Ander was a personalized membership platform that focused on the individual. The artificial intelligence maps unique journeys for each person, empowering individuals to be more proactive, healthy, and connected.
Platforms are disrupting entire domains, empowering individuals to co-create together at scale, and have the potential to democratize value creation. Managed platforms have greater staying power, drive higher monetization opportunities, and balance top-down regulation with distributed governance among users.
As a managed platform, our founding team was heavily invested in securing the best partners (products, content, services, and distribution) to seamlessly integrate into our multi-channel experience.
Our priorities were acquisition of market share balanced with innovation that stays one step ahead of our customer and user needs. Our focus was simple: strategic capitalization that simultaneously captures market share. Ander was a consumer-focused platform and product, however our go-to-market strategy was focused on acquiring large blocks of individual users through customers across three primary domains that are analogous from a user’s perspective.
Individuals have little control nor do they profit from the data their lives and behavior generate. Technology platforms should be serving users as well as compensating them for the value they create — not exploiting their users attention.
I instinctively knew that in order for Ander to advocate for talent (users), data architecture would be critical to our success — an area that falls well beyond my expertise. I first recruited an industry leader that was pioneering ethical data platforms to serve, rather than exploit, consumers. We collaborated with our world-class data team to develop an industry-leading ethical data architecture.
Ken Herfurth
Founder & CEO of Ander
Private Equity Investor and High Growth Executive
Our team secured seven-figures in seed capital to accelerate our go-to-market, product development, partnership acquisition, etc.
Established a number of strategic partnerships: capitalization, data architecture, functional service providers, business development and sales, and content and experience.
Delivered a product to market in alpha and then beta 1 with hundreds of users, to then transition to beta 2 with thousands of users with a strategic partner.
Developed a strong pipeline of investors, partners, and direct sales opportunities.
Built a phenomenal core team of 10 to accelerate the business and product in preparation for growth as the company worked to secure the next round of investment capital and secure strategic partnership capital.
Modern life pulls us in countless directions every day. Ander offered employees a benefit they can’t get anywhere else—a personalized membership tailored to their own needs. In the rapidly shifting workplace, it’s more important than ever to empower individuals. We leveraged artificial intelligence to create personalized journeys, helping our members achieve their goals each and every day.
As an early-stage startup, too many to list!
Securing investment and strategic capitalization to seed and accelerate.
Actively shaping and driving our primary go-to-market strategies.
Pipeline creation, development, and implementation of management tools.
Actively building strategic partnerships: business development, sales, content, product, distribution, etc.
Developed the entire brand platform from the ground up — iterating continuously based on market feedback and signaling.
Lead the development of our marketing strategy, tactics, and all communications.
Recruitment, hiring, onboarding, team leadership and management
Product development and feedback on user experience and interface
Heather Stockton
Principal at Deloitte
Global Human Capital Executive
Leading the Future of Work Program
The most valuable capital for acceleration and growth — simultaneously reducing longer-term risk — is strategic capitalization through partnerships that marry capital with the acquisition of market share.
My instincts on talent assessment are more accurate than I realized, and have developed a more precise articulation of that evaluation so recruitment and executive teams can more easily interpret and quantify.
As an individual that honestly seeks out diversity in life and work in order to sharpen my own world view, because of the influence of our team, I can more accurately identify, understand, and work to shift default power dynamics that exist within a relationship whether internal to our team, our users, our customers, etc.
We were a mission to help the pioneers of business challenge convention and create a more sustainable 21st century economy.
