We recently connected with Samantha Abrahamson and have shared our conversation below.

Samantha, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

I absolutely have had this thought! I will be honest and say that business ownership can be very challenging. However, isn’t anything worth while?

I received my Doctorate of Pharmacy in 2018, and I worked as a licensed Pharmacist for 4 years.
By the time I decided to leave my job in the Pharmacy and pursue entrepreneurship, I was pretty comfortable in my role. I worked at a great store, and I knew how to do my job well. I knew that owning a business would be no small task because while I was working as a Pharmacist, I watched my husband start and grow a company of his own. So I saw the work that it would take, but I also saw the potential rewards such as financial freedom, and freedom of my TIME that you just can not get at most 9-5 jobs.

When I first started having this app developed, it was honestly pretty enjoyable because I was seeing my vision come to life. However, the second that your product / app hits the free market, that in my opinion is when the real journey begins.

I thought that my app was completed when really it was just the beginning. I will put it this way, someone is not going to buy my product from simply seeing a video of me on social media and never having met me UNLESS my product is excellent. This is a GOOD thing though. Because it demands excellence, I have done FAR more than I ever thought possible.

Ever since my app has launched on the app store, we have been working tirelessly to improve the functions within the app and overall user experience. I am proud to say that The Actually Healthy App has come SUCH a long way. In the beginning, when we first launched, all we had were healthy recipes and custom grocery lists.
Now we have an app that completely relies on AI to make eating healthy insanely simple for women. We do this with our health butler that answers any health question 24/7, healthy meal recommendations at any restaurant, personalized cycle syncing recipe recommendations, and recipes that turn into custom grocery lists and link to instacart for convenient delivery.

In business, I have learned that there are going to be hard days. I think it is easy on hard days to think that the grass may be greener on the other side and wonder if the comfortable 9-5 job would be better. However, nothing that is worthwhile is going to come easy.

Becoming a Pharmacist did not come easy to me. Getting this business to the level it is at has not been easy, and getting it to the level that I plan to take it to, I am sure will not be easy. However, those are the things that are worth it. Instead of in difficult moments picturing what it would be like at a 9-5 job, or finding excuses for why maybe I won’t have success, I picture me scaling this app to be top 10 in the app store in health and wellness. I picture so clearly me taking the skills that I am learning and helping other female entrepreneurs to do the same thing.

I think it’s important for me and other women with businesses to not look back but instead look forward at the bigger picture and the reason behind WHY we are doing what we are doing. This personally helps me stay calm and get through challenging moments in business. I know one day I will look back and be amazed at everything this business has accomplished (I already am)!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a licensed Pharmacist, having received my Doctorate in Pharmacy in 2018! I worked as a Pharmacist for 4 years before taking the leap into entrepreneurship.

I have always been very passionate about women’s health. Although I loved working as a Pharmacist, it was made very clear to me during my time working that not enough is done about preventative health. It is all reactive.
While I am by no means against medication, I think a lot of times the first thing that should be done is diet and exercise.
By simply living a healthy lifestyle, we can prevent a lot of diseases / health issues!

I can completely understand why this is hard for many people though, because there are not a lot of great systems in the health care world that prioritize this! Not to mention, most of the time it is pretty hard to get a hold of your doctor or speak to someone in the Pharmacy.

I also noticed that even if someone is trying to be healthy, they need to scroll through social media for hours trying to find a healthy recipe. This takes so much time and there are so many opinions on the internet, it’s hard to know who to trust! I think this can be very overwhelming and often times lead to yo-yo dieting. Where a person is trying different diets but they’re too restrictive so it’s not sustainable long term.

I wanted to come up with a solution and started thinking, what if there was an app that made eating healthy insanely simple? People could TRUST that the recipes are actually healthy because it is created by Pharmacists and all of the recipes come from a certified nutrition coach.

Actually Healthy has come such a long way since the beginning!

Now, I am so proud to say that we use AI to make eating healthy INSANELY simple with four main features:

– recipes that turn into custom grocery lists and link to instacart for convenient delivery (with new recipes added weekly)

– any health question answered 24/7 with our AI health butler

– healthy recipe recommendations at ANY restaurant

– personalized cycle syncing recipe recommendations for the users current menstrual phase!

We make eating healthy a simple and enjoyable experience for women! I know that living a healthy lifestyle is important, so why not make it fun and easy that way we can use our time for more important things like spending time with family?

Our app is for anyone who wants to reach their health goals, and wants it to be made insanely easy for them!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I always laugh when I think of how little I thought about social media before starting my business. In the beginning, I was only focused on having my product developed.
I thought that if my product was good, it would sell (this is clearly my first business).
However, I have learned that you can have a great product, but without advertising / social media, you aren’t going to sell it!
Social media / advertising is the gas in a car. You need it to move!

The hard thing about ads and social media is that no one can tell you what is going to work. You simply have to try and improve until you get your desired response.

When Actually Healthy went live on the app store and I started posting on social media, I would talk about the app building process. This was great at first but after our initial first launch, I could tell that views were lower and our followers weren’t as interested. We needed a new format. In other words, I knew it was time to pivot.

Next, I started making different style videos where I would be dancing around yet showing off the app somehow. These videos were entertaining and got downloads, but the issue is that they weren’t showing off the app enough.

Finally, I tried a couple different video styles. First, where it would be a screen recording going through the app and using different features. I also made a video talking back and forth with the AI in the app, showing off different features.

It was clear that the video format with me talking was most popular because it got by far most views and downloads, with one video hitting over 2 million views!

This also was great because this ad style is repeatable. For example, I can make ads / videos asking millions of different questions to the AI, finding different recipes, building different meal plans, finding cycle syncing recipes, building a custom grocery list, etc. I knew that I could make this video style in bulk!

All in all, social media / ads has been the most challenging part of building a business for me. However, it has been so rewarding seeing the hard work pay off. I see so many people use and appreciate the Actually Healthy App now because we have videos on social media that effectively show it off!

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

There are a million ways to sell a product, but at Actually Healthy, we do paid advertising. This means that we pay to promote certain videos on social media, hoping that people will see and then download the app and sign up for a subscription if they like it.

When you turn on paid advertising, obtaining the first 100 customers is a huge challenge. This is because the ads are not yet targeted at all. Therefore, your cost per install and cost per purchase is extremely high. It is not fun to be paying money every day and not seeing a lot of purchases come in. It can definitely feel like a “near death” moment because you have this beautiful product, yet you don’t see enough people buying it. The problem however, isn’t the product, it’s the fact that your ads aren’t targeted. You have to improve your product, yes, but you also have to FIND your market.

In the beginning phase of paid ads, you are basically gathering data in order to improve your app and get it to a point where the audience feels it is worthy of paying for.

There is a lot of trial and error that occurs. Specifically for apps, you have to watch how your app is being used. What do people like? What don’t they like? Where do they fall off at? For example, we tried many different formats and just landed on one that seems most popular to our market. You might make a change and notice that people really don’t like it, even though it seemed obvious to you.

Over time, your business / app will improve and you obtain more purchases. This helps immensely because then your ads become more targeted, leading to a cheaper cost per install and purchase. It is SO rewarding when your hard work pays off!

Paid advertising is no small feat, however, I hope to take everything that I have learned in doing this and help other entrepreneurs to learn the same thing one day!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @actuallyhealthy.app