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Dolores Ballesteros, a Mexico-based mother of two, was getting desperate. Her 6-year-old son kept hitting his brother, age 3, and seemed angry at her all the time. No matter what she did, she couldnt get through to him. At her lowest moments, she says, I really thought he was acting like a psychopath. Last Mothers Day, she asked her husband for outside help: a subscription to the Good Inside parenting app and its AI chatbot. Ballesteros began using the chatbot to coach her through her sons temper tantrums in real time. It encouraged her to ask him about his feelings and embrace the most generous interpretation of his actions. That was really good for my relationship with him, she says. It also reminded her to set aside time for herself. The chatbot told me that I only have so much patience, she recalls. Today, Ballesteros feels more connected to her son and more confident as a parent, and she credits the companion in her pocket with the transformation. Launched last August, the Good Inside chatbot is trained on the teachings of Manhattan-based clinical psychologist Becky Kennedy, known to her 3.2 million Instagram followers as Dr. Becky. Kennedy had a thriving practice focused on helping parents through difficult moments with their kids when she hopped onto Instagram in 2020 to share her wisdom. She quickly found an audience, especially among parents who were struggling to manage their kids in COVID lockdowns. In her plainspoken videos, Kennedy coaches parents through common dilemmas (for example, difficult potty training, or how to speak with a teen who feels fat) with an emphasis on developing a healthy parentchild relationship. Often appearing in sweatpants and with messy hair, she films her videos between family therapy appointments or in the aftermath of a struggle with one of her own children, ages 13, 10, and 7. This makes Kennedy all the more relatable and equipped with actionable advice. She aims to create sturdy parentswho embrace their authority around their children but dont assert it too stronglyand she frequently reminds them that their kids are essentially good, even if they act out. Using this framework, which Kennedy calls the Good Inside method, she believes parents can tackle just about anything that comes their way. Her insights are now the basis of a growing business empire. In 2021, Kennedy and Erica Belsky, a fellow psychologist and the wife of investor and A24 Films partner Scott Belsky, cofounded the Good Inside company, which has 47 employees and plans to add an additional 18 this year. In June, Good Inside hired Daniel Shlossman, a former Uber, Sweetgreen, and Wonder executive, as its first president. Through the company, Kennedy has published a handful of books and launched a podcast. She and Belsky also created an online community where, for $23 a month or $279 annually, members can access live classes, online workshops covering everything from managing mom rage to building kids confidence, and the Good Inside appwith its OpenAI-powered chatbot, named Gigi, thats modeled on Kennedys writings and videos. The app currently has more than 80,000 members in more than 100 countries, and its on track to double its membership by the end of the year, according to Kennedy, putting the companys annual run rate in the tens of millions of dollars. Most of that growth is organic, through word of mouth and Kennedys social media presence. Good Inside raised $10.5 million in 2023 from G9 Ventures and Inspired Capital. The company is profitable, and Kennedy and Belsky have no plans to raise more money. The only thing that comes naturally in parenting is [mimicking] how you were parented, Kennedy says. But that approach doesnt work for everyone. Kennedy says theres no shame in enlisting tech for help. We already use AI to track our health, learn languages, and develop professional skills. Kennedys great insight was to deploy the technology in the service of healthy parenting. Good Insides app is taking off amid rising interest in chatbot-based therapy. A handful of startups, like Wysa, have introduced conversational agents trained on cognitive behavioral therapy and other methods. Slingshot AI, which has raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others, is creating a foundational model specifically for therapy. Users of apps like ChatGPT and Character.AI, meanwhile, have been experimenting with creating therapeutic chatbots of their own. Critics caution that theres little research to back up the efficacy of these chatbots, and that AI cant reliably provide accurate medical advice. (Indeed, Character.AI is facing lawsuits claiming its bots endanger children.) But since in-person therapy is more expensive than everaveraging between $100 and $200 a session in the U.S.and increasingly difficult to access as demand grows, the idea of harnessing chatbots to bring down costs and reach more people is appealing. Kennedy sees her companys chatbot as making accessible many of the lessons that she offers clients from her office. She says that the apps subscription fee is reasonable compared with the money that people might spend on traditional therapy. When you compare the price with anything else that involves mental wellness, the value you get far exceeds the value youre investing. (Parents must pay out of pocket for both Kennedys in-person practice and the Good Inside app.) Even so, Good Insides app is more of a coach than a full-blown therapist, offering advice without becoming too personal. According to chief product officer Tiffany Shi, the only customer information the company currently stores is the ages of children, most of whom are between 2 and 12. That keeps the chatbots advice fairly generic. In Fast Companys tests, many of its answers followed the Good Inside frameworkassuming good intent, setting boundaries, acknowledging a childs feelingswhile adjusting the language based on a childs age. The chatbot seemed to default to generating advice in a way that validates parents feelings, opening responses with lines such as That sounds hard. The app has additional layers. When the chatbot delivers a response, parents have the option to click a tab to access related content. The app also includes a section similar to a Reddit board that allows users to provide moral support to one another. And there are daily bite-size lessons, delivered via swipeable cards that feature videos and written tips. Both the lessons and the AI-generated answers often include scripts that parents can use when speaking to their children. We want parents to have a way to learn the language of parenting, Kennedy says. But the chatbot remains the centerpiece of the app, and Kennedy sees opportunities to bring the experience of using it closer to family therapy. Right now, the chatbot is purely responsive, reacting to parents queries, she says. But the best help a parent could get is if the chatbot anticipates things and answers questions they dont have yet. She gives an example of a parent whose child keeps throwing tantrums in the grocery store: If