In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, Krista Kolodziejzyk chats with Abigail Keeso, Registered Nurse and co-founder of That Clean Life, nutrition planning software that empowers health and wellness professionals to provide personalized nutrition guidance to their clients.
Abigail founded That Clean Life with her partner, Christopher Hopkins in 2014 and today, the company serves thousands of high-performance customers across the world. Abigail believes that nutrition planning should be flexible based on the client’s unique needs and That Clean Life enables their community of health and wellness professionals to deliver a truly personalized nutrition experience with ease.
Links:
- Click here to download the Client Forms Bundle Freebie (which includes adult and pediatric intake forms, initial and follow-up chart notes, 24-hour recalland 3-day food record templates)
- Connect with Abigail on LinkedIn here
- Check out That Clean Life on Instagram here
This podcast episode is sponsored by Practice Better and That Clean Life. Click the affiliate links below to get 20% off the first four months of any paid plan with either platform:
*Affiliate disclaimer: When you purchase using the links above, DSC gets a commission from each purchase.
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to the Dietitian Success Podcast. Here at Dietitian Success Centre, we’re all about making it easier for you to build your confidence and expertise. So, whether you’re a dietitian or a dietetic student, we’ve got something for you. I’m Krista, your host and the founder of DSC. Now, are you ready to ditch the imposter syndrome and join our incredible, vibrant community?
If so, let’s jump in.
Abby, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be here. Me too. So excited to talk to you. There’s so much going on in the life of that clean life and practice better and all of that good stuff. And so I’m pumped to talk more about what that journey has looked like for you. But to start off, I always love to get to know a little bit more about my guests backgrounds and just how you got to where you are today.
So could you sort of back up a little bit? What did the start of your career look like? And then how did that progress to where you are now? Yeah, cool. So let me see where I should start. I grew up in a really small town. Only one high school. So I went to high school, you know, did what I thought I was supposed to do, went to university right out of high school.
I took biomedical science at university of Guelph. My first year I failed for my first semester. I failed four out of five of my courses. It was so bad. Like I was so bad at school. I stayed there and tried to catch up for a few years before I was like, nope, this isn’t working. And I really tried to make a goal of it.
I just wasn’t a good student. I never have been probably never will be. And that’s why I’ve turned into an entrepreneur. But after three years at university at Guelph, my grandmother took a stroke and I spent some time in the hospital with her. And I discovered my love for nursing. I love taking care of her.
I love being in the hospital setting. I loved just that caring aspect and feeling useful. So I switched gears. I went to Ryerson. I transferred the credits, a few credits I did have to a bachelor of science in nursing, finished that degree and I got a placement at the hospital for sick children.
So I ended up getting a job there worked in infectious diseases for, I think, five years in general pediatrics. So I really found my calling there. I passed all my nursing courses with flying colors. Like it was just really where I was meant to be. And a few years into my life at SickKids, I was working shift work.
So I was working 12 hour shifts, either 12 hours, like 7am till 7pm or 7pm till 7am. And I was just exhausted like I would get home at the end of a night shift and just crawl into bed and only be able to sleep for a couple hours. I just felt terrible. And I quickly realized that if I was going to survive this and make a career in nursing, that I was going to have to take Really good care of myself.
So I got into nutrition. I worked with a lot of dietitians on the floor at SickKids. I got more interested in the science of nutrition, which honestly we don’t learn a lot about in nursing school. And I started cooking and meal prepping and I discovered the concept of meal planning. So sitting down on a Sunday to plant my meals for the week and, you know, make a few dishes that I could take to my shift work.
And it just made such a big difference in my life. Like I had energy, I felt good, I looked better. All my nursing colleagues were like, What are you eating? What are you doing? You seem so different. So I started writing out my weekly meal plans and sharing it with them, just my nursing colleagues.
And they loved it so much. They’re like, let’s do this for a new year’s challenge. So it was like, January 1st, I gave everybody a meal plan. Everybody followed We like started attracting people from outside of like my friends and family, like people I didn’t even know started signing up for this. So that first it was January, 2014.
So I really got a lot of people on board. Then we started growing a community. And after that first meal plan went out, everybody was like, let’s do this again. I love this. Like some people were saying to me, it feels like being on vacation, somebody planning my meals for me. Oh, wow. Yeah, so I put together another meal plan for the following month, February, and this time I charged for it.
