LOCATION: Surrey, UK
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Dutch, English, German and French
CURRENT ROLES:
Non-executive director, MyHealthChecked PLC
Investor
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLE: Founder, Pregnancy+
BOARDWAVE ROLE: Mentor
Amber Vodegel is a storyteller. Not only is she a published children’s book author, she even dreams in chapters. In fact, a dream she starts one night will be picked up the following evening and continued. “It started about 10 or 15 years ago. Every night, just before I drift off to sleep, I recall my last dream, allowing me to pick up where I left off,” Vodegel says. She has no idea why this happens and she doesn’t know anyone else who dreams in this way. But then again, Vodegel is quite unique.
The entrepreneur, who founded one of the world’s biggest health apps, Pregnancy+ which she sold to Philips, grew up in the Netherlands. Her parents were creative and bohemian, abandoning their lives in the Dutch capital for the countryside. “They were part of a liberal intellectual exodus of people from Amsterdam who envisioned a rural life in the countryside. They dreamed of a vegetable patch and of baking their own bread,” Vodegel says. And it doesn’t get much more bucolic or quintessentially Dutch than the little village they ended up in.
“Our village had a population of 1,000 people and our house was located next to a windmill,” she says. It was also “very Calvinistic”, which meant that some of the more free-thinking families who had relocated from cities didn’t entirely fit in. “My school was very small, with only eight children in my class. I often felt like an outsider,” she says.
Despite this, her early years were idyllic. Vodegel had a lot of freedom, cycling to school and roaming free both in nature and at home, which was a suitably radical open-plan living space designed by her father. “There were almost no doors in our house, which was very unusual at the time. My dad painted the house ochre yellow, and laid black Norwegian slate floors throughout. The house was filled with art, plants, and wicker hanging chairs, all in true 1970s hippie style,” she says.
Vodegel was encouraged to express herself creatively. She remembers drawing huge pictures on the slate floor and building many dens in the house. Before things got out of hand, her father introduced one of the few rules she had as a child: no more than “seven” dens were allowed in the house at any one time.
On one occasion, Vodegel even persuaded her parents to let her ride her friend’s pony inside the house. Just for fun, a loop around the dining table. Such a free childhood meant that she grew up thinking that “anything was possible”. But, like many stories, the good times didn’t last and an unhappy chapter began.
Surviving tough times
“My dad suffered two severe brain injuries. The first was from a road accident, and the second when he contracted meningitis. Both times he ended up in a coma.”
The injuries led to a serious mental-health condition, and her father was hospitalised. He lost his job, and the relationshipwith her mother broke down. The couple divorced when Vodegel was 10. Her mother suffered from depression, and they moved into a council house where the family relied on benefits until Vodegel’s mother found a job. “She had never built a career herself, so she had to start from the ground up. When she started working full-time, my brother and I had to look after ourselves during the day. In the evenings, we tried to cheer my mother up in the best ways possible,” she explains. “My dad lived in the same village, but there were long periods when we couldn’t see him. It was very uncomfortable at times.”
Vodegel learned a lot about self-sufficiency during that time,to the point where delegation proved hard in her early career. “It took me a very long time to realise that I can rely on other people and I don’t need to do everything on my own,” she says.
But Vodegel also learned the importance of comedy. “My little brother had a great sense of humour and together we triedto make the most of the situation we were in. We discovered that if you add a bit of comedy to a sad situation, you can still have a great time, no matter what! Ninety-five per cent of any problem is how you deal with it,” she says. “Ultimately, I always felt my parents loved me and believed in me, which gave me the confidence I needed in life.”
She admits that not seeing much of her father for many of her teenage years derailed her for a long time. Watching her mum struggle financially also had a real impact on what she chose to study at university. Rather than the art or design course she had originally favoured, she opted for finance and economics.
The beauty of business
Entrepreneurship can be its own form of creativity though, and building businesses was always part of Vodegel’s make-up. In fact, working as a make-up artist for fashion shows was her first business opportunity, which she did in her spare time while at university. She later monetised these skills by running courses on how to apply beauty products. “I would put an advert in the local newspaper for a make-up course and when I had 25 participants interested, I’d book a conference room at a hotel and run a class,” she says.
In her mid-twenties, Vodegel set up a modelling agency with a friend, but she didn’t enjoy what she describes as a “fickle” industry. It was also around this time that Vodegel published her first two titles, both children’s books about maths, which she wrote with her mum in an attempt to bring humour and fun to a subject that many children find unenjoyable.
Vodegel’s life, however, hit a plot twist during her first marriage to a fellow entrepreneur. “He had signed personal liabilities for his companies in Germany and, two months after we got married, we received a phone call from his business partner to say that there was an ‘issue’.” She was 26 years old and 2.5 million guilders (€1.3 million) in debt. “I never told my parents,” she says.
