The Tech-Enabled Future of Health & Wellness

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

Welcome back to the Forward Thinking podcast, this special edition of the Coast and Commerce podcast recorded live at FWDFest 2025. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media. And I’m Craig Josic, co-founder and chair of FWDFest. We’re getting good at these introductions now we’re six episodes in CJ. But today’s episode is actually one which I find inspiring as well because it’s with a founder who I think really exemplifies what it means to be a successful founder of a startup. Owen is an inspiring

young man, incredible human and watching him evolve over the years and how he supported not only his business but the ecosystem. If for anyone, here’s this story, I want you to dive deep into how can you give back to your community? What opportunities can you have that you can probably inspire someone else? Owen has an incredible story and I know you’re going to enjoy this episode. So let’s hear from Owen Bowling from Coach Welly.

Welcome back to the Forward Thinking Podcast, this special edition of the Coast and Commerce podcast film live here at FWDFest 2025. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media and the goal for this special season of the podcast is to find those stories of innovation and entrepreneurship happening here on the Sunshine Coast that maybe you haven’t heard about before. And one of those stories is Owen Bowling, who is a co-founder and CEO of Coach Welly, which is a wellness.

and solution I guess right so I’d love to hear more about this. Can you maybe just start by what got you started with coach Welly in the first place? What was the foundation or seed of the idea? Well how long do we have been? We’ve got about eight minutes. I’ll try and keep it concise so look I’ve been in the fitness industry since 2002 so 23 years now I actually played semi-professional soccer before that but fell into fitness from there. I was a personal trainer for many years and then started my first

company Crank It Fitness in 2010, it close to when you and I first met, built that company up to global distribution and sales of both of our product and our education system in over 25 countries. Coach Welly was really born from recognising this common challenge in the fitness industry first but then really kind of broadly across people in that a lot of people have a great intention to improve their health but then they struggle to do so.

And it doesn’t seem to be through a lack of information. There’s this gap and often personal trainers help people solve that gap. But I wanted to see if we could do something with technology that could play some of the roles that the trainer plays and actually help people at scale. If they say, want to train three times a week or I want to sleep better, I want to eat better, I want to be less stressed, actually commit to participating in those behaviors more regularly than we see people currently. Yeah. So

So give us the picture of what is Coach Welly today? what is the solution? What is the platform enable people to do? Yeah. So we started off as a fitness solution and we’ve very much have become over the years, a health technology platform. And what that means is that we’re essentially as a technology trying to help people improve their health in a measurable way. So we actually get the data to validate that you are improving your health in some meaningful way. So we’ve got a couple of different products. The main product is an app that can be white labelled for businesses.

So we’re working with businesses in insurance, in medical sector, in fitness, and even in government. We recently signed Sunshine Coast Council as a customer, so really excited about that. Which actually came slightly from Forward Fest last year, so we can talk about that story you like. So there’s a couple of different products, but we’re connecting lots of different parts of a user’s wellbeing journey. So we connect their wearables, we give them personalized fitness content. The system understands what it is that they want to achieve, which is different for everyone.

and also what they like doing and don’t like doing. And then it acts as a bit of a prompting engine and a rewards facilitation engine to dangle a carrot in front of them and say, hey, earn the points for doing this thing because you’re gonna unlock this great reward. Right, yeah. And you mentioned a white label solution. Does that mean that there’s potentially users of Coach Welly that don’t know they’re using Coach Welly or is the brand?

in their face as well. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s an interesting one because there’s so many bits of advice out there around have a brand that everyone can recognise. But when you’re selling to enterprise, when you’re selling to government and really large corporations in medical and insurance, they have their own brand and they have their own relationship with their customer. And they don’t really want to erode that. So we can actually play as the background technology that sits behind their front facing application or their front facing web interface.

we still get to service and serve all of those people without necessarily having our brand in their face. So I’m sure there’s been many moments over the years of developing the platform where you’ve maybe called pivoted maybe or where you’ve adjusted the direction that you’re going. Were there any of those key moments, whether it be customer feedback or market validation or a chance conversation with someone that changed the direction of the business? Yeah, there’s been a few, I think,

You know, if I go back actually to March 2020, I was in California. Now, March 2020 was when the world shut down. So I was in California as COVID was running rampant, didn’t know it at the time. And we were running a pilot of a very early version of this product in one of the biggest gym operators in California. And we had that live for about three weeks before the entire gym industry shut down. But what we learned from that was there was people still using the product six months later when it wasn’t designed to be used at home.