So I charged nine dollars to participate. To follow my meal plan. It seems so silly in hindsight, but it’s a concept that a lot of people Not 10. No. Yeah. 9. anD people paid for it. I was shocked. People were taking out their credit cards and giving me money for these meal plans I was making. So I kept doing that and I did it for probably six months.
I sold 12, 000 worth of meal plans. Oh my gosh. Within six months. And my husband is a software engineer, and he was always helping me with the formatting of the PDFs. And so then he was like, you know, I think this idea Like has legs. I think we should build an MVP and I was like, what is an MVP and in the business world that the minimal viable products so turn this concept of a PDF with a meal plan and recipes and a grocery list into a software product where people can, you know, create their own meal plans and browse recipes and filter them and all that stuff.
So we built that over the course of probably four months, just a MVP, like really small little web app. We launched that in January, 2015, we called it that clean life and the rest is kind of history. We grew that we actually, no, I should mention, we actually launched as a consumer app. So we just thought we wanted to help the average individual or their family eat healthy.
And then over that first year, we had so many health and wellness professionals coming to us saying. Hey, I need to use this with my clients. And I was like that’s cool because I’m a health professional myself. And that’s when like kind of a light bulb went off for me. I was like, wow, I can combine.
Like these two worlds of mine.
This episode of the Dietitian Success Podcast is sponsored by Practice Better and That Cleanly. We’ve partnered up to bring you an incredible client forms bundle freebie that is going to save you a ton of time and streamline your business systems. With this value packed bundle, you get six client forms for free that can be uploaded directly to your Practice Better account, including both adult and pediatric intake forms, an initial and follow up chart note, and 24 hour recall and three day food record templates.
And the best part is they are fully customizable, so you can adjust them to fit your practice style. Just check out the link in the description of this podcast episode to download your forms bundle today. With that, let’s get back to the episode.
So we kept at it. We launched another tier for health and wellness professionals, started attracting a lot of dietitians, nutritionists even medical doctors who are using it for, you know, functional medicine, and we’ve grown it over the last, I guess it’s been eight years now.
And this past June, we actually sold the company to practice better. So practice better acquired that clean life. And now we’re part of the practice, better family and continuing to grow. Very cool. Wow. Okay, so first of all, I can’t believe you, sp you sold, so was it still a $9 product when you sold $12,000 worth of meal plants?
Because that’s insane . I know. I was like, my gosh, can you imagine if I would’ve charged like 18? I’ve made like 24,000. Yeah, no kidding. Hindsight’s always 2020, right? Yeah. But yeah, that’s how many I sold and that’s how many people were. Interested in and just getting a meal plan, you know, having somebody do it for them.
Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. Okay. So can you speak to, because I’m, I mean, this comes as no surprise to you, right? I think when people hear the term meal plan, especially dietitians or practitioners, there tends to be a bit of a. a fixed perspective on what a meal plan is. It’s just this prescriptive, you know, here’s exactly what you should eat every day, which that clean life is so much more than that.
And I’m such a big fan of that clean life. I think that it saves people so much time and practitioners particularly, I think it saves them so much time. There’s recipes, there’s grocery lists, like there’s all of these things. Can you speak to just what that clean life is as a product now? What value it gives to the user?
And how it’s just so much more than just a prescriptive meal plan. Yeah, we’ve actually moved away as much as we can from using the word meal plan because it just has such like a negative Association. Yeah, totally. Yeah, and it’s funny and we really think what we do goes so far above meal plans And that’s why I kind of took that language out as much as we can So we call it nutrition planning and we look at nutrition planning as kind of an umbrella and the way we’ve built that clean life Is very intentional To for it to be flexible.
So if a client comes to you and just wants recipes, say they were just diagnosed with celiac disease and they just want gluten free breakfast recipes, like you can use that clean life to just put together like a collection of gluten free breakfast recipes. Like it can be as simple as that, you know, like not all clients need a really prescriptive meal plan.
And from there they can take it. They can try a few they can discover a few favorites and build on that. And then maybe you build a. The lunches and dinners and keep building that way. So that’s one, one way you can use that clean life. That’s not meal planning is just by creating recipe collections.
And we see this dietitians doing this a lot, especially from our complex diets, say the low FODMAP diet. Like we have everything tagged within that clean life. So you can quickly, like you can type in low FODMAP and get all like the low FODMAP recipes. So recipe collections, the next is setting clients up to do their own meal planning.