The pair worked hard to dispute the claims and pay off the remaining debt that was owed rather than declare bankruptcy. But it took a toll on their relationship. “I borrowed the last 20,000 guilders from my dad so we could negotiate another bank deal. The day I paid my dad back the money was the day I felt the marriage was over. Simply too much had happened.”
With another chapter closed, Vodegel – now aged 32 and living in the UK – had to “start all over again”. And it wasn’t just her personal life that needed rebuilding. She had decided to move out of finance and into digital advertising and the burgeoning industry of online ads. “I knew nothing about cookies, pixels and tracking ads, but I absolutely loved advertising,” she says. The CEO of the agency she was working at became an important mentor to her.
“He really taught me how to run a business and not to be scared to try things out. He encouraged many people in the company to set up their own businesses on the side while we were still working there – many of whom now run their own successful companies.”
This business freedom meant that Vodegel could start dabbling in the world of apps in 2009. First, she toyed with the idea of a diet app before eventually pivoting to pregnancy having noticed how profitable and under-represented they were. And, in 2012, she launched Pregnancy+. It was still very much a side hustle for her, as she didn’t want to quit her day job at the advertising agency until she was sure she could make enough money for her family to be secure. Even though it was a second job, she still gave it her all.
Vodegel found herself obsessing over customers and, at the beginning, she answered every single service ticket herself. “I was working until 11pm most evenings, while still working at the advertising agency. In the end,we had more than 80,000 customer service tickets and 100,000 app store reviews to respond to every year,” she says. Despite overwhelming numbers, Vodegel continued reading reviews. “I wanted to know exactly what people liked and what they didn’t,” she says. “Stressing over your customers is key.”
She bootstrapped the business and all the money she made was ploughed back into the app to constantly improve its content, graphics and code. “We did this for five years and, in the end, we reached 10 million users. I then sold the company to Philips,” she says. Today, Pregnancy+ has 150 million users in more than 100 countries, with two million daily active users. “With it came a lot of responsibility”, she says. “If you advise two million women a day not to consume alcohol during pregnancy, it leads to so many more healthy babies and mothers.”
Hiring the best people was also a crucial factor in achieving success. “I couldn’t have built a successful app without the support and collaboration of an excellent team. In the end, you are only as good as the people you hire.”
The next chapter
Vodegel admits that part of her wants a slower pace of life to indulge in her love of playing tennis and build out her non-exec portfolio. But she also believes that there is one more business in her. Characteristically, she is dreaming both big and radical: “I once built the biggest pregnancy app, so let’s try to build the biggest period app in the world,” she says.
One of her motivations is her dissatisfaction with the current period apps on the market, due to their lack of data protection and because they require expensive subscriptions, which disproportionately impacts women of lower socioeconomic levels. “Menstrual health should not sit behind a pay wall,” she says.
She wants to demystify the subject and educate girls and women on a subject that remains taboo. “Children as young as eight have periods, and a large percentage struggle to afford period products. Why is there no accessible education? There need to be questions like: What level of period pain is normal? What is a heavy flow? People just don’t talk about it.”
Vodegel’s app will be free-to-use but she also aims to reinvent the way that it stores sensitive health data. A completely new architecture will support on-device AI, without the need to store women’s health data on external cloud servers. “Everyone says that ‘data is money’, so collect as much as possible and retarget it or resell it. But this solution is not about money. This is about building trust and moral ambition,” she says. “If we don’t collect and store any user data, we totally eliminate privacy concerns and security risks. Plus, running an app without any cloud servers is also very sustainable and cost-effective.”
“One of the best things about setting up a tech-for-good company, and bootstrapping it, is the incredible amount of support I have received. Many successful entrepreneurs and leaders are backing my social venture, eager to be part of the movement and give back. A lot of these connections were through Boardwave. I believe the era of profiting from women’s health is coming to an end; we need to adopt a more altruistic approach. We should channel profits back to those who need it most in our society, rather than further inflating shareholder returns for a few. That’s true ‘moral ambition.’”
She hopes she can continue storytelling at Boardwave. “I love the openness and support of the network. Becoming a member was the best decision I made last year. Mentoring other companies is very rewarding. I love how it has created an environment where senior leaders are not embarrassed to ask questions that make them feel vulnerable.”
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for business success?
1. Always focus on the long term.
2. Obsess over your customers.
3. Hire the best people.
What is the best advice you’ve been given?
Time is the only thing you can’t buy, so use it wisely.
Can you tell us something surprising about yourself?
I’m really bad at remembering people’s names, no matter how hard I try. But I can always remember the stories they told me (or the clothes they wore).
If you hadn’t become an entrepreneur, what career would you have pursued?
I have always wanted to be a maths teacher. Rethinking the way the subject is taught and making it more enjoyable for children.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?
Is a dishwasher, a hairdryer or an electric toothbrush classified as tech? If so, I would put those at the top of my list. I love ChatGPT but doing the dishes with dripping wet hair and unbrushed teeth – maybe not!
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