It didn’t exist, so we built it.

There's the life we all planned on, and then there's the one that showed up.

Welcome to Founded Wyth Heart.

I'm Anne.

And I'm Katie.

We're the co founders of Wyth.

We built with for the people that we were at our lowest when we needed it the most and it didn't exist yet.

Here's what we learned.

Nobody is supposed to do any of the hard stuff alone.

So each week we sit down with somebody whose life didn't go the way they planned and who built something out of it anyway.

If you're in it right now, if you feel disappointed or alone, you're not.

We're glad you're here.

Today on the show, we're going to.

Be talking to very, very special guests.

Special guests.

None other than just us.

Just us, ourselves.

Anne and Katie, you'll have to wait.

For the, for the good guests at later, later dates.

The point is to introduce you to the podcast and ourselves why we built our company Wyth, some of the kind of origin stories and why, you know, why we're here, why we're doing this,.

Why we're doing this.

So normally at this point in the show, obviously we'll give a bio of who the guest is with all their credentials.

Since I've got you right here and you're a special guest, Anne, why don't you go ahead and give your own bio?

Sure, yeah.

Happy to be be our very first special guest on the podcast.

So my name's Anne.

I'm the mother of two, two kiddos.

I have a daughter who's nine and a son who's seven.

We live in south Minneapolis.

I live with my husband and our big dog.

We moved back to Minnesota during the pandemic, kind of at a time where we needed more community.

And we definitely have found that in Minnesota and are just so happy to be back to our roots.

I got a PhD in Sociology.

I can remember my parents thinking that they would support me for the rest of my life.

So happy to have found a career after my degree in sociology, working on new product development.

And as a part of that work, just got to do some zero to one investigations about what are the pain points people are facing, what do they need, how do we build products that kind of fit into people's lives.

And it's been really fun to kind of take all of that experience and build with and the chance to do it with you, Katie.

And so I'll throw it back to you.

What's your intro?

Who are you?

I'm Katie and I got My master's degree in public policy.

And that's where I met my husband, also mom of two, who lives in Minneapolis.

Lynn has a dog and a husband.

Our lives are very similar.

My daughter's 4 and my son is almost 7.

And my professional background is more in government.

I worked at the university, so I've worked at kind of the city level and the state level.

And there's this theme throughout my career.

I tend to play this, like, utility role, project manager position.

One of the things we work on is kind of cross sector or cross department collaboration.

So they give me the projects.

They're like, go work with people that don't want to work together.

Figure it out.

Make everybody be friendly.

So that's.

That's been my role over the years.

I love it.

Yeah.

Would you say that that's the role that you play it Wyth too?

That we play nicely together?

Yeah.

That's so easy because Ian and I have known each other 30 years.

No big deal.

No big deal.

A couple decades.

I knew you when.

I knew you when you had braces.

Braces.

I didn't have braces.

I knew you when.

When you were old.

Overalls.

There was a lot of overalls.

It was, you know, I think they're coming back too.

Yeah.

I had a lot of sports gear.

A lot of sports.

One of the things I remember, my earliest memories of you, like, isn't a specific thing, but was just like, your aura of kindness.

You were just like people.

It was easy to talk to.

People knew who you were.

They weren't afraid.

They weren't afraid of you.

I don't know.

Thank you.

I don't really give up skin.

No.

And it was just easy to be your friend.

And we fell into this group of really great friends that we're still connected to.

Yeah.

We've been through a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's.

That's what I remember about you too, is your kindness and also your leadership.

And just the choices that you made were always so positive.

And I think you always just attracted kind of the best people to you.

Yeah.

I think from an early age, for both of us, there was this priority in, like, who you hung out with, who you spent your time with and who you wanted to be around.

Yeah.

And we did.

We did good.

We did.

We did do good.

And I think, like, so many of our choices that we made in high school, in college, I think see some of those, like, same themes play out now as moms and adults, and it.

Doesn't feel like grown up, how old.

Actually, how old do you feel?