So, you know, there’s a common saying like teach a man to fish and this is exactly what setting them up to do their own meal planning does. So you can actually use that clean knife to give clients a blank meal plan and then curate them a collection of recipes. Say they are on the low FODMAP diet or they want to go plant based.
So you provide them like with a bunch of vegan recipes. So you can set that up, curate the recipes, add a blank meal plan. Give it to your client and they can do their own meal plan, which is pretty cool. And then the last is, of course, traditional meal planning is when you go through and do it for them.
And as much as dietitians hate this, I can like. Put money on it that every dietitian has been asked for a meal plan at some point in time Yeah, that’s just what clients want. Even if they don’t follow it. They just want to see it They just want somebody to do it for them. So you can do that with that clean knife You can build out entire meal plans like breakfast lunch dinner snacks Monday to Sunday.
We add up all the calories and nutrients for you so that you don’t have to do that number crunching and then based on what you add to the meal plan, the grocery list will be automatically generated. So that saves you a ton of time that way too. And then another thing we do a Vita, our resident dietitian here at that clean life creates templates.
So our customers can come in and grab. I think we have over 110 templates now of a variety of diets and conditions. So you can just grab and go, if a client has gout, say, like you can come in, grab the gout template and have a meal plan ready to go for a client within a minute. Yeah, that’s so, I mean, because I think regardless of whether a dietitian does prescriptive meal plans or not, like just the recipe piece, like every single dietitian, I would assume most unless you’re like heavily clinical and, you know, not doing this type of work, but like you’re giving people are asking for recipes, you’re giving people for recipes.
And I just remember being a dietitian in more of an outpatient setting. Thanks. And the amount of time that I would spend scouring the internet for, you know, a recipe off some random food blog that, you know, met the criteria for what this person needed nutritionally and all of their dietary considerations it was insanity.
I mean, it was wild. And then you don’t even know if that recipe turns out. No, you have no idea. On top of that, you have a gazillion ads. Yes. Oh yeah. And you’re reading about their life story and you’re like, okay, scroll scroll scroll. Yeah. Where is the recipe? Yeah. Yeah. So that clearly like really eliminates that.
And I kind of underestimated that at the beginning, like how important the recipes were. I was like, you know, planning, but no like you said, like people really value the recipes, just having those there. And the way we’ve set it up is that we develop. Design test all of our own recipes. We have a team, a really great team of recipe developers.
So we add new recipes to our database every single week. So it’s like constantly growing. So if you have clients, say you’re a dietitian who specializes in one type of diet let’s go back to celiac. Like you never have to worry about running out of like inspiration because we’re always adding new recipes.
Yeah, that’s so cool. Okay, I want to talk a bit more about just your life as an entrepreneur and what this journey has looked like for you, because that’s what people that listen to this podcast are always interested in hearing about. But I think that this is an interesting segue now into something that happened or that was announced today, which is the actual integration of that clean life with practice better.
So you had mentioned that practice better acquired that clean life in June, which was really cool. And so what does this integration now look like? Yeah. So when practice better acquired that clean life in June, our number, we had two. Two main priorities. The first was to release the starter plan. So a lower price tier, it’s 30 a month to get started.
And this is really great for practitioners who are just like new, who have just graduated. So that was a priority. Number one, check. We’ve done that. Priority number two was to integrate the products so that they actually talk to each other because practice better. For those of you who don’t know is a practice management software.
So this is where you do all your like charting note taking, telehealth sessions, scheduling, billing, all of that stuff. So when it came time to integrate, we knew that practitioners wanted. To have that clean life available within Practice Better. So, the engineers went to work. I can’t speak in too much detail about what they do, because I have no idea, technically.
But they went to work. They created a really neat integration that now, when you’re building like patient protocols and programs within Practice Better, you can easily add Recipes, meal plans, collections and templates to your practice better protocols and programs. So it really creates like a more seamless and streamlined experience.
So you don’t have to leave practice better and go to that clean life and do your nutrition planning. You can do it within practice better now. Which is awesome because it’s I mean, a lot of practitioners, I know a lot of DSC members were using both platforms anyways. And so just to be able to streamline everything into one and be able to keep everything under one roof is pretty awesome.
