These MIB-Women are ready to disrupt the divorce industry!
Let’s start to dive into the industry landscape of relationships. How many dating apps like tinder and match.com platforms have you heard of? If you are looking to start swiping and matching online, there are more than a few options to go for. Once you find the perfect match and can delete your dating app what comes next?
In fact, every second, 200 people are matching on tinder. Every 36 seconds, 1 couple in the US alone is getting divorced, which costs them on average 15-20 k USD.
Most of the people have the feeling of failure and no one to talk to, because family and friends are biased about their partner. Going through a break-up is not something we are experienced in. They consider to get professional advice but are not sure where to start. Also talking to other people who are going through the same situation was a feedback which we often received.
What are you doing to help people going through a divorce?
Our mission is to remove the taboo about talking about divorce and break-up and connect millennials to expertise and resources for divorce. We launched www.thenxtchapter.com to create a place where people can find expertise like councilors and lawyer and read stories shared by other people going through the same situation. Furthermore, we want to inspire people and tell them about other places and concepts for relationships like the brokenship museum in LA or the divorce weekend hotel. The point here is embrace the new chapter in love and embracing life instead of having the feeling of being alone with what you go through.
Sounds great. Tell us, how do you come up with the idea? Are you divorced?
Haha, no we are both nether married not divorced. Excisting platform like the divorced club in london or a divorce party club are founded by women much older than us, who have already been married went through a divorce. For us, it is not based on our personal experiences, we see the problem and are creating a solution. Monica studied event management in Denver, Colorado. For her final bachelor project everybody in her course planned a wedding, but Monica was unreasonable. She decided to do something different and came up with a divorce party. While doing some resource, she discovered that there are more than 800 k divorces a year and that 50 % of this people are between 25 and 30. Most of them said that they can’t find expertise online which they trust enough to talk to. We wanted to change that!
What was your biggest achievement so far?
Our goal was to talk to more people going through break-ups and divorce. Monica just wanted to ask people on Facebook by posting a text, but I didn’t believe anyone would answer. Instead, my German friends would ask me if I am ok. So just Monica posted it into her US network and what we received was far more than what we expected: more than 25 stories during three days, including video messages. It taught both of us a lot about cultural differences.
How did your Hult journey impacted your project?
Hult was the place for us to embrace entrepreneurial spirt. Being sounded by world citizen with diverse backgrounds, culture and dreams, we got inspired by our fellow students stories and soon became friends with some of the coolest entrepreneurs we know! The Nxt Chapter started during our HBC Challenge. Together with Alexander from Stockholm, Mohammed from Egypt and Edoardo from Italy we worked on it for more than 5 month. At this point we want to give a special thank you for our amazing professors and advisors at Hult, especially Elisabeth Moore, David James and James Ethen who were always there with amazing advice and motivation bringing our idea to the next level. For the HBC final in April, where everyone is pitching their ideas to real investors, we started a guerrilla campaign under the name #poweredbypositivity and #itstimeforchange. Highlights of the campaign was the pink decorated Hult Campus, where we shared sweets, sticker and pink balloons with our fellow students. At the end, we filmed short boomerangs of our Hultfriends holding the balloons dancing with pink bow ties or talking about relationships while inhaling helium - a selection is published on our Instagram and Facebook channel. It was great fun and the most amazing part was the great feedback of our friends, who really enjoy it! Thank you again for that. 😃
Please, tell us about your key take aways along your ways.
• Rotating to Boston and San Fransisco motivated me even more to embrace our idea, because people here have a different mindset and are ready for it! Not everyone has to fall in love with your idea, so knowing our market and customer group is key. People from the US are curious about ideas like divorce weekend hotels and more open to talk about their experience, while in Italy or Germany, they have different needs.
• Talking to people of your target group as often as possible helps us a lot to validate our ideas. Making them part of the solution which we are creating is valuable and motivating. One example about how we do that is by publishing stories from people who contact us. The nxt chapter lives through this people who are sharing their stories. Another example is our pilot user group of 20 people who are exploring new platform features first before we officially launch them.
• Be careful to fall in love with London! It’s a paradise for ambitious, entrepreneurial-spirited individuals with a strong drive and big dreams. Every day the city vibes gave us the feeling that everything you dream of is possible. That is also the reason why both of us want to stay in London after graduation.
What comes next?
1. Currently, we are collect feedback about the published stories and advice articles on our website to see if it fits our users needs and can support them with information.
2. At the end of the year, we are going to launch the professional search engine as an additional part of the website. Since then, we are continuously talking to business partner like lawyer, consolers and other experts from the divorce and relationship industry.
Best way to stay tuned and reach out to us:
For live time updates about what we work on and who we meet, our Instagram channel is the right place to have a look! We have a Facebook page where we publish stories, share motivations and advices or if you are really curious, you can subscribe to our newsletter.
We are always excited to share new stories or talk to potential partners, so if you have any idea in mind, please write us at sayhello@thenxtchapter.com.
