Aduri

Founding Product Lead

Nov 2019 - Jan 2022

Product Vision
Product Strategy
Prototyping

User Research + Design
Analytics
Culture + Team Building

Aduri is a pre-seed mindfulness startup whose cornerstone product is a Smart Cushion that breathes with you, making meditation simple, enjoyable, and engaging.

“This really helped me to understand how a meditation can be structured. I've begun to understand how making this a regular practice can help me handle my anxiety. I want to continue making meditation a part of my day”
- User testimonial

Challenge

Aduri had cracked the solution to a growing challenge many wellness companies were facing — meditation and breathwork apps alone don’t deliver results.

By using proven methodologies from the connected fitness space, Aduri makes meditation simple and enjoyable, so students come back day after day. The combination of an immersive experience, tangible product, and sound science creates a practice that actually sticks.

I joined Aduri initially as the Chief of Staff before transitioning into product. During my time at Aduri, I played a key role in everything from partnerships and business development, to fundraising, operations, marketing and product.

Aduri identified a whitespace in the market and brought me on to clarify the vision and execute on bringing the company, physical product, and mobile app to life.

Approach

When I joined Aduri, the company had secured a small amount of grant funding and was just starting to make the first prototypes of Cushion. I worked side by side with the founder to refine the product and company vision, determine a strategy to achieve these goals, and ultimately to deliver on our value proposition for our B2B and B2C customers.

Aduri was accepted into the prestigious consumer / retail accelerator XRC labs which gave us space and structure for mapping company values, GTM strategies, brand pillars, user personas, and internal processes.

Our team conducted extensive user research and ran several experiments to hone in on the problem and validate the ways we could build a system that would help students build a practice they would want to keep coming back to.

Vibration technology so far was really only being used to take people out of their present moment experience (an email, news alert, social media notification, etc), rather than nudging them into the moment.

Our research and testing proved that using a physical product + ambient technology would encourage students to keep coming back to their practice week after week.

During this time, I collaborated closely with our industrial designer and hardware engineering team to finalize the size, shape, and density of the cushion, as well as the PCB and internal mechanics of the system.

View Product Requirements →

I brainstormed and created the core pillars of Aduri’s offering — cushion, content, community — and built out each from 0 to 1.

I developed our proprietary creator tools allowing guides to sync vibration with their audio tracks; ideated, scripted, recorded, and released 30+ unique audio meditation tracks; and built Circles, Aduri’s community feature.

I ran a closed beta, which enabled me to better understand how students engaged with our content, and based on my findings, I led design and engineering teams in creating personalized home pages, developing new content types (journeys, singles, soundscapes, and courses), and building a unique features to track non linear progress and skill building.

I also led the creative development of a bespoke visual language for a cushion that breathed with you, meditation skills, themes, and students’ learning journeys.