Episode 137: Reimagining support for cancer survivors – with Kathleen Brown, Founder and CEO of buddhi

TW: Mentions of suicidal ideation, death from cancer

Kathleen Brown was diagnosed with a rare cancer at the age of 13. While her cancer battle was enormously challenging, she felt completely unprepared for the mental health and emotional struggles that came with it: dark feelings, isolation, trauma and loss.

This difficult experience inspired Kathleen to found buddhi, a digital platform with content, community and curated products for cancer thrivers and their family and friends. With buddhi, she is on a mission to support healing across the entire cancer experience. It’s a place to bring your realness and leave toxic positivity at the door.

Before founding buddhi, Kathleen worked for more than 25 years on behalf of the cancer community in fundraising and advocacy, for organizations including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and The V Foundation. Prior to St. Jude, she spent a decade in advertising sales with Disney/ESPN and Comcast.

During this episode, you will hear Kathleen talk about:

• Her story of getting a rare cancer diagnosis at age 13, and how she grappled with dark and isolating feelings during treatment and post-treatment
• The well-meaning but damaging impact of “toxic positivity”
• How buddhi supports cancer survivors and their family and friends
• Her decision to leave the full-time job she loved, to focus on the startup she was born to create

Visit the buddhi website at hibuddhi.com and follow them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn Kiel: Before we get started, a quick content warning: This episode contains mentions of suicidal thoughts and death from cancer. If these are difficult topics for you, please use your discretion when listening to this episode.

Anyone who’s personally experienced cancer, or been close to someone who has, knows how devastating it can be. But what’s not often discussed are the mental health struggles that can come along with cancer, and the complicated emotions, losses and trauma that can come up during treatment and after treatment.

Today you’re going to hear my guest, Kathleen Brown, share her story of getting a rare cancer diagnosis at age 13, and how she grappled with dark and isolating feelings during treatment and post-treatment. This difficult experience eventually inspired her to found her own startup called buddhi, which offers support to cancer thrivers and their family and friends.

Stay tuned to hear more about that – and if you’ve had your own experience with cancer, how you can join buddhi.

And if you find this episode helpful, then please share it with someone who may find comfort in it too.

Now, let’s go Beyond 6 Seconds with Kathleen Brown. Kathleen is the founder and CEO of buddhi, the digital platform re-imagining support for people coping with cancer. Kathleen founded buddhi after spending her teen and adult years as a cancer survivor, without the support she needed to cope.

She has over 25 years of experience working on behalf of the cancer community in fundraising and advocacy for organizations like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the V Foundation. Prior to St. Jude, she spent a decade in advertising sales with Disney, ESPN, and Comcast. Kathleen, welcome to the podcast.

Kathleen Brown: Hi Carolyn, I’m so happy to be here.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. I’m so happy to meet you. And I’m really excited to talk to you today about your journey and the story of buddhi. So the creation of buddhi, it’s rooted in your own personal experience. So tell me more about your experience with cancer and how it inspired you to found buddhi.

Kathleen Brown: Sure. So you mentioned a little bit about my background, but when I was 13, so 25 years ago, as I was finishing about 15 months of treatment for bone cancer, while my loved ones were planning a blowout celebration to really commemorate, you know, the end of treatment, I was quietly plotting to end my life. And it was something, I mean, my cancer diagnosis was something we were all completely unprepared for, but for me, the mental health struggle was really the hardest part. And it’s the thing that’s not talked about very often. So many of us that are going through treatment, recovering from treatment and even our caregivers experience just a real you know, heavy, emotional toll. And I found that there hasn’t really been a space where I felt comfortable or I felt welcome. I had a rare form of cancer and because I was a teenager while I was going through it, I didn’t quite fit in with the kids that, I was at a children’s hospital, I was at St. Jude, the most wonderful place. But still I stuck out because I was a teenager. I had this rare cancer and I still am dealing with lots of issues in the long-term that never really felt like there was a place for me. Like, do I go to a children’s group? Do I go to the survivors group? You know, I obviously the, the cancer I had, there just aren’t many of us survivors. And so you know, I just didn’t really feel like there was that place for me. But also as I learned, as I, you know, had gone through this, this real healing journey, if you will, I have seen how family and friends oftentimes don’t know how to express their love and their support, and the ways that they are expressing that love and support is not always helpful and oftentimes creates more friction and more isolation for that person that is going through, you know, the cancer experience.

