The opportunity to fundamentally impact users and create deep engagement while improving mental health doesn’t come by often. When it does it makes you pause and take a moment to learn more. Our journey with HaikuJAM began 4 years ago when Dhru, the founder and CEO spoke about a game that was born out of a personal failure that he had encountered. The game had organically grown into a vibrant community in India and he was moving from London to build it out.

HaikuJAM is a social writing game where strangers come together to create 3-line poems around a variety of topics. The app took inspiration from a Japanese style poetry called ‘haiku’, which captures the essence of a moment in three lines. The HaikuJAM app adopts this brevity and combines collaboration with clever gamification to make it simple for anyone to express themselves on any topic. All you have to do is write a few words and the community takes over. The initial thought is taken forward by two random people and a JAM, that often makes the writers and readers pause and reflect, is born. Over the past 4 years writers from 163 countries have created 65MM lines in the game. Over 60% of the users are content creators, which speaks to the deep value that each user gains from actively engaging with the game.

A study by Örebro University suggests HaikuJAM’s ability to enable the expression of inner thoughts combined with community collaboration improves the mental well-being of its users. This is in stark comparison to the mentally depleting compulsive behavior that the “Likes” and “Hearts” chasing social networks have driven. HaikuJAM is a safe and positive way to express feelings and engage with likeminded people.

Using machine learning, data science and AI, HaikuJAM is able to understand the various moods of the writer, how they react to different topics and insights into how they feel about different situations, brands, or topics.

The company took these insights a step further and recently launched INSPO, the world’s fastest consumer research tool (in private beta; launch in 2020). INSPO allows businesses to learn what Gen Z and Millennials really feel about certain topics. A few interesting insights from the platform are:

- Sleep-cations are preferred to adventure when it comes to holiday

- The brand most associated with ice-cream is Netflix

- An unexplored narrative around car ownership is the desire to help parents with activities, like grocery shopping and hospital trips

Businesses have traditionally relied on slow, expensive, retrospective focus groups to understand their target users. INSPO enables businesses to more quickly and cost effectively tap into the subconscious of their target group in real-time and at scale. The insights are actionable inspiration points that can help brands build better products and tell better stories. The INSPO private beta is already inspiring Baskin Robbins, Tinder, Barbie, Nivea Men, Dentsu to name a few.

Understanding your feelings, or that of potential customers, is central to making connections. Dhru and the team at HaikuJAM have figured this out and built a truly unique game and insight platform that we are thrilled to be investing in. We look forward to scaling the business and learning more about ourselves and the world around us.