At harbour.today, Natalie Nzeyimana and her team are helping people build holistic resilience. On this episode, she and Chad talk about building the app at the beginning of the pandemic when she witnessed herself and others feeling like they were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored.
Harbour is a space for people to anchor themselves, find clarity, and set sail. The community offers one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool.
harbour.today (https://www.harbour.today/)
Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/harbour.today/)
Twitter (https://twitter.com/natalieisonline)
Lunchclub (https://lunchclub.com/)
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And today, I'm joined by the founder of Harbour, Natalie Nzeyimana. So, Natalie, thanks for joining me.
NATALIE: Thanks for having me on.
CHAD: So tell me a little bit about what Harbour is.
NATALIE: Sure. Harbour is a space for people to anchor self, find clarity, and set sail. We offer one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool. Harbour was built at the beginning of the pandemic when I witnessed within myself, and the people I knew who I'd worked with, friends, family, just a lot of us felt like we were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored. And so, it began as a course to think about the ways we could use holistic strategies to anchor ourselves and set sail. And from then, from November 2020 to now, it's become a product.
CHAD: You started in November. And I know we first met in London a while ago. You were teaching yourself to code working on an education product if I remember right. And we got together at Google Space there and paired for a little bit. Did you code Harbour yourself?
NATALIE: It feels like another lifetime.
CHAD: [laughs]
NATALIE: I think life before the pandemic and life after the pandemic; there’s a real line there. I've done quite a bit of the coding myself. However, I've also used a lot of no-code solutions to create MVPs. They've been amazing at helping me scale, helping me test out ideas incredibly quickly.
And so one of the interesting things about juggling doing client work, and then also building the back end, and building the module, and then building the design work, and thinking about content juggling all of these different pieces, is that equation of do I invest time in HTML, or do I invest time in machine learning that's going to help me scale? And making all of those intricate decisions has been really, really interesting because, of course, I want to make everything myself. But these no-code solutions have enabled me to test hypotheses so much faster so that I can save time in the long run.
CHAD: Well, tell us a little bit more about what the product is today and what you went through to get to this point.
NATALIE: Sure. So initially, I just posted on LinkedIn to see who would want to join the course. I had a really simple Squarespace page, and then that evolved into a Typeform which I would use with clients to help them track progress and checking in with their chakras every day. And so, the way that Harbour works is that we do an energy review based on the seven in-body chakras.
And so, for anyone who might be unfamiliar with this terminology, the chakras are...well, there are different schools of thought on this. They are a system for either focusing during meditation depending on where you sit in terms of your feelings towards energy bodies. They are a subtle body energy system of themselves. And what I find incredibly helpful for those chakras is that they help people map their energy in a way that I haven't found anything else does effectively.
So starting from the root chakra, which is the base of your spine, you can ask yourself, am I feeling safe? Am I feeling grounded