coBlossom

The often-forgotten pillar of well-being

When’s the last time you actively thought about how to improve your relationship? Fitness, nutrition, and our relationships all impact our well-being. Few would argue with this statement. To achieve results in fitness and nutrition, we have made habits of training and eating healthy. Yet, we don’t dedicate the same focused effort on developing and maintaining healthy and fulfilling relationships.

Over the past decade, the fitness and nutrition spaces have grown increasingly crowded with companies that make it fun and easy to help you work out regularly or eat healthier. Over $265B is spent on fitness and physical activity annually in the US, and there are hundreds of personal nutrition and supplements companies.

Relationships need the same consistent focus and attention to grow and flourish. Much like we can train our bodies to be stronger, we can also exercise our relationships to make them more fulfilling. However, fewer resources are available to help us achieve our relationship goals. Even with research linking healthy romantic relationships to increased overall well-being, few solutions outside of couples therapy exist. Couples Therapy is often seen as a reactive solution when a relationship hits a bump in the road, and many couples view this as a last resort if they consider it at all.

Enter coBlossom, David Klippel and Luke Fraker saw a huge need for a proactive resource that could help these couples start to build or continue to grow their relationships.

Pioneering the relationship wellness space

Luke and David met during their first year at The Wharton School. Luke came to Wharton from Microsoft with an undergraduate and master’s degree in computer science. David worked in consulting at Accenture Strategy and brought a background in customer experience, strategy, and growth marketing. They discovered they had similar challenges balancing demanding schedules with quality time with their partners.

We’ve all had this experience; research found that over 79% of couples say they’re too busy to make quality time for each other during the workweek, and another recent study found that 59% of couples can’t find time for a date night each month. Luke and David found that existing relationship solutions were either too "therapeutic" or not engaging enough. After over 100 interviews, they learned that other couples felt the same.

In the summer of 2021, Luke and David launched a daily relationship text service “RelationTips” to validate their idea. The text service provided couples with daily date ideas, quick activities that they could do with their partners, and general relationship-building tips. Luke notes that RelationTips was a way “to see if we could make a meaningful difference with a quick prototype, then expand upon that.” After seeing success with the service, they decided to start building the coBlossom app. The initial app provided mobile minigames that fit into a couple's busy schedules designed to help them stay connected throughout the day, learn new things about each other, and grow their relationships. In the winter of 2021, they launched a beta test of the app to over 100 users, where they learned that couples who enjoyed the activities desired a more interactive UX – referencing things like Tamagotchi and Farmville – so that they could build a shared space together as they grew their relationship. After adding a more interactive layer on top of the activities within the app, the team launched coBlossom in the app stores in May 2022 to a waitlist of more than 1,500 couples.

How coBlossom works

Once users sign up and pair with their partners, they can create an avatar and start exploring the ‘shared digital space.’ From this shared space, users can access the relationship-building minigames and utilities. One such game is Squibbles, users select an exploratory question, such as “What was your dream career as a child,” each partner draws their answer to the question, and partners then guess what the other drew to learn more about each other in a fun way.

Other relationship-building features include the emotional check-in. This feature prompts partners to quickly share how they’re feeling throughout the day and later provides a set of questions to guide a conversation when they talk at the end of a busy workday. More functional features include a memory reel to store your favorite photos together and a shared calendar to store the upcoming events you plan through coBlossom.

Plans for the future

coBlossom just launched in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. With positive early feedback, the coBlossom team is excited about the impact they can have on a larger scale. The team is currently looking to raise $1.5M in pre-seed funding, giving them 18 months of runway to build out their engineering team, launch their community feature, and build product awareness. The community feature will allow couples to recommend their favorite date spots and ideas to their friends and get local date recommendations. Long term, coBlossom plans to build a recommendation engine that will help couples discover more ways to do what they currently enjoy doing with each other, becoming a date idea discovery platform.

David and Luke envision “a world where once you find a partner and drop off the dating apps, you download a relationship wellness app like coBlossom to pick up and help continue growing your connection.” If you’d like to learn more about coBlossom, download the app, or follow their journey, you can find more information on their website.

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