And so I think particularly in my work in the nonprofit space, I started to learn how much power there is in community and how sort of a crowdfunding healing could be a lot more impactful. And so we stop resorting to using empty platitudes and really invest in someone getting well in the long-term and not just focusing on end of treatment.

I mean, nine times out of 10 cancer patients, survivors that I talked to say, survivorship is the hardest part. And I think so many family and friends think, “you’re done! it’s over! you’ve survived! let’s get back to normal!” And it’s just not the reality that we live in. So that’s what prompted me to, to create buddhi.

And you know, I, so buddhi, the meaning behind it, to be awake, to understand, to know, that’s really like the you know, the way that Sanskrit, I guess would… it’s a loose definition. But for me, cancer was an awakening. And I think it can be for so many people to kind of like direct your, your life’s path if you will.

But it could also show family and friends how, how connection can really help accelerate someone’s healing journey. And I felt like the re the reason why I decided to go for it now is because I’ve had a number of cancer scares over the years. And the ones towards the end of 2018, I had been going in for a number of different tests and was fairly certain it was going to come back with cancer because I had been experiencing all these different side effects.

When I got the results that it was cancer-free, I’m like even like choking up even like, thinking about that moment, because I was so convinced, well, you know, I’ve had all this time cancer-free and you know, I’m sure it’s going to be back. Around that time, one of the only people I knew, one of the only young adults that had Ewing sarcoma, the cancer I had, passed away that same, that same month.

And it really just like woke me up to, I can’t not do anything with this idea, this thing that I’ve been wanting to build for years, I have to do it now because time’s of the essence. So yeah, I mean, I mentioned that it had just been a pain point for a long time, but something that I felt really compelled to do at the start of 2019.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think it’s really powerful and important point to talk about the cancer journey and, and I think it’s hard to really understand it or even think about it if you haven’t been through that experience is the concept of, you know, survivorship being the hardest part. And I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that because I think there’s a lot behind it in terms of how it impacts your physical and your mental health and just really your, your social circle, especially you being sick when you were a teenager, which is such a formative time when our friends are just like so important to us in school and all of that. So I’d love, if you could talk more about like what some of those challenges are either for you or others that you’ve talked with.

Kathleen Brown: Sure. Yeah. For so many years, I felt like I was the only one experiencing these things.

And so, like I said, so many of the feelings were just buried down because they were very shameful to admit out loud. But I’ve now heard validated by thousands of people that I thought, oh my gosh. And every time someone, someone I knew talk about it, they’re like, I thought I was the only one. You know, it’s, it’s just these, these aren’t conversations that were happening out in the open. They’re more whispered conversations or like direct messages about it, instead of like, you know, on a website, in a community like the one I built.

And so for me, I mean, there were different things that I struggled with in treatment versus post-treatment. I think one of the, one of the biggest things is when you’re diagnosed with cancer, I mean, your life is instantaneously flipped upside down. Like it is one of the most traumatic experiences, particularly in my case for a kid, for a teenager who was just starting to get some independence, just coming into my own, just starting to like boys. And, you know, I don’t know that I was fully like comfortable in my body, but certainly starting to think about boys and what’s attractive and you know, so, so one, it was the abruptness of the diagnosis.

The isolation, physical isolation. I had from all of my friends, I was diagnosed the week before we went back to school in eighth grade, which was my final year of junior high. I had been given my last rights within three months and family said goodbye to me. You know, I had, at that point spent 10 days in the ICU.

So when I came to, if you will, I didn’t know what happened. And all of my family and friends were like shell-shocked, like they’d literally seen a ghost and I didn’t know what had transpired. The last thing I had remembered, I was at a drug-free conference with my friends.

