage. And your audience and understanding your audience, yeah, it’s going to be basically what you have to do. It’s not going to be a nice to have and because we’re in real time basically measuring a pool of 3 billion people, there’s no way to get closer to the pulse of understanding markets or understanding your audience better than Solsten. We worked with a few outside of gaming Fortune 500s who have just flat out said, you guys know way more about our customers than we ever could imagine. Like a Nielsen Report or Gardner Report is like it feels like we just stepped years ahead when it comes to understanding our audience and being able to create experiences for them. 

Joe Schaeppi
So we’ll see that. And the other part is we’re going through clinical trials coming up here, and one of our hopes is that when people are in the hospital, it’s no longer 7 hours of psychological assessments to understand. If you have ADHD or schizophrenia or anything like that, maybe you can just play Angry Birds. So on. That being said, moving forward the science of human understanding. And we’re really here. We’re a mental health company with a gaming cape on, and we’re using all this stuff to how do we basically don’t we’re not here to gamify health. We’re here to healthify gaming, basically, and really bring what is engaging naturally and play. And I think in five years, people look back and go, that was common sense, that games and healthcare were best friends from the start. But right now, I don’t think that’s obvious to everyone. 

Joe Schaeppi
So making that obvious should if we do everything right, that’ll be something that happens in five years from now. 

Brett
Amazing. Joe, I would love to keep you on and keep asking you another 20 or 30 questions here, but we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap before we wrap up. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to. 

Joe Schaeppi
Go right now would probably be to go to our website and shoot us an email. And yeah, I think you can follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn is where we’re the most active. Awesome. 

Brett
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your story, educate myself and our audience, and really share this vision. This is all super exciting. I’ve learned a lot and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision. 

Joe Schaeppi
Thanks, Brett. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. 

Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. 

Joe Schaeppi
If you’re a PDB Founder looking for. 

Brett
Help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.