In my internal self, 18.

Okay.

Old enough to be an adult and make decisions, drive a car.

Wait, I can't drink then maybe 21.

21.

Because I was gonna say internally, I still feel like I'm 16 years old.

Like, I look at my life now and I'm like, I have a mortgage and children I'm responsible for.

And it just.

I think you're like the doogie howser.

You're out 100%.

I just feel so like I look at my life and I really can't believe it because my internal setting is still probably stuck in roughly high school where again, where I peaked.

So it's really no coincidence, but.

Oh, man.

So here we are now, 30 years later, we've.

We're friends.

Yeah.

We've been through a lot these last couple of years together, post pandemic, both having children, all of these kind of major formative life experiences.

And we decided to start a company.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're build.

We're building Wyth.

And I'll let Ann describe Wyth.

I guess how I describe with is it's a digital platform for caretakers to manage all their family's information.

So you upload form once, that could be your immunization records or your insurance card.

And the idea would be you never have to fill out that same document again, storing it securely and making sure that the right people have access to it.

I think the idea behind the product is just as moms, you're kind of the quarterback for your family and a lot of what you do is get your family access to the things that they need.

And.

And I think there's kind of a story we could tell about how we thought of with in the beginning.

But it's mostly, it's just really exciting to think about building a product that's going to help families manage their paperwork, manage the day to day.

And what a privilege to get to work with somebody you have such a long history with.

Yeah, I mean, that's what makes it so great.

I think hopefully it comes through in what we built, that we're building it with community in mind.

Yeah, yeah.

Such intention.

I think when we start on the podcast today, it's so much more than paperwork.

Right.

And why and the why behind it.

Yeah, we talk about it as kind of like it is.

It's such a functional benefit.

Right.

Like parents spend so much time navigating and managing their families.

Doctor appointments, new camp signups, you know, school enrollment forms.

But I think the why behind it is was really where our heart was when we kind of started this idea.

And it was informed by these kind of really formative things that have happened to us in the last few years.

And for me, the last year.

And so I think we'll start with our origin story.

Yeah.

How we got here.

Yeah, I think my why for with has to do a lot with my kids, specifically my son Henry.

So Henry was born seven years ago and he was born healthy, you know, no immediate complications at birth.

But over a couple of years, we kind of noticed that he wasn't hitting his milestones.

He'd never walked on time, wasn't speaking, still at 18 months old or so.

So that kind of delay in his development led to us needing to kind of get him evaluated and assessed.

And he ended up with a global developmental delay diagnosis, which we later found out a couple of years later that was due to a rare genetic mutation.

And so Henry today is still non speaking, so he never developed speech or the ability to talk.

He struggles a lot with fine and gross motor movement, which make, you know, communicating his activities of daily living, you know, really pretty, pretty challenging.

He is the sweetest, happiest little guy.

We feel really lucky that he is.

He is ours.

And his diagnosis definitely impacted a lot of things about our.

Just our life as a family of four and how to get him the right supports and just make sure that he was getting everything that he needed to really thrive.

How about you, Katie?

What's your why when you talk about.

Your story, there was these similarities in what you were.

Some of the services you needed to get.

We were in the process of getting Jack diagnosed with ADHD and so he was 4 at the time.

We also were going through paperwork.

It wasn't to the degree, but there was still therapy and diagnosis and feeding clinics and different providers.

And it was this gatekeeper to getting service.

And for me, it was super.

It was very.

It was hard because if I didn't fill that out and I didn't know the answer, it delayed service.

And that was something that was really hard to handle when you wanted to do something to make it better.

When things were really difficult at home and at school, we wanted to start building the skills and what we needed.

And I think one of the similarities of our story is that like, while our kids were struggling with different needs, different things on the other end of their diagnosis, the through line between our journeys and what many other people are experiencing is just that, like, to get whatever service you need, you have to do paperwork.

Paperwork is this kind of thing that you just need to get through in order to get help.

