New year, new you. The new year always presents an opportunity for us to start over, shed bad habits and build new, better ones. January 1st is a day we like to set resolutions for the new year to be a healthier, smarter, or happier person – but too often, these resolutions are forgotten by February.
Here are 10 European startups that will help you keep your promises to yourself and stick to self-improvement throughout the year.
Get fit!
Get in shape in 2019 with the app Fitwell. Founded in London in 2014, Fitwell is a smart fitness and nutrition coach that helps you achieve your weight loss and fitness goals. With personalised meal and workout plans, the app helps you to build better habits. Just like a personal trainer, Fitwell tracks your progress and keeps you motivated to maintain a healthy lifestyle on a daily basis.
If you’re looking to join a gym in the new year, Berlin-based Urban Sports Club offers a single membership that will give you access to over 3,000 gyms across Germany, France, and Italy. In Sweden, Fitness Collection provides similar services.
Reduce stress
If meditation remains a challenge for you, try FlowVR, a virtual reality meditation app out of Reykjavik that combines beautiful landscapes and audio in an immersive experience. You can use the app with a Samsung Gear VR headset or Oculus Go.
If you’re an employer, you might want to invest in the startup’s corporate wellness subscription model, as meditation has been shown to significantly reduce stress and distractions – leading to healthier, happier, and more productive employees.
Speaking of reducing stress on the job, Resilio is a Danish startup founded in 2016 that aims to improve mental well-being at work. The startup claims that one-third of employees suffer from stress, which is in turn causes an increase in sick days, lower performance, and high turnover. Resilio’s app helps employees to reduce burnout, improve job satisfaction, and increase productivity through personalised training, gamification, and webinars. Currently only available on iOS, the startup plans to launch on Android soon.
Save money
There has been a proliferation of banking apps which help from everything from budgeting and tracking spending to refinancing loans. London-based Emma is one such banking app designed especially for millennials. Emma helps consumers avoid overdrafts, find and cancel subscriptions, track debt, and save money. The company raised a seed round of £500k in July 2018 led by Kima Ventures, and recently launched a cyrptocurrency feature that allows users to track their crypto investments.
If Emma doesn’t yet support your bank, try Paris-based Bankin’, which connects with banks in France, the UK, Germany, and Spain.
Learn to cook healthy food
Learn how to make healthy, vegetarian dishes using the ingredients you already have in your kitchen using the Plant Jammer app. Based in Copenhagen, the startup uses machine learning to tell you what delicious recipes you can make with the food you already have, and how to make them.
If you’re too busy to make regular trips to the supermarket, consider having fresh ingredients and recipes delivered right to your doorstep from one of Europe’s many recipe delivery startups. Berlin-based Marley Spoon is one such startup, which allows users to choose from over 20 new recipes each week, and has expanded its operations to Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, the US and Australia. We interviewed Marley Spoon’s CEO Fabian Siegel in November about the startup’s fast growth.
Just go fucking do it!
There’s nothing quite like a financial incentive. Amsterdam-based Go Fucking Do It gives you the motivation and chutzpah to just ‘fucking do it’ – whether ‘it’ is losing 10 kilos, writing a book, quitting smoking or drinking, or launching your own startup. It works like this: you set a goal and a deadline, assign a friend or family member to act as a ‘supervisor’, and set an amount to be charged to your credit card if you don’t reach your goal. On your deadline, Go Fucking Do It will send an email to your supervisor asking whether or not you’ve reached your goal. If you have, nothing happens. But if you don’t reach your goal, your credit card will be charged.