In an interview with Insights Success, Zara Martirosyan, the Co-founder & CEO of inKin Social Fitness Platform, shares her experience and provides resourceful insights about inKin and its products, and the motto of the organization along with its future goals in revolutionizing the wellness industry.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Zara and Insights Success:
Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision & what are the cuttingedge services/solutions offered by inKin Social Fitness?
Founded in October 2014, inKin is a digital platform that helps users to start taking care of their most crucial asset which is their health and well-being through tracking their fitness and health parameters and getting more active and healthier on a daily basis through various engaging activities and online challenges and competitions.
inKin helps users to:
- Learn more about their health and change their everyday behavior by monitoring their fitness & health data from various fitness devices and apps.
- Become more active through socializing with their family, friends, and co-workers, and get motivated through friendly competitions, gamification, and rewards.
Our Corporate Wellness solution is a simple to use and efficient tool for:
- Running friendly fitness competitions and helping employees to track their well-being and promote a healthy lifestyle in the company;
- Virtual team building and staff engagement;
- Corporate wellness facilitation.
We knew it was working when one of the cofounders lost almost 40 kilos since we started working on the project.
Initially, we wanted to create a platform that would allow people to monitor their loved ones’ health data and receive alerts if their family members or close friends weren’t feeling well. However, we realized that the market of medical wearables was not mature enough and there were no accurate 24/7 affordable end-user devices. So, we’ve decided to start with fitness, as fitness and medicine are 2 sides of one coin, where, fitness is preventing health problems, whereas medicine deals with them.
Our platform helps users to gather their health and fitness information from different data sources while getting extra motivation from the community and friendly competitions among friends, family and, of course, co-workers within a corporate wellness space.
The best thing about inKin is that it’s free for individual users! Our corporate wellness platform is also available in both free and business plans, making our solution affordable for companies and institutions of different sizes and budgets. That is especially valuable for charity events and initiatives.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of the company.
inKin is our first startup, so we had to learn and adapt fast. For instance, when we just started, we wanted to build as many features as possible and make them as perfect as it got. Then we realized that this approach wouldn’t take us anywhere and that we need to release new features as quickly as possible to get the feedback from our customers instead of building sophisticated features that no one would use.
Hence, we first built a community for our B2C users and then, based on that, created a wellness platform solution that allows launching a private wellness space for groups.
inKin is often used for charitable causes as well, helping teams to literally step up their game and raising funds for amazing and important causes.
What are the challenges faced while providing Corporate Wellness services and how is inKin Social Fitness serving to tackle them?
One of the main challenges that we face is the lack of understanding of how important data tracking and collection is. Our clients come to us because they like the flexibility and the variety of our motivation tools such as different challenges and competitions modes, duels, ranking system. But what the vast majority of them do not yet understand is that the core value of platforms such as inKin is the data – the before and after results. Gamification and fun widgets help engage employees and inspire them to get healthier. But it’s the data and its analysis that will help HR managers to measure the success of the corporate wellness implementation and, for instance, renegotiate premiums with the insurance company.
That is why it’s essential to create sustainable and longlasting corporate wellness programs with data tracking and not just episodic one-month challenges that may give a temporary boost but won’t significantly affect employees’ overall well-being.
What according to you could be the potential future of Corporate Wellness services and how does inKin Social Fitness envision sustaining its competency?
Corporate wellness programs should help not only create awareness and inspire employees to lead a healthier lifestyle but also be aimed at changing employees’ behavioral patterns and helping develop healthy habits through monitoring their vitals and understanding their body better.
When you have all that data about yourself, you can share it with such potentially interested third parties as insurance companies, pension funds, doctors and carers, and concerned family members.
We will strive to create more features for employees’ motivation, healthy lifestyle education and development that will help both corporate wellness facilitators to launch effective and engaging programs easily and their staff to change their behavioral patterns when it comes to taking care of the most important thing each and one of us has – our health and well-being.
URL: www.inkin.com