I feel like that’s a game changer. Yeah. And not to mention the benefits to your patients as well, you know, being able to build those stronger protocols and within practice better, there’s a food and mood journal. So if you’re into tracking this for clients or client, you want clients to track their intake, they can now log that.
The recipes that they make from that clean life into their food and mood journal. And I should know, like on the flip side, if you don’t want to do that, if you don’t want your client to do any food logging or don’t want them to see nutrition information, you can also turn all of that off. So again, like we really focused on the flexibility and making it really customizable depending on your approach as a dietitian.
Yeah. That’s awesome. Okay. So let’s talk a bit more about just you and your entrepreneurial journey. A lot of most of our listeners are people who practitioners who are at the earlier stages of their business journey or thinking about entering into entrepreneurship and sort of wondering what just that life looks like or can look like.
caN you talk a little bit about Your day to day just I think pre acquisition would be really interesting. So, you know, thinking about and particularly, I would love to just hear about when you had kids and what your schedule kind of looked like. And then maybe post acquisition. So what does your day to day look like now to Yeah.
Oh, so different. What what a change from starting out as an entrepreneur with no kids to an entrepreneur with kids to joining forces with another company and going more corporate. It’s been pretty crazy. So we can start with the early days of Backlean Life. Yeah, I love reminiscing about this because I had no idea what I was doing.
There was days where I would go to a coffee shop and just sit and open my laptop and think because I’m at the coffee shop, I’m working. Yeah, I’m here to work. But I honestly like, I was like, what am I supposed to be doing? So what I did is I kept my job as a nurse for a really long time, like for a couple of years before I went all in on that clean life.
And this was good because it allowed me to kind of build it up slowly. So I think I, yeah, I continued to work as a nurse for two years and then all my days off I would just kind of chip away at that clean life stuff, kind of a lot of guessing on what I was supposed to be doing. We focused a lot on content at the beginning.
That has always been kind of my strong suit. So, you know, building up blog posts, growing a community was huge. We focused a lot on social media at the beginning and mind you, this was in like 2015 when like social media wasn’t what it is now. And it was a lot easier to grow on there. But I do think. That gave us some really great leverage and something we focused on since day one, which I’m still so thankful for is growing our email list.
So when we started sending out those PDF documents, the first one was free. You could opt in. I think we built an email list of over a thousand people with that free first meal plan. And then when we started to sell them, then we had a list of people like to go out and market this too. So growing the email list.
Is like probably one of the best things we did in the beginning and continues to serve us to this day. We do promos to just our email list, that’s it. And they always go over so well. So that was a great thing I did in the early days, but I’m thankful. To my past self for sorry, I don’t want to cut you off, but I think particularly because I just think this is a really interesting thing to sort of touch on is just how you mentioned how social media used to be so much easier to grow on and I don’t know how you guys feel about this, but I know we feel these days that posting to social media, it feels like you’re just kind of posting to crickets.
Like it’s really, we’re not getting the same return from social media as even we did two years ago. Whereas the email list is really just, it feels like that gift that keeps on giving it’s it’s still works and it’s still there. And it’s still this engine that’s running in the background where social media is so volatile.
Yeah, and it’s a guaranteed entry, right? If you send an email, you know it’s you know, without getting into the antics of email delivery and all that stuff, but you know it’s going to their inbox and you know they’re likely to see it. Whereas if you post on social, you’re, like, rolling the dice with the algorithm whether anybody will see it.
And it like could take off one day and not the next so I think there’s still it’s almost like you have to, I feel like we have to be on social media like it’s just like a tax you almost have to pay to be like, kind of active, but like our strategy now is you know, continuing to be active on social, but then moving people off of our social channels, like with onto our email list to get them to opt into a free offer or something that we can keep in better touch with them over email.
Totally. oKay. Thanks. Sorry for that side. Yeah, no worries. But like we, I should say that’s like a great thing we did, but we also made like so many mistakes along the way as well. Yeah. There was one of my favorites was like at the in the early days. I thought like we needed press and PR like I thought we needed to be in the media to grow which is so funny looking back.
So I hired a publicist. Oh, did you? I love that. And this publicist. Sold me the dream. Like we sat down, I still remember like the place at the coffee shop and she’s we’re going to do this. We’re going to get you in this publication. What are, what is your dream podcast to be on? And painted this beautiful picture.
