Brief writings from Sam Pantazopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO of Vizer, on values, core motivations, and our reason why.
At Vizer, we are united by the shared vision of democratizing wellness.
We believe all members of our community, regardless of circumstance, should be empowered with resources to develop long-term healthful habits.
Read 10 motivations directing the strategy of Vizer, a preventative wellness platform.
1) Make Healthy Choices Accessible
The primary goal of Vizer is to help people develop healthier habits. This requires increasing access to resources. Let's start with an example:
Jane Smith, a single parent of two, is working three jobs to make ends meet. Even with multiple income streams, there is often more month than money. With non-negotiable bills like rent and utilities due, food is one of the first budgets cut. The Smith family is considered food insecure.
Questions that arise:
With limited purchasing power, what food is Jane able to buy?
Does she have transportation to get to a grocery store? Or does she need to shop within walking distance of her home?
If limited to her neighborhood, are there options nearby for fresh produce?
What happens when Jane is at work? When the task of cooking for the family falls on her oldest son, John, who himself is only 12 years old?
Does John know how to prepare the foods purchased?
Does he have the tools required to do so?
This list demonstrates the endless challenge facing food insecure communities every day. Food insecurity exists in every state across our country, and statistically, is likely impacting someone in your own personal network.
Vizer supports at-risk communities by targeting these root issues. It is only through increasing resources available that we can build the foundation upon which healthy habits can grow and sustain.
2) Make Healthy Choices Achievable
Although the benefits of healthy habits are widely-known, intrinsic motivation to stay active evades most. This is because, as a population, we struggle with delayed gratification. When the return on our investment seem worlds away, we struggle to find the will to engage in the behavior today.
Vizer emerged from my personal battle with wellness. I deeply wanted the benefits of a healthy lifestyle, but couldn’t find it within myself to take the steps required to achieve it. These harmful lifestyle choices impact all aspects of our well-being: physical, mental, emotional, and relational.
Vizer helps users integrate healthy choices into their daily habits in a manner that is measurable and sustainable. It accomplishes this feat by accelerating the value derived from each daily workout and making each workout serve a bigger purpose.
It is our hope that a day in the Vizer ecosystem leaves you motivated, fulfilled, and en route to accomplishing your health and wellness goals.
3) Make Healthy Choices Fulfilling
We want users to understand that moving often and eating well are both satisfying and enjoyable.
Once we cross the threshold of habit formation, living healthfully becomes better than any alternative. We feel more energized, deeper and more lasting joy, and a stronger sense of well-being and community.
We want users to feel as if they have stumbled upon a way of life they didn't know existed, but from which would never return. Think of it like a funnel from awareness to consideration to action, but for personal well-being.
When people want to learn about healthy choices, Vizer Explore helps them discover what is available. When people want to take action on their health, the Vizer Market facilitates their experience.
4) Build an Inclusive and Empowering Community
Vizer is not a top-down ecosystem. Vizer is a symbiotic relationship where every party contributes and every party receives. Our goal is to improve the health of all people, and only in a society grounded in equity can we actually do so.
The commodity being traded via Vizer is support. Vizer supports people with finding motivation and finding resources. Vizer also supports organizations with sustainability and growth.
As everyone supports the ecosystem, everyone is equally positioned to receive. This creates an environment of mutual trust and aligned value from which true community forms.
5) Increase Awareness of the Systemic Barriers Impacting Health
We've demonstrated that living healthfully requires access to resources. But there is a significant and growing gap in who possesses resources in our nation that is deeply systemic in nature.
This gap in resources is most prominently seen in low-income communities and therefore disproportionately impacts communities of color.
Most alarming is the impact of these systemic barriers on long-term health for impacted populations. Entire communities are forced to make daily compromises that compromise their health. We are seeing chronic onset disease at younger and younger ages in impacted communities.
It is shown that the difference of a zip code alone can mean decades of difference in life expectancy.
We want to bring this issue to the forefront of the conversations in our community. Change begins with awareness and discourse, and with this conversation occurring via our channels, we can collectively work towards progress.
6) Help Non-Profits Spend Less Time Fundraising and More Time Programming
Vizer emerged from a social venture incubator. The purpose of the program was to explore how business can be used as a tool to solve social problems. I was fascinated by the concept of sustainability and its role in impact work.
Fundraising is unsustainable by nature. When resources are moved from one pocket to another, as they are in charitable fundraising, they eventually become depleted. This creates a need to fundraise again. This recurring cycle puts a strain on non-profit time and resources that could be much better spent focused on delivering services.
Business, however, is designed to sustainably produce resources. It does this by creating and trading market value for capital. When these resources are directed towards social causes, you can fuel impact in an enduring manner.
As a social enterprise, we believe business has a moral, social, and ethical responsibility to serve the micro and macro communities in which it operates. After all, what is the purpose of starting a business if not to leave the world better than it was before?
At Vizer, our goal is to sustainably create resources to promote community-wide health, alleviating fundraising pressure on community organizations, and empowering more mission-driven work.
7) Support Small Businesses
The backbone of a local community is small businesses. My dad was the owner of a local Greek restaurant that closed during its first year of operation. This is the fate of many small businesses who struggle with getting off the ground.
But small business is absolutely integral to the growth of a local community. Business operators create strong neighborhood roots and increase local economic opportunities. We believe building tools for small business owners to thrive is a direct method of improving local communities.
Vizer helps small businesses grow by connecting aligned businesses and consumers who would enjoy one another. Vizer creates authentic relationships by attracting participating businesses and members who align on what matters - their reason why.
This mission and values alignment creates a long-term relationship between both parties. As invested consumers, they share the business with their network and support new initiatives. By creating long-term customer loyalty and enduring relationships, we can support the local entrepreneurial ecosystem and drive communal value.
8) Support Team Members and Families
At Vizer, we have the privilege of working with a hard-working team of individuals who lead heart-first. They have made the choice to devote their time and energy to building this vision in the hopes of forming a better world. As a part of this team, they have contributed a small piece of themselves to a greater collective whole.
It is a core motivation of mine that this platform touches their hearts and homes. I want to build tools that will help their parents live more healthful lives and create a better world for their kids to grow up in.
In building for our own families as much as the collective family that is our society, we make macro impact feel micro.
9) Build Communal Value
All in all - the world is in a precarious state in terms of health and wellness. We have normalized palliative care, where we invest most of our resources in healing disease.
We want to change that.
We see how unsustainable the path we are currently on is, and we want to do something about it.
What if we flipped the narrative? What if we got in front of these major issues? What if we made moving often and eating well a reality? We could revolutionize healthcare as we know it.
Addressing health at the individual level is step one to improving societal health. This baseline of energy and happiness becomes a nutrient-rich garden from which change and opportunity can grow.
10) Commit to Learning Every Day
"Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow, whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die." – Tao Te Ching
Technology is evolving rapidly and the state of the world is evolving even faster.
Our goal is to stay informed of changing tides and how our platform can grow to best support emerging needs.
Vizer is designed to be a resource that will build long-term value for all stakeholders, and the best way to serve stakeholders is to listen to their needs and respond quickly and effectively.
We intend to listen, learn, and above all, grow.
Are you ready to join the community as a member or a business owner? Download the app to learn more!