And for me, it ended up, remember spending one week doing just like a time log to figure out where my time was going.

And I was spending about 10 hours a week filling out forms, investigating the next.

Right.

Service provider, chasing insurance reimbursements, you know, you know, just documenting our life and kind of managing that aspect of our family and our son's journey was consuming just a significant amount of time.

So.

So we were kind of going through this.

Then we, we went on a road trip.

And so.

So this is like setting the stage of how we finally got to our company idea.

But we were going to.

We had to go see Coldplay.

Of course you had to see Coldplay.

Because that was my.

It was my Bucket List concert.

There's somebody you gotta see in concert live before you die.

For me, it was Coldplay.

So I roped in you, I roped in our other friend to go along with us on this journey.

And they didn't play in Minneapolis, so we had to drive to Madison.

Yeah.

So of course we're like, mom's weekend.

Get us out of here.

I didn't even think it was a weekend because I think we got like 24 hours.

It was like 30.

Yeah.

And it felt like amazing.

Great dinner without having to cut up somebody else's food for a little bit.

But we know each other so well.

But I think just having that amount of like uninterrupted time, it was just like such a gift because we could really kind of talk about what was what's going on in life.

Like, what's, what's working in your life, what's not working.

Yeah.

And one of the things I'll say is at that point, my daughter was about to go to preschool for the first time and I had left the workforce when she was born.

And so I had this chance to be like, well, I don't know what I want to do next.

Like, I'm.

Am I going to go back to the workforce?

Am I going to get a part time job?

Talking about that with you guys at the same time you were telling this story of how difficult this paperwork was and.

Yeah, yeah, well.

And I think I had actually told you guys about the time audit that I did, and I was like, I'm spending like 10 hours a week doing this.

Are you guys.

Is that what's happening for you?

And I think it was like, to some degree it was like, yes.

And I think our other friend was like, you know, maybe you need a household manager.

I Was like, you know, no knock to household managers, but I don't know that they could, like, fill out all of these forms for me, because some of it is just like, it lives in your head, you know, your birth story.

You know, if there were traumatic events, even if I could hire somebody to replace me, it wouldn't give me that time back because they didn't have the knowledge that I had.

Like, this is something that is kind of irreplaceable.

Yeah.

And so we were.

You were.

We were just having this conversation, and then one of us were like, well, why don't we.

Why don't we.

Why don't we solve this?

Yeah, let's make this easier.

If paperwork and data that you have is the issue, like, what's the solution?

And we got really excited and we started looking to see what was out there, and nothing kind of like addressed it the way we needed to for our use case.

Yeah.

So we with was born.

Yeah.

So we came home and I think we were just like.

I think we talked about it for the rest of the trip.

Okay, guys, just like, sounds good.

I'm going to live in my finance world.

Call me when you need some numbers crunched.

But I think, like, we went home and I think we just started doing our own market research.

Right.

I think you talked to your friends and neighbors.

I talked to my friends and neighbors.

I think my takeaway from, like, you know, my scrappy and of 10 neighbors was that it's such a given that, like, when you go to a new doctor, you have to fill out the paperwork that, like, nobody even questions it anymore.

But, well, what if it was.

What if it was different?

What if it didn't have to be that way?

And I think paperwork sounds so boring, but for me, it was just like such a pain point that I was like, no, this feels.

This feels like worthy of investing some time to see if it couldn't be better.

Yeah.

And we really got into it.

And then last summer at the end of August in Minneapolis was the Annunciation shooting, and it really affected our community.

There was 200 families that were impacted.

Personally, it was really difficult because my.

My brother and my nieces and nephew right next door, they go to the school there and experience that.

And I have, like, a lot of people that live around here have a friend that also had kids there and experienced it, and a friend that lost their child.

It was very overwhelming, this really formative experience in this year.

And so here we are building with for us.

And now all of a sudden, you saw this use case of 200 families that needed access to services and care immediately and they had to manage paid time off and all these things that were.

