Hello, Startup Iceland community! My name is Paige Anderson and I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from Wellesley College, an all-women’s liberal arts college located near Boston, Massachusetts, in May 2020. I’m an American but have made a couple trips to Iceland and like many tourists, was stunned by the gorgeous nature and how trusting Icelanders were towards each other. During my trips to Iceland, I discovered The Reykjavik Grapevine and found their articles to be quite interesting. And from January to April 2021, I’ll be back in Iceland to intern at The Reykjavik Grapevine. If you’d like me to interview you, let me know! And since I’m also looking for full-time work, please reach out to me if you have any leads in content creation, writing, and/or marketing! I’d really appreciate it. To contact me, you can email me at panders3@wellesley.edu. In the meantime, allow me to share why I’m passionate about the startup life…
I just finished a marketing internship with Cress Health, a startup that creates disruptive technologies in order to enhance individual and organizational mental health. I found it to be a valuable learning experience – I learned how to effectively analyze competitors’ posts, create analytics for our posts, make post templates, and create captions that would be interesting for our audience to read.
Throughout my time at Cress Health, we had to switch from primarily focusing on Cress Health, an app aimed to help healthcare workers deal with burnout from COVID-19, to Callie, an AI personal wellness companion that uses personal insights to help manage stressors effectively. My job then was to research who our audience could be. Since the majority of us were college students or recent graduates, I thought it would make sense to focus on Millennials and Generation Z.
When doing my research, I was surprised at how many problems these two generations are facing. YouGov called Millennials the “loneliest generation” and Business Insider reported that there were high rates of work burnout due to long working hours and stagnant wages and that there was an increase in the rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety, and ADHD compared to previous generations like Generation X. And Business Insider reported Hillary Hoffower concluded that “Gen Zers are following closely in millennial footsteps, as they get ready to inherit the world that millennials are still struggling to conquer” since female Millennials and Gen Zers were reported as being more anxious than their male peers.
Current economic, political, and social issues have not made it easy for these two generations to get by. However, just as Callie could be a tool for success for these two generations (along with other generations), I believe that other startup products can be tools of success for Millennials and Generation Z. First off, both of these generations make up a large proportion of the world population, which signifies that a lot of them can take advantage of a startup product. According to MCSI, in 2020, about 1.8 billion people, of 23% of the global population, belong to the millennial generation. And Bloomberg reported that in 2019, Generation Z will comprise 32% of the global population. Likewise, Millennials and Generation Zs’ combined spending power is at $3 trillion, according to Y Pulse, which means that their market value holds a lot of clout.
Startups have the potential to help solve pressing issues that governmental institutions may not have the ability to solve due to fractured political interests or, perhaps, even general apathy. So let’s try to help them.
If you’d like to learn more about Cress Health and/or Callie, please visit this website