And so that was really hard for me because so many people were treating me sort of with kid gloves. And I still felt like I was, you know, the same person, but as I you know, came to if you will, beginning of December of 1996, so three months into treatment, I was whisked whisked away to Memphis, hundreds of miles away from home to be treated, restart treatment at St. Jude. And so then I felt like, well, now I literally can’t see friends or family. I’m at this place with all these little kids. And I’m a teenager and my friends were just starting to date and go to parties. And so for, for me then, anger was the real predominant thing I felt. We back in 95, 96 didn’t have access to the internet, social media. Like there were no CaringBridge. There was no, you know, there was no way I could keep in touch with anyone outside of cards and letters in the mail.

Yeah. And so that was a real struggle that I didn’t have an expression outside of going to a payphone or, you know, the, the phone at the Ronald McDonald house, which you could talk on for max half an hour at the time. I was just left to just have those emotions stewing up inside of me.

And they, at the time, so St. Jude has evolved a lot. There were no teen rooms. We weren’t talking to therapists back then, they now have, you know, a child life program, and these things didn’t exist. And so left to my own devices, I was just so full of anger and resentment. I was ready to combust. And that came to a head when I was finishing treatment and two weeks before I’d finished treatment, so when I was given my last rights that the gentleman, that gentleman, the Saint, guardian angel that performed that sacrament, Cardinal Bernadine, he, at the time when he performed the sacrament had been a cancer survivor himself. And from that time to the end of my treatment, about a year later, he passed away from cancer.

And that was again, two weeks before I finished treatment. And I carried all of this, I mean, not only anger, like I was, I was beside myself when he, when he passed away. And I remember going to to his funeral and his wake. He, I mean, he was you know, one of the more famous, like influential people in Chicago, in the Midwest, certainly within the Catholic church.

And I mean, they had, I wouldn’t say like a ticker tape parade, but they had a, quite the, the funeral celebration for him in Chicago. And he designed his funeral path before he passed away to go past my school because he considered me a friend of his. And I just carried all of this survivor’s guilt quite honestly, of like, how am I here at the end of treatment and this man that has just influenced and literally saved my life and so many people, how did he not make it?

And so, yeah, I just felt completely unprepared for all of these emotions. But as the years have gone on now, and I’m 26 years post-treatment, the issues have been, you know, from just the everyday anxiety and fear of recurrence to, you know, scan weeks. I go in for tons of tests. The financial stress of, you know, all the money that I have to pay out of pocket for all these tests that I go in for, you know, relationship, intimacy issues. Just the triggers that I’ve heard. It’s very common for a lot of people in the cancer industry. You know, every time you hear someone else didn’t make it, you know. Anytime someone else has a, a recurrence. Or like today you know, the news of Norm Macdonald, one of my favorite comedians passes away. It’s like all of that. You’re like, why am I still here?

And so, yeah, I just found it really tough. Because when those of us are diagnosed with cancer, we’re not given kind of a get well guide. Like there’s not really any manual on how to navigate being part of this community in this world. So that, that might be more, more of an answer than you wanted, but I’ve coped with a lot.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. I mean, it is a lot, and there’s a lot that I think people just, again, if you haven’t been through the experience, you don’t think about it. You may think that, you know, once you’re, you’ve gotten through your, your treatment, you’re just sort of on with your life, but there’s so much that’s along with it. And you know, can definitely see how that impacts you as well as the people around you, who, you know, you said really a lot of times don’t know what to say, or if they do say something it’s, it’s the wrong thing.

And I know on your website, you also talk about, you know, some of the challenges around toxic positivity, where there’s a lot of pressure I think for people to just always, you know, put on a happy face and just, you know, always thinking positive and having gratitude, which again are positive, important tools, but it’s not the real, it doesn’t address the whole reality of the situation for people struggling with, with something that big.

Kathleen Brown: Yep. That’s it. And that’s, and that’s a thing that toxic positivity and that like relentless, you know, resort to platitudes: that’s that’s all people know is to send get well cards and you start to see, you know, people post social updates about what they’re going through and you see the same, you know, repeating of “stay strong, you’ve got this, you’re my inspiration” and that kind of thing.

I know people don’t know what to say, but when you’re feeling so down in the dumps or, you know, you post, you know, “I’m done with treatment” and now everyone’s just like, “you’re done! I knew it!” And like, in your mind, of course you, you’re probably relieved and excited to be done, but you’re also like probably scared about like what’s to come and what’s next.