I’m like, take my money. Wow. And we worked with her for two months. She like, didn’t deliver on anything that she said she would. Me being like early on to the business game, didn’t have a contract. So she basically like. Took a few thousand dollars and then kind of vanished and didn’t deliver on a lot of what she said she’d do.
So that was a early learning to like kind of hand in hand with social media. It’s you don’t necessarily need press. But if you do enter into any business, you know, partnerships, make sure you have a contract. Yeah. So true. Yeah. Lesson Yeah. So that was a big mistake. And I think You know, just putting myself out there continuously has served us well.
I remember the first webinar I ever did, and I was just so terrified. I was like, Oh my God, a webinar. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but just putting like overcoming that hurdle, like putting myself out there time and time again, has really you know, helped us put one foot in front of the other and always go to that next level because you can’t.
I realized early on you can’t grow if you just kind of stay the same and stay behind your computer screen and don’t really want to talk to anybody. Yeah. So that was like a huge learning is, you know, putting myself out there and overcoming that fear. Yeah. I still, and I don’t know if you still find that maybe you’ve got, maybe you’ve been able to kind of overcome that, but I still find that’s that one thing that I know.
That I know works really well, and I still have to Make myself do it because there is still that fear there of I don’t know, just getting in front of new audiences and being like, what are they going to say? What are they going to think? Am I going to go? Hey what is that going to look like?
It’s just still scary for me. Yeah, totally. Same. Will I ever grow out of that? I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know if I will either. Like it is still you know, everything you say, you know, is going to be scrutinized and you put it out there. Exactly. I read it a hundred times and I’m like, think of all the ways this could be interpreted like in a way that I didn’t mean.
And it’s, yeah, it’s scary. But at the same time, like I’ve kind of realized you just can’t live in fear. You eventually have to know it’s true. Yeah, go after it. Yeah, but it is like it is a much different world these days. Online. Okay, so back to your day to day. And just sort of talking about how what that is look like.
So there was The coffee shop days and then what? Yeah. And then things started ramping up. Once we launched the B2B side of that clean life, which was for health and wellness professionals, that’s when things really took off. So that first year we were selling to consumers and the membership was like 9 a month or 90 for the year.
I love that nine number for some reason, but I realized I was going to have to sell a lot of memberships to that clean life at 9 a month to be profitable. So, you know, going B2B made a lot more sense. When we launched that clean life, it was called that clean life for business. Originally it isn’t, it’s just called that clean life now because we actually retired our consumer tier.
We don’t. We don’t work with individuals anymore. But when we launched that, that opened up a whole new world. That really took off. I got to work with health and wellness professionals again, like I was back in kind of my element and what I knew. So when that happened, we got really into partnerships and this was another thing that served us well.
So we’d look for communities that had audiences similar to ours. So. Somebody like you, Crystal, like dietitian success center you know, how can we build each other up? Like, how can we collaborate in a way that’s a win? So we started doing that in like 2017 and partnerships have been so great for us.
Just, you know, figuring out who has a community like yours, but that you’re not competing with and how you can collaborate in a way. That, you know, fuels both of your businesses. And that’s been, you know, something that’s worked really well for us. Yeah. That’s awesome. I totally agree. And I think that’s, I mean, that’s why we’ve done so much with people are listeners to this podcast.
They know that we’ve done a number of sponsored episodes with practice better and now practice better slash that clean life. And so are not, you know, are very familiar with that in our relationship, but that’s why. We’ve done so much work together because we’re such complimentary products, which is what’s so interesting.
It’s none of us really, none of us overlap with each other to the extent of competing. It’s we’re all complimentary in a really cool way. We all offer something different to a similar audience, which is. If you can find people like that, or organizations like that, it’s like amazing. Yeah, like I know a lot of the dietitians who use that clean knife now are doing corporate wellness where they go into a workplace and they do a presentation and get a lot of clients that way.
And Evita did an interview with Trista Chan not too long ago, and she collaborated with a personal trainer to launch like a nutrition and fitness program. So even if you’re like not B2B you’re a dietitian serving clients I’d really encourage you to look for opportunities to collaborate with, you know, complimentary health professionals to grow your audience and awareness.
It’s definitely a good play. Totally. Okay. So then how long did you have your business before you had your first baby? Ooh. So we had launched in five years, five years of business before I had our first, who’s now four years old. So 2019. So leading up to that, I feel like we were so ignorant. We just had no idea how free we were until we had a baby.
