Hong Kong tech entrepreneur Bradley Dowding-Young’s new app aims to put mental fitness in the palm of your hand
The Ready For Launch series asks questions to entrepreneurs to get the inside story behind a new startup or product launch.
In 2019, Bradley Dowding-Young became a Tatler Gen.T honouree as the CEO of Silentmode. Silentmode developed a sensory deprivation face mask to reduce anxiety and improve health. This May, Dowding-Young made a surprise announcement that the Silentmode brand was winding down and he would now be known solely as the co-founder and CEO of Breathonics.
The company recently launched the BRX app aimed at helping people take better control of their mental health. We’ve put Dowding-Young on the spot for a refresher on the goals of his company and its BRX app.
Read more: World Mental Health Day: Wellness habits and practices
Can you introduce Breathonics in one sentence?
Bradley Dowding-Young (BDY): Breathonics is a mental fitness company on a mission to help one million people improve the way they think and feel through music, science and technology.
Who’s the target consumer?
BDY: Our target customers and users are typically 20 to 45-year-old males, city dwellers and gadget lovers. We see a lot of traders or knowledge workers: people who do high-intensity mind work and need help switching off or powering up. We built this product to target a large swath of the population that, we believe, has been neglected by traditional meditation products. Through our brand position, mission and values, we tend to attract people looking for low-investment, high-return techniques.
What’s your value proposition?
BDY: For those who don’t know where to start or struggle to find the time, Breathonics makes breathwork easy to begin and fun to continue. We have taken the frameworks of physical fitness and applied them to mental health, resulting in mental fitness. Our programmes are scientifically proven to help reduce your heart rate and balance your nervous system in just 5 minutes. We believe that “working in” is just as important as “working out”.
What’s the size of the potential market?
BDY: The Global Wellness Institute reported that the global wellness economy was valued at $4.5 trillion in 2019. It’s been one of the fastest-growing industries over the past decade, with a growth rate of 6.4 percent annually from 2015 to 2019—nearly twice as fast as global economic growth (3.6 percent). The total wellness market is predicted to grow to $7 trillion by 2023. Digital wellness is growing particularly fast, catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic. People are looking for ways to improve their well-being in the comfort and convenience of their own space and time.
Tell us about the process of coming up with the idea.
BDY: In 2017, after spending the last five years of a 12-year marketing career working 80-hour weeks, I had a workplace burnout. I took a three-month break and spent the following year looking for solutions to improve my mental fitness. This led me to learn about the nervous system and breathing, inspiring me to train as a breathwork instructor under Dr Belisa Vranich. The thing I loved about breathwork was the physicality. The saying “body over mind” is true—changing your breathing patterns can change the way you feel.
Looking through the market, I couldn’t find any solutions that gave me the instant relief I wanted, so we set out to build a solution. Starting with hardware, we created the world’s first sensory deprivation mask and built a multi-million dollar revenue stream. The software component initially started as a way to support the hardware.
After the eCommerce crash of 2021, we shifted our focus exclusively on the software, Breathonics, eventually leading us to the future of the web: Web3 technology and the blockchain. We recently launched the latest version of our app, BRX by Breathonics, a rest-and-reward functional role-play game where you can enjoy breathwork built into lore. We have found that new audiences are much more engaged with interactive storytelling and the reward function of the product encourages people to try it out.
Who are your investors and how closely did you work with them through the product development stage?
BDY: We were lucky to find a great group of angel investors who helped us scale the company after we initially bootstrapped ourselves to a product launch. They were great at giving us feedback on the hardware builds. Progressing into software and Web3, we have an open forum in our Discord community where holders advise on features, bugs and general feedback. Web3 moves fast, and it’s possible to get feedback in minutes rather than weeks. As we build the future of the business, our community is key for sanity-testing ideas and product features. We are seeing a completely new way to approach product sprints.