#20: Starting up with impact
A Q&A with social enterprise founder, Candice Hampson
Pass It On is a bi-weekly newsletter bringing the tech and non-profit sectors closer together through knowledge sharing, written and edited by Lauren Crichton.
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It’s great to be back!
To kick off the autumn season, I’m thrilled to introduce you to this week’s Q&A guest, Candice Hampson.
Candice is the co-founder and CEO of Kiteline Health, a startup that provides healthcare coaching for people affected by chronic and long-term conditions. Candice’s founder story is deeply personal: diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in 2015 at age 32, Candice underwent a challenging journey to recovery that left her committed to removing those barriers for others. In 2020, right before the first UK lockdown, she took the leap and started her own company. And not just any company, but a social enterprise, an organisation that puts purpose alongside profit. For Candice, this commitment was a no-brainer—shaped by her past experiences and future outlook that she so eloquently shares below.
Candice and I met via Zoom in April. Her positive energy was infectious, her drive unquestionable. Since our conversation in April, Kiteline has continued to go from strength to strength, successfully securing additional funding to accelerate product and content development and expand their team.
Now, on with the Q&A!
Building a startup with social impact at its core - with Candice Hampson
I’ve been passionate about fighting inequality since I was a student. As an undergrad, I was heavily involved with Engineers without Borders. Shortly after graduating, I went travelling with friends around South East Asia and that’s when I first discovered the concept of a social enterprise. In Cambodia, my friends and I stumbled upon a restaurant called Friends that was attached to an orphanage. The children were raised in the orphanage and then worked as staff in the restaurant—the profits of which funded the orphanage. Seeing business and impact all rolled into one like that really struck me, and I knew I wanted my future career to be in that direction.
My first real professional opportunity to work with social impact came after completing my MBA in the UK. I joined On Purpose, a leadership development program for social enterprise. On Purpose exists to help professionals transition to working in purpose-driven organisations, and it was a huge springboard for me.
Fast-forward ten years, and I ended up founding my own social enterprise just before the first UK lockdown in 2020. I was working as an impact investor for Big Society Capital at the time, but I had wanted to strike out on my own for a while. When I got into the Antler startup accelerator program, I decided it was now or never. I founded Kiteline Health and haven’t looked back!
Kiteline Health provides health coaching for people with cancer and other long-term conditions. Could you tell us where the idea came from and what problems you’re trying to solve?
My founder story is a very personal one. Six years ago, aged 32, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. I have been fine for three years now, but along my journey I faced two significant barriers:
(1) Difficulty in understanding what lifestyle changes were right for my diagnosis post chemotherapy
Here I’m talking about things like diet, exercise, and reducing stress. Studies have shown that physical activity can reduce your risk of cancer recurrence by 30-40%, but doctors won’t explicitly prescribe it as part of a mainstream recovery plan because there aren’t twenty years of randomised control data behind it. The same goes for introducing a mediterranean diet. The idea of complementing conventional medicine with lifestyle changes (integrative medicine) is still on the fringe. It shouldn’t have to be either or.
(2) Limited access to credible research
The internet has given patients access to all kinds of information about alternative approaches to treatment. And it can be a dangerous game when you don’t have the facts—especially given how quickly misinformation can spread through things like Facebook groups. There needs to be a reliable way of presenting information to people that clearly and accurately explains the benefits and risks of choosing certain approaches.
Kiteline exists to fill the gap on a person’s road to recovery. By providing support in lifestyle and behavioural change, we aim to be the complement to treatment and medication, therapy and mental health.
Why did you decide to found Kiteline Health as a social enterprise?
The short answer is because I believe the way we’ve been conducting business over the past 50 years is unsustainable.
At Kiteline, we want to improve the lives of as many people as possible in the most accessible, affordable, and inclusive way as possible. So we’ve built that into our ethos and values from the very beginning. We wrote social purpose and B Corp language into our articles of association, became a member of Social Enterprise UK, and plan to go through the B Corp certification process once we’re a little more established.
Even though our company and product is at such an early stage, we’re committed to measuring our impact however we can. Currently, we use an NHS-validated quality of life survey to measure Kiteline’s impact on our users. It’s not completely fit for purpose, but it’s giving us some data to work with as we build our user base. We also send out a feedback survey half-way through a user’s coaching program and use Net Promoter Score to track user satisfaction.
What does it mean to be a purpose-driven organisation in practice. How does it affect the decisions you take?
I can give you a recent example. One of Kiteline’s biggest clients is a procurement team for a housing association. Before signing the contract, they asked us if we pay the London Living Wage. We didn’t have a policy for this at the time, but it was obvious that it aligns with our values and contributes to social good. Unfortunately we don’t qualify for it at the moment because I’m taking a large pay cut as a Founder-Director, but as soon as we have more funding, we’ll become a London Living Wage employer.
Not all decisions are so straightforward. Today, our health coaching product is quite expensive. And we’re primarily selling it to companies who will pay for this coaching on behalf of their employees. Even though we want to reach and help as many people as possible, including those who are most vulnerable, this strategy is deliberate. We realised that we need to be on a solid footing and go after the money first. Because if we can’t make our business viable, we’ll fold and won’t be able to help anyone. It was a tough realisation, but we believe it’s the most sustainable way for us to help people in the long run.