And what happens, you know? If you think about it, and this is not something I really understood until I started studying, you know, all these different healing modalities over the years, is how in fight or flight mode when you’re experiencing acute trauma, you you’re conditioned to just get to that finish line and just, “okay, what do I need to do? What’s the plan that I’m following, and okay, all right, I’m just going to get there.” And when you get there and the dust settles in your life and the oxytocin starts changing in your brain, that’s why people feel so overwhelmed and feel like “I should be grateful, right? Like I should be just happy to be alive.” And then your community, your support network keeps echoing that back to you. It’s just like the isolation. It breaks my heart because I just see so many people going through it and they think they’re the only ones. It’s just, it’s, it’s really common and there’s not an easy answer, but you know, one of my solutions is let’s help family and friends understand the experience better.

They don’t need to have the perfect thing to say, but we can get into to how buddhi is, is helping you know, address some of the emotional mental side effects because it’s, it’s I think people are more open to accepting help and acknowledging what’s going on in their head, if they’re getting that support from their support system.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I’d love to talk more about what kind of resources and support buddhi offers. Cause it seems like this is sort of, you’re, you’re creating that community that you, that you didn’t have when you were going through this when you were younger. So yeah, I would love to learn more about how it supports both people going through cancer, as well as their their own support network.

Kathleen Brown: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so right now we’re primarily focused on serving cancer thrivers that are in treatment or post-treatment perhaps living with cancer. Their supporters can join as well. And you know, the primary resources the supporters have are, are different than the cancer thrivers, but we have a full content library of about a hundred pieces of written stories, covering everything from scanxiety to sexual dysfunction, infertility and then videos, meditations, breathwork exercises, sound bowl meditations. The idea is really to provide some resources in normalizing these different feelings. And then in the conversation forum area, people can connect with each other and kind of talk through different things.

One of the functionalities we built into buddhi was the ability to go incognito and change your display name. So you can go by whatever you feel comfortable with in the event that, you know, you do want to talk about some things that, you know, you might feel too embarrassed or ashamed to talk about. And since we launched like five weeks ago now, we every week are making more upgrades and it’s all based on feedback from the community.

Everything that we’re building is based on doing thousands of user interviews and finding out like, what are you struggling with most? And what do you want to see next? And so for instance, this week we’re upgrading five new things, and it’s like reactions to comments and better ways of sorting conversations and comments.

And people are going to tell us what they want to talk about. Like you could suggest topics that you want us to cover. Event ideas like workshops and things that you want to learn more about different socials that we’re hosting. And then we’re going to be rolling out some additional features with the social tool and marketplace. And again, that is all going to be tested with the community and getting their feedback before we roll anything out.

And that will, I don’t know if you, if you wanted details, but that would allow our members to be able to express how they’re feeling. And it’s by choosing like a funny GIPHY on a sliding scale, like a funny picture to express, like “here’s how I am today.” You can add a little bit more detail, but the prompts for family and friends, like they will be subscribing to your updates, and that money goes into your wellness wallet. You can then invest that in everything from therapy sessions to meditation apps. Again, those are going to be things that the community tells us they want to see in the marketplace, but that’s the idea of how it works. People are sort of investing in the healing process.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s really great. And you know it’s a pretty new company. You just mentioned that it’s about, at the time we’re recording this it’s about five weeks old, or five weeks into, I guess, a public beta or launch.

Kathleen Brown: Public beta launch, yeah, exactly. I started working on it three years ago in September, so it’s been a while behind the scenes, lots of research and development. And of course, raising funds to keep building and hiring some folks to help me build. So it’s been a long journey, but only open to the public for a little while.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. That’s so exciting! So, you know, buddhi itself is very new and you’ve, but you’ve had a whole career before this, you know, from, you know, working for many other companies before you became a founder. So I’d love to learn more about your career and how your previous roles kind of helped and prepared you to start buddhi. So when you first started out, how did you even decide what direction you wanted to take?