So we welcomed our first daughter 2019. And I was telling you earlier, Krista, she was just like an absolute angel for the first four weeks. And my husband, Christopher, my husband’s my co founder. So we thought we had no childcare. Like we thought we would just work through this. Like she’d just sleep over in the corner and we would just continue on our life as usual.
Let me tell you, I got a baby that had the worst colic of life. Like she just screamed day in and day out. So that was fun. We quickly realized we needed help. We live in Toronto and we had no family close by. So we did our best for the first four months and then we actually ended up hiring a nanny who still works with us to this day.
Who’s just been an absolute. God’s end and she has really helped us. She’s become a part of our family. And that has allowed us to continue working. And I also, I might’ve told you this before, but I feel like it’s really allowed me to show up even better as a mom. inStead of trying to work and trying to be a mom, I can focus on my work.
And then at the end of the day, I can be present as a mom. So I’m, I feel very fortunate. To have this opportunity to have a really great nanny in our lives. Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s something actually I was talking to my husband, Paul, about the other day, as we were talking about how we, it’s really.
It’s really because we’re going to get to a point to where we’ll need some sort of childcare like I was just saying to you like my husband’s off right now he’s on paternity leave for four months which is incredible but then once that ends like there’s going to have to be another solution because like you said, I’ve even already found that sometimes I’ll be Like I don’t want to feel like the time I’m spending with my son is like time I’m also thinking about and trying to do a little bit of work while he’s distracted, you know, and it’s really easy to do that.
And it’s no that’s not how I want to show up as a parent either. It’s I don’t want to be like half in half out in both things. Yeah. So I feel like that’s going to become so important for us to try and have that clear. Boundary between the two that clear separation between the two. So that exactly like you said, you can show up fully in both.
Yeah. Because when you’re like trying to like accomplish something and do work while you’re also trying to parent, it’s just it’s frustrating for you because you’re trying to do something. And then you’re like, Oh, yeah, quiet, just sit there and play. And then it’s frustrating for your kid, especially as they grow older, that they know that they don’t have your full attention.
So to, to be able to have support, it’s just, You know, it’s something I feel so blessed for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so how has then your life, your day to day life changed since the acquisition? What does it look like now that you’re sort of more in a quote unquote, I don’t know if it’s like more, I don’t know what your schedule is like right now, but like a corporate.
Job. Yeah. Yeah. So the deal closed this past June. So we’re about five or six months in now. When we joined originally, my role was going to be just to stay and continue to do what I was doing to run that company. tHere was a few organizational changes a couple months in and now I’m actually leading the entire marketing team at practice better, which has been a really cool opportunity and a huge learning experience going from like leading a team of four people to a team of 10.
So that’s been a fun, fun challenge. And like I said, huge learnings. But like day to day, like at that clean life, we had a lot of. Beliefs about meetings. We weren’t about meetings. So we’re like, let’s meet once at the start of the week and figure out what we need to do. And then we go off and we do our work and we’re good.
And at practice better is just such a bigger organization. Like you can’t do that. There’s just too many people and too many things you need to talk about and so many goals that it just doesn’t work that way. Like you need to constantly be on calls. So I did that’s been the biggest to judge.
Adjustment for me going from like a small team to a bigger team is just like the amount of meetings in a day and the amount of people but things are like moving at a really fast pace too. And I’m not in control of that pace anymore, like I used to be. So that’s been a big adjustment too, but also a lot of fun.
Yeah. And do you find that it’s easier now to shut off at the end of the day? Because now that you don’t have, I don’t know, I mean, I think from my perspective as an entrepreneur, and maybe you didn’t feel this way, but maybe you did, is Your life is, that’s like such a massive part of your life and such a massive part of your, just thoughts every day and, you know, I don’t shut off at four o’clock and then not think about my work like I did when I was in corporate.
You know, it’s it’s kind of always there, and you’re always thinking about it, and you just, you care about it so much, and there’s a lot of things that are on your mind, and that are maybe stressing you out, or making you excited, or whatever, it’s just so a part of your everyday life all the time. Do you find that it’s easier now to shut that off, or not really?
No, exact opposite actually. I think when you’re an entrepreneur, that doesn’t leave you. Like even if you sell your company, you’re still an entrepreneur, your heart’s still in it. You still want it to succeed. You still obsessively think about it like all the time in the middle of the night, early in the morning.
