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Guest lecture on A Step-By-Step Guide To Scaling a Walking App: Jamie Rosen, 15 March 2023

Wednesday, 15 March, 9:00-10:30 AM CET

About Jamie Rosen

Jamie Rosen is the Founder & CEO of WayBetter, a B2C startup in the US that makes games which promote healthy habits — from eating better to being more active every day to managing stress. WayBetter has had over a million paying customers.

Jamie is also the co-Lead Investigator, along with a team of behavioral scientists out of Brown Medical School, that received a $1M grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to develop a game to quit smoking, called QuitBet, which is currently in clinical trials.

Jamie graduated from Harvard College and began his career as a toy inventor. He later dropped out of Harvard Business School to start his first tech company which was acquired in 2004. He later sold his personal patent portfolio to Yahoo!

About the Lecture

Congratulations, you’ve created an effective, engaging mHealth app! That’s just the start. How will you get it onto the phones of the people who will benefit from it? Unless you expect to rely on grants forever, how will you fund ongoing research and development? How will you design your app not just to help patients but to be itself healthy and sustainable? Until you solve for this, the impact of your life-changing app will be limited.
In this talk, Jamie Rosen, founder and CEO of WayBetter, will discuss how his company developed StepBet, an app that motivates people to walk more. This case study will cover the experimental R&D phase, which took years, as well as finding a path to a self-supporting financial model and eventually a large userbase. You’ll hear about his experience, some of the painful lessons along the way, and how you can anticipate and plan for the eventual leap from the lab to the real world.

We are pleased to invite you to join this guest lecture. Registration is not required. Please be aware that we will be recording this guest lecture and will be making it available in our teaching library. If you have any questions, please contact Ivana Cabalzar (icabalzar@ethz.ch) prior to the start of the guest lecture.

Prof. Dr. Tobias Kowatsch, Associate Professor for Digital Health Interventions, Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, University of Zurich; Director, School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen (HSG); Scientific Director, Centre for Digital Health Interventions (CDHI), ETH Zurich & HSG; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore

Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch, Professor of Information Management, ETH Zürich; Professor of Technology Management, University of St.Gallen; Advisory Board Member, CDHI, ETH Zürich & University of St.Gallen; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore

Prof. Dr. Florian von Wangenheim, Professor of Technology Marketing, ETH Zurich & Advisory Board Member, CDHI; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore

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