The Pioneer interview with... Candice Hampson

Candice studied aerospace engineering in Canada and worked in the aerospace industry before moving to the UK in 2008 to do an MBA at the University of Oxford. She went on to take part in a social enterprise leadership course, work in innovation consulting (including with us at The Foundation for a couple of years), impact measurement, health innovation and then spent seven years at Big Society Capital.

In February 2020, Candice left Big Society Capital to start her own business, Kiteline Health with some seriously pioneering goals. This is her Kiteline Health story showing how the path of a pioneer is tricky and success is not inevitable.  In particular it brings to life how inside-out pressures to grow and sell, even for a start-up, can overwhelm the bigger picture, outside-in view of finding the best, most sustainable ways to earn customers’ decisions.

What was the ‘burningness’ you had to start Kiteline Health?

I was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer in 2015 at age 32. It was a massive shock to the system. I recovered but I was terrified at the time. I asked my oncologists what I could do to improve my chances and every time I asked their response was ‘nothing, there is nothing you can do’.

I was a bit surprised. On the one hand it’s a nice thing to hear, at least it wasn’t my fault! But my husband and mother-in-law started to do their own research and they found out there is actually so much you can do to influence your recovery and prevent reoccurrences. Mostly around diet but also a lot of stress reduction, exercise, building positive relationships in your life. All of this can positively impact your recovery.

So, for me that was really the genesis behind Kiteline Health. I was so frustrated that we not only had to go out and find this information ourselves, but it was also hard to get to the truth on so many different matters. You’d come across someone who ate kale all day long and they’re cured! It’s tempting to believe because all you want is a cure, something easy you can do to fix yourself. But so much information and advice isn’t evidence based, and what works for one person might not work for you.

I wanted evidence-based information to be more widely accessible to cancer patients, so I joined a startup accelerator to help find a co-founder and hone my idea. I went in with a problem: it is very hard for people with long-term health conditions to find the right information. Critically, it is even harder for them to change their behaviours. Over the course of the program the solution I came to was health coaching. Finding somebody to champion you, to identify the smallest steps you can take to adjust your lifestyle, and to give you a pat on the back when you’ve done it.

Originally, we designed it for people with lived experiences of cancer and tested the idea in a short pilot. However we ran into issues with the b2c market after we launched ads for the product on social media. We were getting high click-through rates to our website, but people kept hovering their mouse over ‘what is health coaching’ and no one converted to a free session.

The data led us to two conclusions. One, people didn't understand what health coaching actually was: the UK market was far behind an American market 10 years ahead. And two, people in the UK are less willing to pay for health interventions and services. They’re willing to pay for gym memberships and personal trainers, clearly things the NHS shouldn’t be covering. But this coaching tool fell under people’s perceptions of what the NHS should offer.

We had to pivot quickly to a b2b model. We realised business owners care about long-term health outcomes, about their employees living longer and healthier lives. So we started speaking to businesses about their employee wellbeing offering.

What were your breakthrough moments, your early Moments of Belief?

The first success happened when one of our health coaches invited us to meet her husband, the owner of a logistics company. It took just one day to convert our initial conversation into a signed contract. It was all because the business had one person in their senior team who had breast cancer, and he wanted to support that individual.

It was an important signal to us. The challenge was now how do you find businesses where there are senior people, with valuable members of staff who they want to look after?

At this stage we broadened our focus. The service was originally for people with lived experiences of cancer, but there aren’t many individuals at working age with cancer. We opened our offer up to long-term health conditions. We wanted the service to be flexible and work for people with different conditions in a genuine way

One of our greatest successes was signing a contract with John Lewis for a one-year pilot. They wanted us to deliver virtual group health coaching and develop a flagship product: an online course for line managers which teaches them how to manage their own and their team’s wellbeing. That was a big win for us.
Everything was going well with the pilot, and we started to build our product. But we quickly reached the point as a startup where we needed to fundraise. By that point we’d raised just under £370k from a mix of VCs and angel investors. We’d burned through our cash and were gearing up to raise more in a seed round with a target of £1-1.5 million.

Then the market completely shifted. The war in Ukraine started, the cost-of-living crisis hit and VCs issued warnings advising no investment for the next 18-24 months because the market was crashing. The advice was to cut your costs and ride out the storm.

Having cut staff and made some difficult decisions we launched our fundraiser a month after this message came out – we didn’t really have a choice. On the sales side, we had some big names in our pipeline that we’d been working on for 6-12 months, but they all came back and said ‘sorry, we’re not engaging any new suppliers’.

In the end, we ran out of cash, and we had to shut down.

What did you learn from this difficult experience?

As a first-time founder you learn so quickly, and you also learn a little bit of everything. If I were to do it again, I would be less frantic and recognise my main concerns as a CEO are product, sales and fundraising when you need to.

I would’ve focussed more on understanding product development, how to optimise performance and be user-centric and user-led, speaking more to customers about what they needed. It was one of the mistakes we made when we pivoted from B2C to B2B, we didn’t refresh our insight properly. We had some conversations, but the overwhelming pressure from our investors to sell, sell, sell, meant we didn’t give enough time to developing a strong proposition and customer profile.

When we were in the B2C market and supporting people affected by cancer, it was a niche market and we were a big fish in a small pond. When we moved over to B2B, we became a minnow in an ocean of employee and wellbeing benefit providers. HR and Wellbeing Managers get bombarded with hundreds of different start-ups offering different things.

So how do you cut through when you’re offering one slither of the pie? It was difficult to nail our USP and get the messaging across.

When people DID understand what we were offering, they got it straight away and were really excited by it which was encouraging. But it was a tough sell and a tough market.

How could you have stayed more outside-in?

When you’re an entrepreneur and founder of a small start-up there’s always a million things you could be doing. It’s easy to take a path of least resistance. It’s easier to get the small tasks done like the accounting or sorting emails, rather than focusing on the bigger picture, and the challenging questions around what our customers wanted.

We had grand plans to speak to customers regularly, but it fell down the list of priorities. When we tried to get customer feedback, we struggled to get responses. Especially when we started working with larger companies like John Lewis, we realised convincing people to give up their time to talk to you is really hard.

It was a scary ride full of so many ups and downs, a rollercoaster of emotions and mental health. But ultimately it was an amazing three years. I learned so much across many disciplines. In the end, we provided 1:1 support for 40-50 individuals and received positive feedback. I feel very proud that we were able to change those people’s lives for the better.

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do organisations find it so hard?

It means really understanding what customers want. Not just once, but how it changes over time, constantly keeping a pulse of how people are responding and how their needs, or your understanding of them, keep changing. It’s essential to help you stay ahead.

But it’s hard to find the time to prioritise it. In our case it was hard to find the people to talk to you, to understand how you incentivise it and how you make it an easy and regular thing for you and your business.

Are there any Customer Pioneer organisations that you particularly admire?

We switched our energy company from Bulb over to Octopus Energy. Recently they’ve been running energy saving sessions on certain days and times where the grid is in overdemand. You can sign up to these sessions and if you use less energy during this time they give you money back. It’s only £1 but it all counts, and it’s an interesting way to gamify energy consumption and work with your customers to help them save money.

In the start-up space Maven Clinic are interesting. They provide a one-stop shop for women in terms of everything they might need health-wise. Historically there’s so much gender inequality in health. There’s a really good book called Invisible Women about how everything has been designed from a man’s perspective – everything from surgeons’ tools to car seat belts. I think Maven Clinic is an interesting all round health proposition for women.