You know, it’s, it just that, that doesn’t escape you. And I think since the deal closed. I’ve worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life and I think about this more than I’ve ever thought about it in my life because just so many more opportunities have opened up. Like with that clean life, we were nutrition planning for health professionals, but now we’re practice management platform for health and wellness professionals.
And like the opportunities and the doors that. That has opened up is pretty wild and from like a marketing perspective, like how we, you know, find health and wellness professionals to use practice better in that clean life. It’s just, it’s so much more to think about now than it was before.
But yeah, when the deal closed, I get emails like, Oh, I hope you’re sending this email from the beach. And I was like, no, actually the exact opposite. Yeah. Yeah. But this is exactly why we made the decision to sell that clean life. Christopher and I and Evita and Tabitha and our team of recipe developers, we felt like we had taken it.
As far as we could take it. Our customers were asking us for practice management features. Like our customers wanted us to have things like scheduling and billing and charting built into that clean life. And we have had a really good relationship with practice better since they started in 2016 or 2017.
Like I’ve known Natalie, the co founder of practice better for years. And we just thought. Like we knew that clean life was destined to be something great, but we were at the end of that like place in our journey where we were just like, we’re like, there’s no sense in trying to build practice management features when practice better has at all.
Like it just made so much sense to combine forces. So the fact all this to say, like the fact that I’m working more now and more obsessed as an entrepreneur than I ever have been, that’s okay. Because This is the next stage of that clean life’s journey. Yeah. Okay. And then that’s a good segue into my last question, which is just what’s next for that clean life?
Like what to, what, if you can speak to anything, like what do you guys have kind of on the horizon in terms of just new stuff that’s going to be happening, new things you’re going to be launching? Yeah, so yeah, absolutely. So we just launched the integration with practice better. So we’re calling that v1 of the integration because we know we’re going to have a lot of feedback and a lot more things our community of health and wellness professionals are going to need out of that integration.
So. That’s where we’re at right now. We’re collecting feedback. We’re hearing what practitioners need and we’re excited to improve on that integration. And then there’s this whole world of AI that is opening up and that’s opening up to health and wellness professionals. That’s opening up to us as a tech product.
And what does that mean for us? There’s a lot of opportunities to improve and already amazing. Product by introducing AI into it. So that’s something that’s really top of mind for us right now is how we can enhance that clean life with AI. Oh, cool. That’s awesome. Yeah. So good to talk to you.
Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah. I’m still like super impressed. You’re here doing this podcast after just having a baby, like kudos to you because you know what? It’s one of those things though. That’s like a fun. Like I love having these conversations, right? Especially with people like you.
It’s just fun to hear about your journey. It’s fun to talk about your journey. Like it doesn’t feel like we’re, feels like we’re just having a coffee chat. It doesn’t feel like I’m like doing work. So I’m happy to have this stuff in my calendar. Yeah. And I don’t know about you, but I always felt. aS a new mom like you, you weren’t in control anymore, like you weren’t in control of your day or your routine or your schedule and work.
Is that one thing that you can kind of come back to that you kind of feel like you have some control over? So I always found solitude in that. I don’t know about you. Oh yeah, totally. And I think too, just I feel like that’s such a part of my identity as well that I just don’t want to let go of is that business owner entrepreneur side of things too.
And it’s just, you know, finding ways to do it in, you know, fun ways at the beginning is key for me. So. Yeah. Like I said, when it’s, I think like entrepreneurial like spirits like are in you. Yeah. Yeah. If you have it. There’s no getting rid of it. Yeah, totally. Okay. So where are the best places for people to Learn about Follow that clean life.
Yeah. Or you as well, because I know you’re active on LinkedIn, so I’m sharing those. Yeah. I’m most active on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. Cool. Because I don’t have to post pictures and I can just write . So find me on LinkedIn, Abigail Kiso, and then for that clean life, we’re at that clean life.com. And then we’re probably most active on Instagram at that clean life.
Awesome. Perfect. I will link to all of those in the show notes. And we also have a really great bundle that we’re doing with you guys slash practice better right now. It’s like a freebie bundle with a bunch of client forms that people can download and then they can get a certain percent off of their memberships, which is really cool too.
So I we’ll link to all of that in the show notes as well. Amazing. Awesome. Okay. Thanks Abby. It was so good to talk to you. Okay. Thanks Krista. Thanks Krista.
