Hey everyone, Max is on the line. I hope everyone is having an amazing day.

As for me personally, I traveled a lot, talked with amazing people, and hopefully managed to know this world a little bit better. I appreciate every second of my life and the opportunities I’m having. I work with amazing people and do things that matter. Every day. No complaints!

This couple of months was intense, stressful and exciting for the company. I notice how every month shapes Nozomi drastically in some way or another. Sometimes it gives me an anxious feeling that we’re not having a specific direction and I’m not doing my job right, but I feel it’s how it needs to be at the early stages. We have a decent vision and goals, but the best “path” is still unknown.

As for today, I have a strong feeling we’re in a transition stage and it’s even more important to make the right decisions. We already have started facing scale issues and working towards their resolutions. A lot of “scale checks” are in place (or i think so 😂), but we have some trouble scaling our sales volume.

In this quarter update, I’ll talk mostly about 3 main aspects of the Nozomi, which were the main focus of Q3:

1. Culture
2. Nozomi Value
3. Partnerships and Opportunities

In every one of these sections, I would also think about my personal insights. I think this will help you understand my thinking process and increase the value of the update.

Culture

It’s funny how there are so many things in this world that we know are good for us, but we do not make use of them. We do not make use of them until it’s too late. I guess it’s how humans work. Before you can adhere to something with a positive effect, you need to experience the negative consequences. The experience of those consequences creates an emotional snapshot that you will try to avoid in the future. Without it, you simply “can’t feel it”.

The same goes for my understanding of the cultural importance in the company. I knew it was really important, I’ve read a lot of books and thoughts of industry leaders, but I simply didn’t feel it. And it unavoidably led us to negative consequences. The only thing I’m happy about is that the company noticed it pretty early and the negative effects haven’t impacted us drastically.

We’ve lost two amazing fellows this quarter. As there are always reasons from the two sides of the table, I feel my personal responsibility for not seeing some things clearly. I appreciate your contribution to the company and wish you good luck on your further journey!

This quarter was enlightening in terms of the importance of trust, support, and collaboration in Nozomi. We felt how influential it is to be together and listen to each other when things go not as expected. We felt how amazing it is to be connected to team members working on meaningful things together. And we felt how important it is to help others when they need it. My hope for Nozomi is not only to have teams with remarkable skillsets but also to have a feeling in the air of doing important things with people we like doing so. Impact, trust, support, and collaboration are the key variables in our culture.

Our team did an amazing job in terms of internal communications, events, and collaboration improvement:

1. We’ve done cool internal events like Nozomi Tournament and All-hands. Now we try to gather the team together more frequently. In Q4, we’re planning to create a common space for everyone, so everyone feels the connection.
2. Together with Product Management, we introduced processes in our product development, empowering the connection and collaboration between people.
3. Last but not least, we’ve done an amazing job in terms of our internal communication. Introduction of PDPs, 1/1s, and leadership updates help us stay on track.

Such quarter progress is an amazing result and I want to say thanks to my friends and at the same time colleagues – Vladislav Vashkevich, Ekaterina Tretyakova, and Margarita Ragatsevich – for strong discipline and being flexible to do things you haven’t done previously. Thanks to Alexey Zverugo for jumping in and helping to create a vision for future developments. I appreciate your strong vision and am happy that we have such a unique opportunity to create something special together.

There are many things in our roadmap, and we’re still lacking core items in our culture, but we’re working hard to create an amazing environment where everyone loves what they do and feels inspired 24/7.

Nozomi Value

When starting the company back in 2020, we had an ambitious idea to create a company that can bring hope to people in the most important times of their life. This simple and emotional vision has led us to where we are right now. Every quarter we worked hard to establish what we actually mean by that and how exactly we can do so.

I’m grateful for specific experiences that lead us to further detalization of our vision. Recently, we have determined 2 directions in our company growth: Nozomi Digital Health Product Studio and Nozomi Health.