Kathleen Brown: Looking back now, like, oh my gosh, I, I should’ve always been an entrepreneur. Like that’s what I started doing when I was like 11 and 12 years old is building my babysitting empire in town. And, you know, my mom recently unearthed all these paper Excel files, if you will. I have literally all these spreadsheets of all the people I babysat and how many hours and what my hourly rate is and notes, I’d put notes if the kids were bad. Anyway, so I, that was kind of, you know, as a kid, that’s what I did pre-cancer.

I was very, very actively engaged in fundraising for St. Jude starting with the end of treatment as a patient speaker. And then later I was involved in some different fundraisers. They had like radiothons and stuff throughout high school.

But then I got to college and towards the end of my freshman year of college I had seen some, someone had chalked the quad at the University of Illinois and it said something like, “do you love St. Jude? Come to Garner Hall, 7:00 PM, Tuesday,” and they were starting a new collegiate program for St. Jude. And so I went and I ended up meeting my then future boss, Chris Boysen and Dana Pace. And it was two representatives for St. Jude that were just trying to get a fundraiser off the ground. And I, you know, took the lead of that, and then we out-fundraised every other school, like hundreds of schools involved in the Up ’til Dawn program. In the three years that I was there, we raised a few hundred thousand dollars and got hundreds of kids, well, actually no, thousands of people involved in fundraising for St. Jude.

And so that was what I wanted to do, like raise money, plan events. That’s kind of what I, the path that I want to go down. But St. Jude wasn’t hiring when I graduated college or, you know, as I was approaching graduation. And so I got sort of what I thought was the next best thing, and that was in event planning. And I, for anyone listening and not watching, I’m “air quoting” event planning. It turned out to be more of a sales job that was, if you can sell a corporate event like a team building event, or, you know, a corporate picnic or something, then you can work with the operations manager to kind of execute it, basically packing up stuff. And it was the worst. I think the worst job I’ve ever had. I lasted nine months.

But looking back, it led me to my next job, which was in advertising. And it was only because I quit a job and didn’t have a backup plan and I had rent to pay. My coworker from that job said, you should talk to this nice lady. I, you know, me and his girlfriend at the time dog-sat for the boss, and just said she was looking for an assistant. You should just like take this interview because you know, I’m not sure how you’re going to pay rent.

So I took the job and Lisa Meyer ended up becoming one of my first mentors in advertising sales. I had gone to college for advertising and media sales, but I didn’t fully understand that industry at all. So I never realized that was like a viable career, but I ended up staying doing that for a decade. So that was a job at Comcast. I went from there to ABC, merged into a job at ESPN, and then moved back to Chicago.

I sold lots of different mediums. I was very happy doing media sales for a really long time. Very, I wouldn’t say I was fulfilled so much as, I was doing fundraising work on the side, like, you know, running different committees and fundraisers and whatnot, but St. Jude approached me in 2014, again, about a decade into ad sales with a position that was to lead field event fundraising.

So basically overseeing all the different galas and radiothons and all that kind of stuff in the Midwest. So I spent about a year in that role, moved into a corporate development role, which was a much better fit given my background. And so I worked with lots of corporate partners to raise money from their employees and their customers in lots of creative ways. And didn’t think that I was ever going to leave St. Jude or that role until again, these cancer scares led me to, I think, what is my real purpose.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. So I guess at the time that you were still working at St. Jude, buddhi was sort of like an idea or something you were working on, but weren’t, you know, needed that time to develop before you kind of made the decision to like leave your full time corporate job and, and go full-time into running a startup or starting up a startup. And, and that’s a big change, although you said you’ve always been entrepreneurial. How did people in your life react to you leaving your corporate career and saying like, I want to start this startup, I want to put this idea out and make it real?

Kathleen Brown: Interesting. Cause I think a reason why a lot of people don’t take a risk is because they’re, they’re worried about one, you know, how am I going to pay my bills? Or what are people going to think? Or whatever. I was so terrified of what St. Jude was going to think.

When you mentioned it was sort of like you know, nights and weekends or like a side hustle, it was. I didn’t even feel empowered to say out loud, what did I want, what I wanted to build for years, because I didn’t want them to think it was because I loved St. Jude any less or because they weren’t doing a good job or that I wasn’t grateful that they saved my life.

