Lessons from 1 year of exploratory career change
Introducing our homegrown brands - join us for a new chapter!
It’s been a while since I wrote here. I hope each and every one of you is doing well.
The past weeks have been a whirlwind, leaving me with little time to pause and reflect - but I’m finally able to share with you what we’ve been working on and what’s the next chapter of Yoginify.
As I write this, I'm seated in a cozy hotel room in Gifu, Japan 🇯🇵, cherishing a few days of vacation from my self-employment. This precious moment of quietude has prompted me to take a look in the rearview mirror and reflect on the past year.
One year of self-employment explorations à la Yoginify
The reasons for the pursuit of self-employment
One year ago, me and my business and life partner Ghia, embarked on a big career change, with a few goals in mind. We wanted to:
Take control of our time
Achieve location freedom
Pursue work that is truly fulfilling and contributes with value to the world
With a vision to combine health and wellness with new technologies, we started Yoginify. And over the past year, it feels like we’ve done a million things and more.
I think I can call it our year of exploration. It has been filled with trials and errors. Our approach has been simple: test, learn, adapt, and persist.
We made use of our skills in business, tech, and design to set up a very lean agency where we worked hands-on to solve our clients’ problems, whether it was a new website, a new SoMe marketing strategy, a recruitment video, or a new graphic design, we made it work with the limited resources we had.
Introducing our homegrown brands
But we also worked really hard on building our own projects and digital products. We’ve had tonnes of ideas spanning all the way from starting a physical yoga studio to building apps.
A lot of ideas got scrapped (thank God), and some ideas we tested and failed.
And some ideas made it through all the way to launch - and we can finally share the results of what we’ve been building👇🏻.
Yoga With Ida
Yoga with Ida is an on-demand yoga, meditation, and breathwork streaming service for people who want to bring more body-mind exercises into their wellness routine. New classes and programs are released every other month.
Start Streaming Yoga With Ida Today!
Follow Yoga With Ida on Instagram
Online Office Yoga
Unwind the grind with Yoga-as-a-Service and elevate your team’s body and mind. Online Office Yoga is a platform for companies with remote workers who can book virtual yoga classes with experienced yoga teachers. With our service companies can offer regular yoga classes as an employee benefit for remote workers, or book yoga for one-off events like team-building or conferences.
HerCycle.io
HerCycle is a mobile application that enables women to live in alignment with their menstrual cycle and hormones. 9 in 10 women suffer varying degrees of symptoms related to their menstrual cycle, and 40% of women do not respond to any of the available treatments for PMS. Happy hormones require everyday lifestyle habits of exercising, nourishment and mindfulness. HerCycle help women to align their lifestyle to their hormones’s monthly rhythm.
We are in prototyping stage and are currently accepting menstruating women between 18-45 to test our app. If you are interested in learning more, sign up for our e-mail guide here:
Sign-up to HerCycle E-mail Guide
Here’s some stuff we learned during this year of exploration
How to set up a legal entity in Sweden
How to build websites in many different ways
How to build an app (and how not to 😆)
How to develop a brand identity
How to create videos (and the importance of video in today’s online world)
How difficult it is to build a social media following when you do it wrong, and how easy it can be if you do it right
The importance of an intellectual property strategy and how to make one
How to balance a 9-to-5 and build several side hustles — it’s not easy! 🤯
How to embrace the process
Our takeaways from this exploratory year
It's never too late to embark on a new career journey. Take the leap and trust that the universe supports your endeavors.
It’s okay to keep a day job to support your (side) businesses. It not only provides financial security but can also be a source of skills and networking that can be beneficial for your startup.
Choose the right partner (in business and in life). The ups and downs are easier to navigate when you have someone who complements your skills and shares your vision.
You can be content with less money and understand that wealth doesn't equate to a good life or personal worth
Embrace a culture of testing, prototyping, iterating, and testing again. It’s okay to fail but remember to dust yourself off and try again.
Fall in love with problems, not solutions. And remember that starting off with the solution first is “stupid engineering”.
Spend more time outdoors and less time confined to an office. Move your body and still your mind daily. It will benefit you holistically.
Do not underestimate the role luck plays. As the saying goes, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Putting yourself in the right position to capitalize on opportunities is a skill in itself.
Continuous learning. The secret according to the Zen masters: always be a beginner. Adopting a beginner's mindset can help keep you humble and open to new ideas.
Join us in the next chapter of Yoginify
We want to thank everyone who’s been subscribing to this newsletter. We appreciate you being here more than you can imagine!
I love writing and will continue to do so, but our work now continues mostly under our respective brands Yoga With Ida, Online Office Yoga and HerCycle, so you can follow us there, we will not send any more newsletters through this platform.
With love,
Team Yoginify