I was the Co-founder and CTO at Lifeguard Health ApS. The company made it to its seventh birthday.

The idea

My partner and lead investor Mikkel Nybo Andersen had stepped down from the management of ContentCPH and sold his stake. He had an idea about making people healthier, and he needed someone who could carry the digital side and actually build it. We had worked together at the agency, so he knew what he was getting.

In 2015 Mikkel spent more than six months researching the market. We then began working on the concept, and on 23 May 2016 we founded LifeGuard Health ApS with the aim of creating a comprehensive and preventive B2B health concept with a holistic focusing on health, well-being, and performance. Our research showed that companies were already offering fitness subscriptions to their employees, but they had not been successful in motivating and retaining employees in a health program.

Digitising the coach

We recognized the opportunity to combine the best of both worlds: the digital world with the physical coach. By "digitizing the coach", we could deliver a scalable solution where many of the classic coach tasks could be moved into the digital domain.

This allowed us to combine automation principles and gamification known from existing health apps with people, creating results through a personal relationship. In collaboration with Morten Zacho, we developed a "Health Calculator" that could issue a numerical overall value for users' health with the help of onboarding data and ongoing input from both users and digital devices. This health calculation laid the foundation for all healthcare content.

LifeScore

Working with Morten Zacho, at the time working alongside Bente Klarlund at the Centre for Active Health, we developed the health calculation that became LifeScore. From onboarding data and continuous input from the user and their connected devices it computed three sub-scores – FitScore, DietScore and MindScore – which together produced a single figure for the user's health. LifeScore underpinned every piece of health content on the platform: it told the user where they stood, and the coach where to intervene.

The figure translated into three zones – green, amber and red. In practice it was an early-warning system: an employee heading for red was caught while something could still be done, rather than surfacing as sick leave six months later. That is the whole difference between prevention and treatment, and it was what the companies were paying for.

The platform and the app

The platform itself was a Laravel web application with role-based access. Five roles logged into the same solution and each saw a different version of it: the user got their training sessions, their health score and their dialogue with the coach. The coach got an overview of their users and could set up programmes. The health care manager – a clinical adviser from the insurer – could see personal data on the users who had consented, and intervene. The company manager got reporting on the workforce as a whole, never on the individual. And the administrator held it all together.

One person could hold several roles and switch between them – a coach could also be a user. That sounds trivial, but it means permissions cannot hang on the user; they have to hang on the role you are logged in as. With health data in the system, that distinction is not academic.

Alongside it ran a mobile app, published on the App Store and Google Play. Its main job was not to be a second interface but to act as a bridge: it pulled data from the user's fitness tracker and passed it on to the platform, where it fed into the health calculation. Without that bridge the calculation was left with whatever the user typed in themselves – and self-reporting is notoriously optimistic.

Tested by 5,000

The algorithm and the coaching concept were beta-tested across user segments before launch. More than 5,000 Danes onboarded the first version and helped us calibrate the model – and it was that body of data that made the calculation credible enough to build a product on.

Vitalityguard

Six weeks after founding the company, a shortcut appeared. Together with Dansk Sundhedssikring we set up a joint venture, Vitalityguard, which resold the same platform to their customers under a different name and a different visual identity. The same codebase, the same LifeScore – a new identity on top. It forced us to build the platform white-label ready from the start, long before we could afford to think about architecture for its own sake.

The shortcut was their sales operation: Dansk Sundhedssikring already had the customers and the relationships, where we had the product and no sales force. It brought Maersk in as a client. The partnership was dissolved in 2018 over a disagreement about sales strategy, and we went our separate ways with a shared source code.

Reload and Berlingske Media

With covid having shut down B2B sales, we tried to compensate by going straight to the consumer market. We built a freemium platform – a free health test and health profile as a springboard for selling coaching – and struck an affiliate deal with Berlingske Media on a ”no cure, no pay” basis: we carried the development cost, they carried the media cost, with the tabloid BT as the main channel.

The traffic arrived. Over 100,000 visitors in a short space of time. The sales did not. After two months we put the project on hold.

The diagnosis was uncomfortable but clear: the audience did not match, and the media strategy was wrong. We had assumed reach alone would sell, and underestimated how much a recommendation from a person is worth against an advert in a publication. The platform itself survived, though, and large parts of it were reused in the core product – so the work was not wasted, only the business model.

The company

LifeGuard was far more than training; we also offered sleep and stress guidance with podcasts, videos, exercises, and coach dialog. At our peak, we had more than 25 employees – the Facebook page still stands as an archive of what we built. We had financial backing from the Growth Foundation and several investors, and were a part of the entrepreneurial environment of Health Tech Hub Copenhagen.

It was covid that broke the business. The market shut, and converting customers became close to impossible: budgets were uncertain, appetite for investment had gone, and the HR departments we sold to were busy holding together an organisation that had suddenly gone home. We had stretches of four to five months with no sales worth the name.

And when companies came back, they were somewhere else. Working from home had become normal, budgets had been rewritten, and wellbeing was something you discussed on Teams rather than something you invested in.

We kept it running for three years after the lockdown but never found our way back to growth. In December 2023 we had to declare Lifeguard bankrupt.