And so I finally got the courage to open up. Like it was just eating me inside. I was working every night and weekend, and I started to realize every time I would go into meetings with, you know, all these different corporate partners and meet all these, you know, constituents, if you will, at events, I was just becoming more and more frustrated with the way things were and like the platitudes and all that kind of stuff. It was almost like the idea of buddhi kept hitting me over the head until I felt like, okay.

My boss at the time, we had a very friendly relationship and I respect the hell out of him. I still do, but he wasn’t my friend. Now he’s my friend. I was terrified to even tell him. But I just got to the point that I said, you know what, if he fires me for telling him that this is something that I want to work on, I’m willing to take that risk. I need to ask his permission that I’m working nights and weekends, and that I maybe spend a few hours every week going to networking events or workshops.

Like there were certain things that were starting to get in the way of my schedule, or it might be like a women in tech event at eight in the morning, where I felt like if I weren’t like on at 9:00 AM and it was maybe 10:15. So I had that conversation with him, just, “Hey, it might not be anything, but I’ve been working on this thing for, I think at that point, seven or eight months, what are your thoughts?” And he’s like, “What would be your goal for it?” And I had said, “well, I would love this to be a full-time thing, like if I could make it work.” So I was kind of bracing for the worst, that I had just told him, “yeah, I want to probably leave St. Jude to do this.” And his answer was “KB, you were born to build this.” And that was the permission I needed.

And then we, you know, we talked through it and I was sobbing in my car having this conversation with him. He was in Memphis. And he said, “no, you are so passionate about this. You talk about this stuff all the time. If not you then who?” So he repeated words that our CEO from St. Jude had said about St. Jude: If not St. Jude then who else is going to invest in research and treatment to support children? So he repeated that back to me, like, “if you don’t build buddhi when you’re this passionate about it, who else is going to do it?”

So the rest is history. I didn’t leave right away. We came up with a transition plan and did not leave them high and dry, but they’re still very dear friends and I love them. It’s just, no one’s really focused in the area that I’m building. It was not a knock towards them.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, well, that is great that you took that risk and, and were honest and open about what you were doing and what your goals were, and that he was supportive in that way. He clearly saw the passion and that you were creating something that didn’t exist at, or no one else was really doing or working on as you said.

Kathleen Brown: Yeah. Yeah. And he’s still the biggest champion checking in all the time and how can I help? And you know, helping share stuff. So. It’s been wonderful. It wasn’t just him. Up to the CEO of St. Jude, everyone has been incredibly supportive in you know, not making me feel guilty that I’m, that I’m working on this now.

Carolyn Kiel: Oh, that’s fantastic. So, you know, you, you we’ve been working on it. You wound up leaving St. Jude and continued to work on and get it ramped up. And I think I understand you were ready to launch in early 2020, I guess right around the time, as we all know, that the pandemic started. So what was that like? And what adjustments did you have to make because of that?

Kathleen Brown: Oh, gosh, I’m having PTSD even thinking about it. So, and not in a bad way, but no, I think anyone that’s been building a business during this time, these past 18, 19 months. It’s just, it’s been a lot. Cause you know, you’re trying to figure out how you could stay afloat.

And and also like now that the world has changed, what does the world need now? And maybe it’s not my business the way that I had originally designed it. So I had already, at that point, worked on buddhi for 14 months, I guess. And that was all like tons of events in the beginning, just doing like surveys and research and development, through, you know, just talking to lots of different people. Then getting to the point that I identified a solution, if you will, that would work and called it buddhi and incorporated it and kind of did all that stuff, put together a business plan, pitch, all that. Raised money, hired a team to build it.

And then yeah, like I said, then we launched February 24th, 2020, and that was just a beta website. And we were at that point testing the target, if you will. Target audience was family and friends. So it was, you know, if you know someone that’s been touched by cancer, invite them to buddhi. You can send them an email or you can send them this healing box of goodies that comes with a handwritten note and an invitation to join.