So we really learned that there was something there, but we knew that we weren’t going to sell to gyms during that time. So we just continued on the development of the product, knowing that once things came out, or trusting that once things came out, there would be a market there in that space. We then learned at different, probably events more than anything else from the market, that actually this was a solution not just for gyms, but for corporates and for medical and for insurance. We thought it would take us years to validate the usage and the data in gyms before we could go talk to those customers.

what we realised from the customer feedback and from the market coming to us was actually no one’s solving this kind of problem and we’re proactively looking for solutions. So we’ve been able to deal with those different market verticals much earlier than we thought we would. Yeah, so I think one of the challenges that many startup businesses face is the idea of not being first to market or not being unique in the market. you know, definitely in the wellness app platform space, there’s a lot of competitors in that space.

So how have you addressed that and how have you aimed to differentiate your offer? Yeah, it’s a big question. I would say in the wellness and fitness app space, the predominant strategy is B2C or direct to consumer. So you have an app, you put it out and you market to consumers. Now that has become very expensive and very challenging and very competitive. So our strategy was never going to be direct to consumer. We may stumble across a viral growth loop.

with referrals where we actually end up going a bit more B2C, but initially our strategy was very much B2B. So sell the value to a business to help their employee, to help their member, to help their customer enhance their health and wellbeing. Now, if you think about a corporate, we already have all of this upstream data and studies to show what impact.

healthier employees has in terms of productivity, morale, staff not leaving, all sorts of benefits. So to a business, that’s worth a lot more than it necessarily is to the individual person. sell the value where their value is the highest, i.e. the business, rather than sell it to the end consumer directly. And I think you’re competing in a very different market then as well, aren’t you? Because that corporate wellness space is still very much at the early kind of adoption phase, I think, across enterprise.

That’s my, from the outside, that’s what I see. And you’re kind of really, I guess, tackling that market in a very strong way. So that sets you up for new opportunities, right? Yeah, well, look, I’ll give you some insights. It’s really fascinating. So in the private market, are companies, particularly companies that have performed really well over the last decade that do a great job in looking after their employees. I think one of the biggest opportunities we have in Australia for my company and generally as a sector is government.

Government generally are not looking after their employees in the same way that some of these private sector companies are. And so for us, we see that as a huge opportunity to enhance the health and wellbeing opportunities and benefits for government employees. Can be a challenge to get into government, but we’ve got our first government customer in Sunshine Coast Council. So we’ve kind of broken that first barrier. So we’re very excited about that as a whole market opportunity.

Awesome, well done. Look, I know you’re a big proponent and supporter of the innovation or entrepreneurial ecosystem here on the Sunshine Coast as well. You’ve been involved in FWD Fest in a number of ways over the years as well. So can you talk to me for Coach Wellie, how has this ecosystem that surrounds us here on the coast supported your journey with the app? look, it’s really been fundamental in a number of different ways and I’ll touch on a few of them. So when I first met Gavin and CJ,

who really are the founders of FWD Fest and Silicon Coast. They really, describe them as the champions champions. They just connected me with everyone from Advanced Queensland to sports, to sport tech sector of the Queensland government to potential investors to Sunshine Coast Angels. We raised our round of funding with Sunshine Coast Angels as the lead investor. We’ve attended FWD Fest multiple times and met potential customers, partners, collaborators.

integration partners. I would say last year when I pitched at the procurement pitch at FWD Fest, I can tie our council contract back to that pitch. it’s not just sort of airy-fairy connections, it’s actually tangible business results that have come from this event. Yeah, excellent. So I guess the ecosystem on the coast here is still relatively small, relatively new. mean, events like FWD Fest definitely bring it into the spotlight more, but there’s a lot of room.

for more on the Sunshine Coast, for more growth, for more development, for more community supporting each other and lifting each other up, regardless of what stage of business you’re at here. So what do you want to see? Personally, like you’ve been in this space, what’s your hope or vision for the entrepreneurial innovation system here on the Sunshine Coast? Look, I think there’s a couple of things I’d like to call out. So one is Rob Steffler and the DeLorean project at Glasshouse Christian College. I think I’d like to see that kind of model scaled across

more schools, not just here on the coast, but elsewhere. I think the education system plays such a pivotal role, but there’s probably a bit of catch up to do there in terms of what are the future job requirements given AI and technology and where is education kind of taking these students. I think the university, it’d be great to see them collaborate a bit more. They’re a powerhouse, but they kind of run their own race to a degree. So I think that there could be real collaboration with all of those different sectors from high school through university through industry.