you always ask the chatbot what to do, it might feel like Groundhog Day. But what if the chatbot could say, Lets zoom out for a moment. Nothing is wrong with your kid, but I would love for you to jump into this four-minute video and this step-by-step guide, becaue this has happened a few times. To create these kinds of interactions, the company would have to harvest more information about users than simply their childrens ages. Mike Krieger, Anthropics chief product officer and a cofounder of Instagram, serves as a mentor to Kennedy. He envisions the app developing a memory component, with profiles of users and their kids, based on parents queries. There could be a situation where youve talked to [the chatbot] for long enough that you could ask it, What are the thought patterns I tend to get stuck in?” he says. (Kennedy says that data from parents chats would only be used to train the Good Inside chatbot.) Personalization is on Good Insides road map, though the company declined to comment on a timeline or whether it would introduce subscription tiers to support such features. And there are limits to how far therapeutic chatbots can go, says John Torous, director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Its possible to superficially customize a chatbot where it uses your name. But if youre really looking for deep personal patterns, it takes a lot of data, he says. You need billions or trillions of data points to get good at learning a person. For now, Good Inside makes clear in its terms of use that its chatbot isnt a therapy substitute. Thats a way to avoid liability, but its also a simple fact. The chatbot may not know everything about a parents situation, but it knows enough to offer assurances to its users that they are good parents and their children are good kids. And that might be good enough.
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E-Commerce
When professionals tell me they want to be more confident, I usually give an answer that catches them off guard. I have no interest in helping you feel confident, I say. None whatsoever. That tends to get their attention. Especially becauseas a coach to CEOs, presidential candidates, and professionals across industriesIve seen what actually builds confidence, and its not waiting around for the right feeling to arrive. Instead, confidence is a behavior. Its something you can do. If youve ever walked out of a meeting thinking, I knew what I wanted to sayI just didnt say it right, this shift might be the key to your growth. You dont need to feel confident to sound confident. And if you learn how to do the latter, the former often follows. The real reason dont be nervous never works Theres a moment early in nearly every coaching relationship where someone tells me about a past flopan interview, a pitch, a panel presentation where they froze or rambled. Theyll say something like, I just wasnt confident, and assume the solution is to fix how they felt. But thats a mistake. Trying to improve your performance by fixating on feelings with ineffective self-talk like dont be nervous or dont think about your imposter syndrome is a textbook case of thought suppressionthe mental equivalent of telling yourself, dont think about a pink elephant. You do. Every time. Thats how the brain works. The more you try to suppress feelings of anxiety or awkwardness, the louder those feelings tend to get. Its not your fault. Its neuroscience. But it is your responsibility to approach communication differently if you want different results. You dont need inner confidence. You need outer tools. Let me tell you about Jim. Jim was a midlevel marketing executive with great ideas and terrible delivery. Hed mumble, rush, and avert his gaze any time a high-stakes moment arrived. His team loved him, but they couldnt put him in front of clients. He was passed over for leadership roles, because his physical and vocal presence screamed, I dont belong here. Jim didnt need therapy. He didnt need a new personality. He needed tools. One of them was a wine cork. Yes, a cork. Jim started practicing his key messages with a cork between his teeth; the impediment of the cork forced him to work harder to enunciate. He had to open his mouth, breathe more, and move his lips with intention. It didnt take long before something clicked: he wasnt worrying about sounding confident anymore. He was sounding confident. And just as important? His team noticed. So did his boss. Jim got promoted. What to do instead of trying to be confident Here are three tools from my book Dont Say Um that anyone can use to build communication confidence physicallynot emotionally. The first tool (the same one Jim learned) is a time-tested one that goes back thousands of years; the others are ones I invented working with executives in high-stakes communication situations over the last two decades. The Cork Drill Take a sliver of a wine cork (or a pencil, the tip of your finger, or a soft candy) and place it gently between your teeth, just on the side of your incisors. Use this object as an impediment and read aloud from a paragraph or practice a short pitch. Force yourself to enunciate as expressively as needed to enunciate every syllable. Then take the impediment outand notice how much clearer and more resonant you sound. The Lego Drill This drill is about building your tolerance for silencea key behavior of exuding confidence. Grab a few Lego (or Duplo) blocks and place them on your desk. Pick one up, and while holding it, speak one complete thought. When you finish that thought, place the block down in silence. Only after the block is clicked into place can you pick up the next one and deliver your next thought. This simple, tactile ritual forces you to pause, breathe, and reset between thoughts. It trains you to slow down and get comfortable with the kind of deliberate silence that powerful speakers know how to wield. Because when you stop filling every gap with um or nervous rambling, you actually have time to evaluate what you want to say and what your audience needs to hear. Silent Storytelling One of the quickest ways to unlock free and released gestures is to tell a story with your bodywithout saying a word. Try to explain how you make coffee in the morning, or what your commute looks like, or what happened yesterday at workbut do it without making a sound. Mouth the words, allow expressions on your face, and move your hands as expressively as necessary to communicate your ideas, but do so silently. (You can think of this like being muted on TV.). Youll find your hands and face moving naturally describing shape, motion, sequence, or scale. Thats silent storytelling. It bypasses self-consciousness and trains the body to express clearly, without overthinking. When you do speak again, your gestures will feel more connected, less stiff, and more expressivenot because you got them right, but because you got out of their way. Confidence isnt a prerequisite for good communication. Its often the result. So stop trying to feel confident. And start doing what communicators do when they feel confident.