And then we were really trying to test like, does, does this work? If we, if we invite someone to join, they get an idea of what it is, what it entails, and then they can start to tell us the kinds of things that they want in the marketplace. Well, that was not going to work. In the beginning weeks of COVID, we weren’t even sure how it was spreading. Also the biggest need in the beginning, if you remember, was everyone was afraid to leave our houses, and what was going to give you coronavirus? And we couldn’t get masks. And so I never felt comfortable telling anyone we were live. Celebrating anything at that time would have been completely insensitive and tone deaf.

And so I just was individually touching base with people in our community. And at the time we didn’t have an actual, like physical, digital community online. It was social media and a newsletter list. And so I would touch base with people like one-on-one through direct messages, emails, and just, how are we doing? Anything I can help with?

So we started hosting some like Instagram Live conversations with different like healing practitioners. And very quickly I learned that, you know, the mask thing was the most important thing to immunocompromised individuals. And so I was able to source face masks from a vendor and ordered 500. I crowdfunded for my own network, ordered all these masks.

And then once they arrived, you know, did a handwritten note with, you know, a kind of a postcard about what buddhi was or what we were building. And over 75% of people that got masks got on this wait list. And again, then we would just build the newsletter and build, you know, social, if you will. And it gave us ideas of what do we want to talk about as we’re building the community now?

So I knew we wanted to launch community first. I didn’t realize that I hired the wrong people to build buddhi. And so we started beta testing. They had originally promised we would launch the community by the 4th of July. So, you know, pandemic, I guess, was like mid-March. 4th of July, I was like, okay, in that time, we’re going to build up the content library. We’re going to host these events. And July became the following August. 11 months after their date, the promised by date.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow.

Kathleen Brown: And so, not ideal. I fired them and I had to hire a new tech team, but it’s been a journey, but I think if there’s anything that’s prepared me for, for building, especially in this really unstable time is being a cancer survivor and rolling with the punches and figuring out what needs to get done to keep moving forward.

Carolyn Kiel: Wow. And now, so, yeah, and now you’re in public beta, which is so exciting. So like what kind of early feedback have you gotten from the community members who have been using the site in public beta so far?

Kathleen Brown: Tons. So we’ve gotten lots of topic suggestions, and you know, additional things that they want to chat about that we don’t have content, or we didn’t have events planned for.

And then just general functionalities. So, better sorting the conversation threads, making it easier to respond to someone via like a reaction, like an emoji. Like one of the things people didn’t have the ability to do originally was to edit or delete their comments after they’ve posted them. To be able to tag people in conversations.

And one of the things that we’re working on in the next few weeks is allowing people to customize their profiles. So that like right now you can only see your profile of your account settings, but so that people can get to know other community members.

And we’ve been trying to figure out like, how much do you want to share in that profile? So you know, we’re still trying to figure out what that looks like. Are we just going to add certain like badges or tags? Or have like a bio section? Perhaps you could start updating how you’re feeling with just community members? So we’re trying to figure out how much customization we offer and how much people are comfortable sharing. But it sounds like people want to like get to know their fellow community members better.

And then also we’ve updated notifications. So it’s something we take for granted on existing sites and social media, but that sort of nudge that someone’s responded to your comment. We didn’t have that working initially. And so now you’ll get an email and then when you log onto the site, it shows you notifications and it can take you directly to the conversation thread. So yeah, they might seem like small tweaks, but they’ve been making a really big difference in more people feeling empowered to join these conversations.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, definitely. And the community aspect, is that something where maybe people, cancer thrivers can join the site and literally meet other cancer thrivers that they didn’t know before? Is that something being built in or exists in some way?

Kathleen Brown: Exactly. So right now they’ll join in conversation with them. And like I said, they’ll hopefully soon be able to start seeing their profiles and learning more about them. Because again, we’re trying to preserve people’s anonymity if they want it, because some people are interacting anonymously, they’re more than likely going to have privacy settings. If people can like better get to know them, but some people have been asking for the ability to direct message individual members.

And of course, anything that we’re doing, we do want to poll members. Is this something you want? Because we don’t want to add functionality that’s going to actually create more stress. We’re debating whether or not we connect to social media accounts so that you can have the ability to like follow them and their updates there.

But yeah, so there’s not the ability to connect one-on-one yet. It’s one to many currently. As we figure out, you know, what the majority wants to see.