What’s been the most challenging part of founding and running Kiteline Health so far?
Definitely the extreme highs and lows that come with being on the founder rollercoaster! Despite knowing what to expect in theory, nothing prepared me for how it would feel in practice. And you really do feel it. Kiteline has such a personal mission that it’s extremely hard not to take rejection from investors and clients personally. Especially when you’re a people pleaser like I am.
Another challenge is regulating pace. We’re not 22 year olds in Silicon Valley. We’re older, and we’ve faced chronic conditions; we know that maintaining work life balance and our mental health is extremely important. But when you’re passionate about something, setting boundaries for yourself can be difficult. I worked weekends until I realised it was unsustainable five months in; now I’m more strict about switching off. Ultimately, the team’s health is more important than how quickly we scale. If things take longer, then so be it.
In addition to setting boundaries, what other techniques do you use to help you ride the rollercoaster?
Understanding rejection
I’ve been reading up on positive psychology and trying to understand how to reframe rejection so that I’m less beaten down by it. Recently I learned that those who struggle with rejection typically consider it to be personal, permanent, and pervasive. They put all the blame on themselves and think they’ll never succeed. Those who handle rejection well, conversely, are able to view it as impersonal, impermanent, and specific. I’m trying to practise more of the latter.
Protecting my time
It took me a while to realise that time is my most precious resource. As a naturally curious person who enjoys learning new things, I was keen to get involved with lots of aspects of the Kiteline business that I’d not previously experienced—like accounting! Eventually I realised that bookkeeping wasn’t the best use of my time as a CEO. You can’t be involved in everything, so you need to figure out where your time and energy is going to have the greatest impact and focus there.
Encouraging asynchronous communication
I encourage the team to avoid meetings and preserve people’s time. We use a lot of tools that provide other ways for us to share information and connect: Slack, Airtable, G Suite, etc. We write up all our processes and keep our employee handbook on Notion; it’s incredibly helpful having it all in one place.
Walking the dog
It’s a daily form of meditation for me, and an opportunity for self-reflection.
What advice would you give to anyone considering starting a social enterprise?
Think carefully about how you want to fund it. The bonus with venture capital (VC) and angel investment is you can move so much faster: you have the funds to hire more people, build the product, and get out there. The downside is that it’s a much riskier route: you are in charge of delivering a return on people’s money. That comes with a lot more pressure.
If you’re going to pursue VC/angel funding, you really need to make sure you’re aligned with your investors when it comes to purpose. Be clear about your company ethos and how being purpose-driven will affect how you build the company. The UK probably has the largest number of purpose-driven investors in Europe, but none of them will fund lower than £500k. Angel funding for impact-led companies is tough right now, but change is coming: an increasing number of larger funds (like Connect Ventures and Ananda) are starting to create smaller impact funds internally. At Kiteline, we’ve been fortunate to find some values-aligned investors to back our vision, including Antler and SFC Capital, as well as a handful of passionate Angel investors.
Another two pieces of advice I’d give are: (1) start measuring your social impact early and (2) talk to your customers as much as possible.
How can the tech and non-profit sectors come closer together?
Before I suggest how, I want to share a couple of personal stories to illustrate why I think this is so important.
About one and a half years ago, I attended my MBA class’s ten year reunion. The keynote speaker was talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution—artificial intelligence, machine learning, cryptocurrencies, etc. At the time, I was working at Big Society Capital, the top investor in the UK social sector. Listening to this talk, I realised: very few people, if any, in our sector, have a clue about any of this stuff, including me! The next day, I signed up for Andrew Ng’s Intro to Machine Learning course. I needed to understand what this technology meant for us.
The non-profit sector urgently needs more people who can explain and understand the applications of these kinds of emerging technologies—how they can make charity operations more efficient, and charity impact more effective.
Between 2018 and 2020, I sat on a large grant funder in the UK’s grants committee. Our programme called Tech for Good gave charities £50-100k grants to explore new technologies. A very large majority of those grant applications were for chat bots. When it comes to technologies like artificial intelligence, charities need to be thinking much bigger, and aiming much higher.
How do we achieve that? We know charities can’t afford to invest in the exploration themselves. Perhaps grant funders could provide more education and inspiration. Maybe we need an On Purpose equivalent for tech sector professionals—to help and encourage more of them to transition into the non-profit sector. Greater diversity among charity trustees would probably help, too.
Ultimately, exploring things you don’t fully understand is scary. The more that non-profits can cultivate a culture where it’s safe to try, fail, and learn, the more likely they’ll be able to uncover relevant opportunities to apply technology in ways that help them achieve their goals.
Which three books have had the most significant impact on you as a leader and why?
The Mom Test - About asking your users first! Don’t jump to conclusions.
Zero to One - Lessons from Silicon Valley about how to do something new.
The Tao of Coaching - It’s what we do as a business, and essential to leading people.
More questions for Candice? Catch her on LinkedIn or:
Pass It On is now back on the usual publishing schedule, so I’ll see you again in two weeks!
Take care,
Lauren 👋