Seemed so trivial to the actual trauma and the actual pain, but still had to happen.

Somebody still had to do it.

They had to manage through.

They had to manage through all this stuff.

At that time.

All I want to do is help in any way possible.

It was trying to like come to terms with this really traumatic event.

And the only way that was helping me cope was we here, we were working on this thing on the side that I knew someday would help somebody manage this trivial paperwork so that they could get what they needed.

Because I wanted to.

I would do anything to help these families and them and my brother.

Yeah.

And my kiddo and I. I feel like that experience for you and watching you go through it, it actually like kind of totally changed how we thought about what we were building.

Because I think we realized that we weren't just building away from like annoyance.

We were building towards something that was actually trauma informed, something that could help people on their journey.

Getting access to mental health services that they need because they had witnessed something really horrific.

Managing kind of the long term care of their children who had been through something horrific.

Yeah.

And it was again, it was taking something that was just like unspeakable and really hard to cope with.

Using that emotion to build something better and build something that would help.

I feel like it, it like you saw it before.

Like you.

I think you looked at my story and you said, yeah, that is something that could totally be solvable.

But I feel like you're investment in your commitment like almost totally changed overnight.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm sorry you had to go through that.

I'm sorry our community had to go through that.

Yeah.

It's really sad.

It's.

And it's gonna be around.

Yeah, it's.

It's really.

I don't know what I'm.

I don't know.

I'm trying to get.

There's a word there, but I can't figure it out.

Yeah, it's like omnipresent for a long time.

Yeah.

That story reminds me like from the get go it just became this conversation starter.

Like we hadn't built it, we like started visioning it, but everybody.

It like gave us this way to talk to somebody and it gave us a way to talk to somebody about like why, like why it was for us.

And they either saw new side of some of the things that we are going through or it opened up the conversation to be like, oh, I feel that way too, for a whole different reason.

Yeah.

And then it just kept going and going.

Then we transitioned into this phase.

We're like, okay, well, how do we learn what we need to do to move forward?

That phase was also fun because you had this community, your neighbors or people in your network from work, and they were fascinating.

We had people in this industry, and they're like, yeah, think about this.

I think that that's been one of the most fun things to do as, like, an entrepreneur, like, in our 40s.

Right.

So we have, like, now more than 20 years of career experience that it's been fun to kind of go back and say, like, I could keep going on this path, working for this company or that, you know, whatever, but actually to kind of break out and then go back and look at some of the people who've been with you on your work journey along the way and pull in their expertise and kind of build your own thing has just been an incredible journey.

Like, it's just been so much fun.

I think is my takeaway that, like, every day is a little something different.

Today we're going to do something with the product, or we're going to prototype it, or today we're going to talk to somebody on the legal side or, geez, Louise, like, how do we make sure it's the most safe thing?

We have done so much learning in a year.

We talked about how it would have been so fun to have mental space to learn something, and now I feel like I'm learning full time almost every day.

I do, too.

What's nice about being the boss, the boss, ladies, is we get to choose who we work with.

Yeah.

We know what type of information we need to get.

We take recommendations from our family and friends and our network, and then we get to other awesome people or other awesome vendors or consultants that care about us or care about the product or have some connection to some instances it's a their own child with special needs or another story.

That's really impactful.

And so it's nice to have that.

Yes.

I actually think.

I think you made a good point earlier where it was like, the tool, the idea of Wyth and what it could do for you, I think is just like this really nice entree into kind of asking people in a really almost kind of like, door kind of way, like, what's going on in your life?

Like, what is this thing that you're managing?

Because my lesson, my takeaway, is that there's nobody who's not managing something.

Somebody is Managing a chronic illness, somebody is managing their child with special needs, somebody is managing their own cancer diagnosis or their immigration paperwork.

I mean, the stories kind of just keep coming.

And I don't think it's one of those things where if you're sitting down, you know, meeting somebody in passing or in conversation, where it's like, nobody is going to be like, oh, yeah, I'm trying to get my citizenship.

