‍Chronic constipation affects around 15% of humanity, some 70 million people in the EU alone. Twice as many women than men are affected. This is different than going on vacation to an exotic country and ending up constipated for a couple of days.

‍“People are not keen to talk about constipation in the offline world because it is a taboo”‍

Patients suffer from constipation for months and years, and it severely impairs their quality of life. Healthcare systems fail to take this condition seriously. People are not keen to talk about constipation in the offline world because it is a taboo.

That is why we have created Apriwell, a fully vertically integrated solution to treat constipation as a chronic disease. Everything is centred around the patients and their needs, providing an app as a digital therapy guide and products like food supplements that help alleviate constipation. All components of our solution are supported by evidence and are created with medical doctors and nutritionists in our team. Chronic constipation is strongly linked to the lifestyle of patients, like other widespread chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes. The main reason why existing treatment of chronic constipation often fails is that it mostly deals with the symptoms, not the causes. It is not enough to just prescribe a laxative.

Therefore, Apriwell is also about the right behavioural intervention, taking patients by the hand and showing them how to make changes to their lifestyle in order to tackle their condition.

“This is how chronic diseases will be cared for in the future: a single platform for patients who do not want to be preoccupied with it literally all the time”

There is personal coaching available and a community of other affected individuals from which to get help. We think that this is how chronic diseases will be cared for in the future: a single platform for patients who do not want to be preoccupied with it literally all the time. This is just the beginning: constipation is only one of the many conditions not being treated in the right way.

We saw a huge opportunity to help digitize the health care space – this crazy, large, slow-moving industry. It is an insane market to go to, you must be completely obsessed with it. We must reimagine healthcare systems from the ground up to solve the existential problems of today. I previously co-founded a leading clinical trial platform where we dealt with a lot of different diseases, from simple ones to late-stage cancer. I learned that people with a chronic disease are affected by it daily – for a very long period of their lives – possibly even their whole lives. They do not want to think or talk about it all the time. That is why our mission is to offer the best treatment possible and provide relief. In a regulated sector like healthcare, founders must have industry expertise.

“Helping people is not enough; the idea must also work as a business”‍

It is not enough to have good technology, good marketing and good teams. In healthcare, a lot of things make sense on paper. But that is another lesson from my previous startup: helping people is not enough; the idea must also work asa business. This experience makes us faster and more efficient.

There is, however, the beautiful side of it as well: when it works, and patients tell you how much you have changed their lives and how much you have helped them. This is what motivates us more than any profit or valuation imaginable.