I was in a meeting with state government yesterday actually and I think there is a lot of intent and there’s a lot of disparate activities that are happening. I think it probably does take state and local government consolidating together to try and bring more of these activities cohesively into one kind of piece because the sum of the parts will be great, the total will be greater than the sum of the parts if we can do it that way. Not an easy problem to solve.

I think also capital is a really big challenge for startups and innovation. think risk capital in Australia is quite immature. We’re not a mature market when it comes to risk capital compared to places like the US. So personally, I’ve had to capital raise and it’s taken an enormous amount of effort. And I would consider myself to be one of the better people at pitching, at networking, at really driving my idea to investors. And I’ve found it really tough. I think if you didn’t have

my network, my experience, the social skills that I’ve developed over the years, it would be even harder. So I think, you know, pathways and access to early stage capital is still a huge opportunity for us. So those would be a couple of my top ones. Yeah, I love it. So for that person in the Sunshine Coast business community watching or listening to this episode when it releases, what’s your message to them? Like whether it be getting behind something or throwing their support behind something or attending something like what would you want to say to that person who’s just

living, working on the Sunshine Coast, but trying to build something of their own. Like what’s the message? Look, I think you cannot underestimate the power of collaboration. And I think the best way to enhance your chances of collaboration are in-person events. So get to FWD Fest next year if you weren’t here this year. Get yourself to other events even in Southeast Queensland. Go up to Cairns to Tropical Innovation Festival. Go down to Brisbane to Something Fest or Something Tech.

get yourself to events and try and go with a couple of people that you know or link up with people beforehand because when you go with a cohort or with a group, you get so much more leverage around the shared connections that each of you have. When you go to an event on your own, it can be a bit daunting. But I just cannot understate the value and the power of in-person events. I love it.

Owen Bowling, if people want to reach out, connect with you, maybe support you and Coach Welly or learn more about what you’re doing there, where’s the best place for people to connect with you personally or with Coach Welly? Yeah, so personally LinkedIn, just Owen Bowling. Bowling is in Tenpin or Cricket, very easy. And our website for Coach Welly is just coachwelly.com. Excellent. So I hope that’s been inspiring for you guys watching and listening as well. Definitely, you know,

a business journey here on the Sunshine Coast to continue to watch because I know that you’re only just getting started, right? So there’s a lot more to come. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, then you’ll probably enjoy the next episode of the Forward Thinking Podcast, that special edition series of the Coast and Commerce podcast here at FWDFest 2025. So we’ll see you in the next episode. See you then. What an inspiring story. Owen is a powerhouse. He’s always willing to share his passion and he’s disrupting an industry that

is really important for health and well-being. I’d love to share a story, Ben, that we’re in Melbourne at the GEC and he got tapped on the shoulder. Now, 120 countries were attending this global Entrepreneur Congress and he was asked to pitch. Owen never did miss a beat. He got up, shared his story in front of thousands of people. And so it inspires me to actually look at, always be ready, always be on point.

And so when you’re ready and you’re looking at your idea and your passion, practice, practice, practice, practice. Owen’s always talks about that all the time. So I think that’s something you can take away from hearing Owen and his story and how he’s developing something really unique right here on the Sunshine Coast. Yeah, super cool story. And just one of many that we’ve captured here in the Forward Thinking podcast series. And we are getting close to the end of the Forward Thinking podcast series because next episode is episode eight as we round out.

the season and we’re going to round out the season with a really useful one for anyone in business. So that’s all I’m going to share about today. So you’ll just have to tune in next week so that you catch the final episode of the Forward Thinking podcast. We’ll see you in that episode real soon. Keep moving forward.