“In our high-paced world, innovative ideas are born every day. And I’m not talking about all the ideas, it’s about the most promising ones that can change the game. Unfortunately, not every one of them survives. We worked with tons of early-stage companies (and were the startup founders by ourselves) to understand the foundations of the issue. Fixed costs, decreasing runaway, long time to market, and big costs of change – to fight with these, your company needs to be lean, flexible, and efficient from the start. Unfortunately, a lot of companies do not have such opportunities and run out of money before they can even make the first pivot. Just imagine that for success you sometimes need 2-3 pivots.

For me, the saddest part is that we’re losing so many innovative ideas and opportunities that can truly help people. I believe our mission is to make sure the most important and needed solutions become successful in the market. This is what our Nozomi Digital Health Product Studio is about – we want to give companies better chances to introduce disruptive ideas to the market, bringing positive change in people’s lives. To win the game, companies need to have the necessary skillsets connected with the right chemistry. Faster – Better!”

This understanding was one of the most important achievements in Q3 and helped us to focus on the most important things in our product development process, which is the speed of validation and flexibility for change. Together with our product development teams, we created a process that allows us to test ideas quickly and develop them with future changes in mind. Thanks to that, we’re able to validate any concept in 3 weeks and develop the beautiful MVP in 2 months.

This new mission also lead us to rethink our services. We introduced new packages, allowing us to support ideas on different stages – from initial validation to growth.

Another thing we are excited about is Nozomi Health. As we see great value in our studio model – we still want to help people directly. We know we have the right mix of talents and processes to do so. We worked hard to create the first concepts of our white-label patient engagement solution. Our goal is to help telehealth companies to increase engagement in their solutions by using gamified patient journeys. We’re planning to make the first validations this quarter, and I’m excited to share some updates later. If you’re interested to explore the solution more – please let me know.

I want to say special thanks to Ivan Staselovich, Kirill Fidzukevich and Gleb Loutov, Ilya Pavlov for your contribution to the first product concept.

Partnerships

When we started working as Nozomi we established this rule to call clients our partners. And it’s not about being different or creating a unique brand identity. For us, it shows what type of relationships we want to engage in. Partners are more than parties connected by some sort of agreement to provide value to each other. Partners are connected emotionally, they trust and respect each other. It’s a win/win relationship. This creates a unique bond of commitment because you have positive emotions towards another person and truly want them to succeed. This is the kind of relationship we try to achieve with our partners.

Because of such a vision, we had a lot of trouble when exploring new partnerships. But the ones we found – we truly appreciate and want them to succeed. I believe this vision will help us work with people we like, be committed and satisfied, and disrupt the market with innovation.

We’ve done amazing work in our marketing and sales departments. We are constantly learning and growing, and the flexibility is incredible. We’ve also talked with a lot of amazing people and found some interesting opportunities that we’re excited to explore.

We started 2 amazing partnerships in Q3. One of them is Sensae – an innovative Danish startup that helps people to manage stress & anxiety by using AI to interface with emotions through personalized haptic biofeedback. I think it’s amazing to help Sensae team with such a disruptive idea.

Another promising partnership we established is with Sumu. Sumu combines epigenetic DNA analysis with holistic health coaching, enabling you to live longer and healthier. We are helping Sumu to create a platform allowing to provide all the services inside one amazing and easy-to-use app.

I’m super excited about these partnerships! We appreciate you bringing such a positive change into the world and are happy to contribute to your success. Thank you!

The one thing that I personally learned when trying to create new partnerships – there are countless amounts of opportunities if you start looking at things from different angles. I personally was so focused on polishing the sales and marketing funnel that I forgot there are also different ways to build great partnerships.

Thanks to Margarita Rogatsevich, Julia Zhyshko, Anastasia Ilkevich, and Ilya Pavlov for such amazing work this quarter. The flexibility and learning were incredible!

Final thoughts

Almost 2 years passed since the foundation of Nozomi and it was a challenging journey. We met so many obstacles, we haven’t slept for nights and we became a bit older because of all the stress.

But we’ve gone through all of this together, with passion and confidence. It was for sure the best two years of my life – to see what type of team (and individuals) we’ve become and it’s even more exciting to see what we can achieve in the future. We have a unique relationship inside the company and a passion to do everything the best way possible.

My dream for us is to face all the future challenges together side-by-side, go forward with a fire in our hearts and become a hope for those who need it most.