Like, that's not maybe going to be the first thing that.

That comes up.

Or they're managing traumatic event.

But when we kind of share about what we're doing, they're like, oh, I totally get that.

Like, I totally see what you're doing, and here's how it applies to me.

And it's actually been this kind of, like, shortcut to, like, really get to know people kind of well.

And it's really exciting to put it in people's hands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we're at the stage we have almost a prototype.

Gonna go do an AB test what feels exciting.

Yeah.

And put it out in the world soon.

To stamp entrepreneur on the business card.

The business cards was one of the most exciting parts to me so far.

It's just like having.

Having something to hand out to people.

It's been really fun.

I wonder if we want to just talk about the podcast and what we hoped that could bring and.

And kind of where we're coming from there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we could.

We could do anything.

So why do a podcast?

I think I'm really excited to do a podcast because I really want to find people who were going through something really hard.

And even though it was hard, they managed to find meaning in their experience.

And not just meaning, but something bigger, something for community, something that would not just help themselves, but help other people, too.

And I think that those stories are so inspiring.

If there's anything I want people to feel when they're listening, I think it's.

I don't want people to feel alone.

And I think when we start to talk to people about going through their hard things and people can hear themselves and other people, I think that that's.

I think that that's the work that we're here to do, and it doesn't.

I mean, everybody goes through hard stuff in their lives.

And at different times, you might be a supporting role for somebody who is going through something hard.

And other times, you might be the person who's just, like, really in it.

And so I think, talking to you and talking to people that we're going to have on the show is just that they can hear themselves and the stories that we're going to tell.

Yeah.

And maybe it sparks something in them to be like, okay, these ladies did it.

This person thought about it a different way and helped get through it and helped revision.

What can bring you purpose and meaning.

I think that's important.

Yeah.

Well.

And I think for me, I think on the journey, like, the.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that it's.

Our journey with Henry is going to be lifelong.

Like, it's going to be hard for a long time.

But the story that I tell.

Tell myself about what we're doing can change and it can drastically impact how I feel about the day to day.

So for me, I think that that looked like for a long time I was just really sad about being on this journey at all.

And as I've gotten further along in building Wyth which is, I think, born out of somebody only who's really been in the paperwork and how tedious it all is, nobody who hasn't lived this experience would build something like this.

Like, you have to really have lived through it.

Having this experience led to Wyth.

Right.

And then all of a sudden, I started to see the journey that our family's on as more purposeful.

And I think when you can find purpose in the hardest stuff that you're going through, I think that that's actually like a really transformational process.

I also want to be super clear at this point that for me, that doesn't feel like toxic positivity, that doesn't feel like things are always going to be okay, or because you started this thing the rest of your life is fine.

For me, that.

That's definitely not my own goal.

But I think if there are ways that we can reframe some of the stories that we've told ourselves, that there's just so much hope and optimism that we can find.

And I think that we can kind of find that in community and shared experiences.

Yeah.

And I think one of the things from this experience so far is a lot of people near us are doing this.

They're taking their own experiences and their own challenges and figuring how to rethink it or find purpose.

And so I think there's something powerful in that, that it doesn't have to be this big thing.

It could be this everyday thing or everyday connection you have of somebody really doing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well.

And I think even when we were thinking about, okay, well, if we're going to do a podcast kind of around this theme, who would we even invite?

And I think our first attempt at even brainstorming something like this was 10 to 15 people.

Like, right off the bat, we were like, this person.

This person.

How about this person from my life who started this group or founded this product or whatever.

And I think it's like, the more you look, the more of those people there are.

Like, there are just so many inspiring people out there, and the opportunity to just tell their stories to me is just, like, one of the most exciting things we're doing together.

So we're gonna bring them to you.

Yeah.

We're gonna tell the stories.

Yeah.

And you're with us.

So thank you for being here on our first ever podcast.

First podcast.

Thanks for listening.

Founded Wyth Heart.

Founded Wyth Heart.