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah, well, that makes sense. So you know, it’s still so early in the journey for buddhi. What are your long-term goals for the platform?

Kathleen Brown: I mean, ideally I’d love buddhi to be the number one cancer support platform out there, to not only provide that support to the cancer thriver themselves but to their caregivers. We’d like to have more and more resources for the caregivers to be able to, you know, heal their mind and body. Especially in the long run, like we know the toll is very heavy on them as well. It’s just right now, we kind of had to focus on a more narrow target. From there, and this is again like the current roadmap, from there wanting to expand to like family members and close friends that have been impacted because even though you might not be the caregiver to someone. You know, I know in my case, some of my really close friends, aunts and uncles, grandparents also really, really struggled in many ways.

And I think, again, the idea is if how cancer can be an awakening, it could be for you or your loved ones. But again, to reduce that shame and stigma associated with talking about your feelings and identifying ways that you can process and work through them. But I think, I mean, if I’m thinking like, you know, seven, 10 years down the road, if the model of buddhi works to support people in sort of misunderstood communities, people that are impacted by in this case, cancer, how could that apply towards people with MS, infertility, soldiers returning from war, people in recovery? Like, I think there’s a lot of applications for this type of thing. It’s just, we have to start baby steps, but I mean, certainly I live every day knowing it could be my last. And I hate to say that I feel like a ticking time bomb, but in many ways I kind of do.

I feel like I know life is short and I want to make the biggest impact I can in whatever time I have left. So you know, when I want it to be a massive company, it’s because I want to make a massive impact on the world. I mean, I know I have in some ways, but it’s not about me being a billionaire and having a yacht in the Mediterranean. It’s, how can I use my voice and whatever influence I have to make a difference in the world?

Carolyn Kiel: Yeah. Wow. That’s so powerful. And I can see how that can have an application, you know, beyond cancer in the long run and really just be a support platform for a lot of things that people are going through that we just don’t have that support platform for yet. Oh, that is incredible.

So, yeah. Kathleen, thank you so much for being on the show. How can people get in touch to learn more about buddhi or join buddhi? Where should they go for that?

Kathleen Brown: Yeah, so they can go to hibuddhi.com. So it’s spelled H I B U D D H I dot com. You can join in about 30 seconds. It’s completely free. Again, everything we’re building is to serve the community. So we encourage everyone to share feedback, what they like, what they don’t like, what they hate.

And it’s not only the free community within the platform, but we’re hosting weekly events as well, virtual events. And so everything from socials, workshops and panel discussions, again, those are crowdsourced. The community is telling us what they want to learn about and the fun things that they want to do to get to know one another.

And you can also follow our social media. Maybe you just want to kind of see what we’re working on and that’s at hibuddhi as well. H I B U D D H I. But yeah, that’s a great way to reach out, but you can always DM or email us and introduce yourself.

Carolyn Kiel: Fantastic. And I’ll put links to the website and the socials in the show notes so that people can click on it easily from there.

Cool. Yeah, I mean, Kathleen, thanks again for being on my show and, you know, just closing out, is there anything else that you’d like our listeners to know or anything specific that they can help or support you with?

Kathleen Brown: Oh, thank you, Carolyn. No, I mean, I would just say like, you know, it’s okay to not be okay. You know, as the cliche goes. Like there’s so many people struggling. And just, you know, giving each other grace and compassion. Understanding that, you know, just because maybe someone has a scowl on their face or cuts you off in traffic, I always try and think like they might be going through something. I mean, certainly that’s not the first thing that comes to my mind. I might be like, what a jerk! But to always think like, they, yeah, let’s give them grace. They might be going through something. So yeah, nothing else to add, but I appreciate you having me and providing the space to have this conversation, Carolyn.

Carolyn Kiel: Great. It was great to talk with you. And I know my listeners will find a lot of comfort and a lot of utility in this community, if they’ve been going on their own cancer journey or if they are close to someone who has, so thank you so much for sharing your story today.

Kathleen Brown: Thanks Carolyn.

Carolyn Kiel: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help us spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend. Give us a shoutout on your social media or write a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of our episodes on our website and sign up for our free newsletter at www.beyond6seconds.com. Until next time.