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E-Commerce
As the creator economy continues to grow, brand trips have become a staple marketing strategy for consumer-facing brands, and B2B firms are starting to do the same. Adobe Express hosted a Summit in New York City for 46 creators. As an Adobe Express ambassador, I attended this summit, which focused on marketing and business, covering travel accommodations and offering early product updates, feedback sessions, and networking opportunities. Similarly, Semrush hosted an influencer weekend in 2024 for nearly a dozen creators in London paying for their travel, meals, and experiences. Just like their consumer-focused counterparts, these B2B companies hope hosting creators at exclusive events will lead them to speak highly of the brand, earn them positive coverage, and act as a source of real-time feedback. The big difference with B2B creators is that purchasing decisions in the workplace are often costly. As a result, there is a more nuanced and complex consideration. Brand trips are an emerging tactic in the B2B space. Heres how companies are doing it, the outcomes theyre driving, and the lessons that we can learn from companies hosting them. Why brand trips for B2B creators are gaining popularity The creator economy is expected to exceed, $2.71 trillion in revenue by 2037, according to Research Nester. This is because many influencers have become trusted voices who drive sales, even in complex B2B buying cycles. Opportunities for a brand to connect with relevant creators in person are a way of earning face time and introducing them to the team and product line. It also provides them with motivation and ways to collaborate, as well as hearing feedback from opinionated supporters. Nicole Ponce, Influencer Marketing Team Lead at Semrush says, Theres been a noticeable shift where B2B brands are adopting B2C-style engagement tactics, and brand trips are one of them. Substack and LinkedInwhere I teach marketing development and career development courseshave noticeably prioritized creators, encouraging everyone from CEOs and executives to industry experts and emerging voices to share content consistently. As LinkedIn is growing, B2B creators are starting to be a group of folks you can’t ignore, especially if your product is looking to target the B2B space, says Kate Olmstead, Adobe Express Community & Ambassador Programs Lead. Five years ago, we didn’t have this concept, really of top voices in marketing. LinkedIn creators with 250,000 followers, speaking to the likes of CMOs and VPs of marketing, says Olmstead. How to create a B2B brand trip where both sides benefit Establish what the focus of the event is, whether its the launch of a new product, a discussion on industry trends, or a celebration of a major milestone. It depends on the event, but typically well incorporate either a demo, product insight, or a workflow preview to spark interest. Sometimes its through more curated, two-way conversations, where we share whats launching and invite feedback from creators about what they need or see missing in the market, says Ponce. Typically, companies cover the creators travel accommodations, meals, and experiences in exchange for the creator posting on social media. Neither Adobe nor Semrush required posting to attend, which likely removed pressure for participants (who are likely to share on their own if they enjoyed the event). Olmstead says that Adobes trip aimed to introduce like-minded creators, offer early exposure to new features, and provide a forum for candid feedback. What also likely helps the creators buy in is the association with a big, well-known brand like Adobe. This boosts their careers as influencers and also provides the opportunity to network with others and the chance to stay in an appealing city for free. Invite creators based on relevance and consistency over reach Inviting a mix of creators across platforms, titles, career paths, and audience sizes can help ensure theres interesting conversation as long as theres a set of shared interests. I personally look at whether they create highly engaging, high-quality content and whether their audience is one that our brand wants to be associated with. But its not just about reach or follower count. We also look at how much value they bring to the roomand I mean that literally, says Ponce. We try to curate a space that fosters meaningful, peer-to-peer conversations. So we intentionally balance different expertise levelsfor instance, having a content marketing specialist alongside someone who focuses on paid advertising, she added. Create balanced programming thats educational and entertaining While its important that the brand benefits from hosting a group of creators, its important not to make the agenda too self-promotional or jam-packed. There needs to be room for fun. While the creator expects to learn about the companys products, its also important to be clear on how the event benefits them. You’ve got to have substance to [a brand trip], whether that be through the learning agenda, the educational content, or giving something back to them, in terms of bringing an industry expert that can help them level up their own businesses, adds Olmstead. Brand trips that strike the balance deliver qualitative outcomes like the attendees leaving with a positive impression of the brand, as well as quantitative impacts like social mentions and reach. You might just find that your business benefits.
Category:
E-Commerce
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