Today we’d like to introduce you to Lissy Alden.

Hi Lissy, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?

“I will never start a company.”

I said those words out loud more times that is comfortable to admit! That said my road to building MYNDY has been about chasing problem that was in front of me—until I ran out of places to work at to solve them—and then I had to create my own thing to figure it out.

Let me step back. I worked at a bank upon graduating from college and ended up burning out. I was in an operations role in the investment bank (not the sexiest place to work but I wanted to learn how to build something). I ended up learning a lot about how to deal with angry people, how to work a mean spreadsheet, and how complex systems worked. There, I was also told to be less enthusiastic (they called me “Bubbles”), got yelled at a lot (“sorry, it’s not you… I just hate it here”), and was basically told to keep my mouth shut and not to ask questions (unless you’d like something on your review that says “you don’t get along with your boss”). This incessant feedback served as the equivalent of personality suffocation—I burned out trying to be someone else.

So, I promised myself I would get out…But not before I spent my entire first year of work eating a strawberry-frosted, sprinkle donut each morning and reading the entire spammy AM paper before I got to my desk with a big, prize in my mystical horoscope which told me every single day that both the man and job of my dreams were coming…today. Spoiler – they didn’t—the job or guy (my guy came over a decade later).

I got good at the job this first year, won a global award, and started meeting with 3-5 people a week to find my next big career move. I was looking to find a place to self-actualize, a place where I could work hard and be my big, excited self.

After speaking to over 100+ people in a 9-month search, I ended up at a 40-person Education Technology company. When I started the job, it was 5 of us on the enterprise team, with learning programs that needed work (hello very terrible customer ratings), and the bold dreams of transforming the way the Fortune 500 did business. What started as a job, quickly became my life. I worked all the time, traveled even more, and the stress that initially drove me (“pressure makes diamonds people”), crushed me. My stomach started hurting daily, I had no appetite (again for anyone who knows my hypoglycemic snack-fueled days, scary town), I was in multiple countries in a week, and my sleep was no longer restful. In the meantime, I was running a lot I hurt my knees and I slid into burnout.

I felt lost in this stress, my team and clients at this startups were all stressed, I spoke to companies on the best place to work list and their employees were stressed. It felt like an epidemic.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I decided to go study this problem at graduate school.
I went to MIT to build a quantitative, research-backed model to fix company culture. Why? I thought if I could just solve what I thought was the root of the problem—stress caused by work—we’d be all set! Why? Because how could I have been in two such different places, and ended up in the same, run-down-and-out state where I felt like a sad, tired, and watered-down version of me?

So I became an expert in what we call Organizational Fitness. I became a company fixer, getting hired to work cross-functionally in services businesses to rearrange internal operations for growth. It was amazing work but I realized that even when companies are well structured, paying people the right amount, accounting for work life balance, kicking out jerks…people were still stressed. But instead of blaming work, they’d blame their health, politics, living situation…you get it!

That is when I started MYNDY, a Mental Fitness company. I built a quantitative, research-backed model to help people manage their mind—or to practice the things that athletes do each day to keep their mindset sharp and achieve their goals. Since working on the Mental Fitness side of things, it’s been a 5+-year journey: I started doing research for year one, then teaching in year two. Year three was about fundraising and starting to test out the product. Then year four was about building a webapp to test things further. Year five has been about fundraising, and building our app. I’ve learned so much—and get to do what I love—which is help people feel like the best version of themselves, today (not tomorrow, or when they get a new job, find a partner, or wait for something external to make them feel good).

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

Absolutely not.

To begin, I didn’t even know what road I was on for the first 1.5 years of building. I wasn’t sure if it was a research project, a consulting business, a tech company, or a book. This was hard because I’d get a lot of questions about what I was building early days, and didn’t have a great answer. This caused me to lose a bit of confidence during the first year. I thought I had to have it all figured out!

Then, there have been a multitude of switchbacks (going a bit of this way and that, instead of being able to “climb the hill” directly). Once I finished my first round of research, I started teaching classes. These were selling out and my clients loved them, but the main feedback I kept getting was that they wanted my help to “help them continue their practice” even after they were finished the course; they’d ask: “if you’re teaching Mental Fitness exercises, where is your gym”!? I was about to sell a very large corporate deal, when I realized I was going down the wrong path. If everyone was so excited about continuing with regular follow-up, this one-off consulting gig wouldn’t solve for that. So I turned it down, and decided to run a bunch paid product tests, raised money, and have been building ever since. While my vision hasn’t changed much since the start (maybe it’s gotten a bit bigger!), the path to realizing it has been winding.

In addition, I’ve worked with several challenging contractors (who were struggling with addiction, anger issues, and more) who have ghosted me after months of working together (in one case…years), advisors who have tried to renegotiate terms post-handshake, and people who overcharged and underdelivered. I’m a people person, so in many ways, these are the hardest challenges. I used to internalize a lot of these issues and take responsibility for them—as I thought that was what a mature leader did. Over time I realized the only job I had was to ensure I hire well, and if I ended up working with someone who wasn’t a good fit for us in terms of timing, values, or capabilities, I needed to step away from the relationship quickly. Knowing my values has infinitely helped me prioritize and show up in these difficult conversations.

Lastly, is that I’m a solo founder. I grew up in a family of 4, am a twin, and love working with others. But so much of building has been with me as the leader. There are days when I have to make tough calls, spend scarce money, keep pushing, and there’s nobody to look to that understands the business, implications and has to live with the consequences…except me. I used to think this was a problem. It’s now one of my favorite things. I get to hire a team that is incredible, I get to call the shots, and I get to pour my time into what matters most, the folks I’m working with and the problem we’re solving. But in the early days, when the fog of what we were building hadn’t lifted, it was so hard.

Okay, for real last one…not making money is hard—and then making a little, is also hard—especially when you’re working so hard. Entrepreneurs don’t talk much about it, but it’s real, and it’s a challenge.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?

We help people practice Mental Fitness. The purpose of Mental Fitness is to create the right mindset to achieve your goals. Tactically, this means helping people do exercises that build new behavioral and mental patterns so that they can literally think differently. So, just like you workout your body at the gym to transform the way you look, think, and feel, you can do the same for your mind. We are focused on long-term behaviors that you do repetitively, so we are a wonderful compliment to therapy, coaching, or as a low-lift entry point for folks who haven’t tried much for their mental health, but are interested in working to either: 1. Reduce stress, exhaustion, pressure, burnout, or what we call – “toasty-ness”, or 2. Boost focus, energy, mood, and performance. We sit on the wellness side of the Mental health spectrum and so we’re truly working to create a new industry by building out a gym for your mind.

We are known for our 10-minute daily routines that get people feeling good in just 2 weeks. These routines pull cross-functionally from neuroscience, performance psychology, meditation, mindfulness, and more to give your brain a full-mind workout. We’re the cheapest, fastest, most holistic solution on the market today.

What sets us apart aside from the quick nature of our workouts, is our holistic approach to accountability. We like to say that we provide the 4 elements needed to shift your mindset (and associated behaviors):
1. Inspiration: Patent-pending, research-backed, quantitative model
2. Perspiration: Daily workouts that help you build new behavioral, mental, and emotional patterns
3. Celebration: Support in the form of text-based accountability and the ability to create your own Mental Fitness teams with your friends/colleagues
4. Results: We track your progress via our proprietary game and scoring method that is both motivating and a special way to visually engage with your mind.

I’m most proud of a whole lot. First, the fact that we’re pioneering a new industry, with a fresh approach, while maintaining a relentless focus on efficacy and outcomes is big. I have gotten so much skepticism from the investment community, the medical community, and the wellness community about “how we’re different”, and now as we continue to build and our customers are getting increasingly excited, so is the rest of the world. It was hard to block that out early days (as mentioned) but I’m so proud I kept going—thank goodness I have an entire business that has helped me with that . I am also proud because I started this thing with a real and hard problem to solve – burnout. I worked for years on the org side, and then the individual problem, and now we’re bringing those two things together to companies and their employees to solve the 360-degree-solution to the problem. Lastly, the team who has helped me build are some of the most special humans in the world (shout out to Alex Rose, Thanh Le, Adriano Cola, and my family).

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?

• Our app MYNDY is game changing for me. I practice Mental Fitness using our application daily. I also like to get creative with my cooking, read, and paint.
• I love listening to the podcast “How I Built This” for inspiration. It is so helpful and motivating to hear about the origin stories behind brands (and founders) we all know and love!
• Read:
o Newsletters: I love Seth Godin’s daily newsletter, Farnam Street newsletter, and James Clear’s newsletter – they are always a joy in my inbox.
o Books: 3 of my favorite books I’ve read are Learned Optimism, by Martin Seligman, The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, and The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.myndy.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myndy.co/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/myndy/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6qxPpoubHBxOa5q8sTs-YQ/about
• Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lissy-alden/

Image Credits

For the one with the blue screen – that’s Chai Ventures photo. Otherwise – all set! Thanks!