Mission
Better’s mission is to research, develop, and share the best ways people can improve their lives and the world. We believe that nearly every aspect of life and the world can be made better—like preventing poor air quality, poor savings strategies, and poor educational practices from stealing years of our lives—and that it is our moral imperative to discover and promote ways to make things better to protect people from the harms caused by poor practices and systems.
Vision
Despite the existence of many high-impact ways to make people’s lives and the world better, only a small fraction of people and key decision makers are aware of them. We aren’t aware of any organization that publicly shares an organized collection of such methods so that people don’t need to chance upon and validate each method independently. We envision creating a free resource that anyone in the world can access in order to see how they can best improve their lives, their community, and the world.
We will ensure that our research is applied by advising people and organizations that we expect will positively impact the world and directly launching ventures and initiatives that have the potential to change the world.
Strategy
Our strategy is to help people better themselves and the world. We believe that by helping everyone become more good and effective, we can improve people's lives on an individual level and coordinate people to take collective action on global challenges.
There is significant overlap between making people, organizations, or society as a whole better. For example, helping people improve their mental health is also something that organizations invest in via employee wellness programs to improve performance, and also something that societies invest in to directly help their citizens and reduce societal harms like crime and unemployment. We believe that researching how to improve any one of these three areas leads to concrete paths forward into how to improve the other two areas.
Our current strategy is to focus on bettering people in order to:
- Spread our message broadly with relevant content that helps people
- Monetize by providing valuable content, products, and services to people
- Create social impact by improving people's lives and multiplying the impact of changemakers
- Change the world by encouraging people to take collective action—such as purchasing, funding, and voting for things that both better their lives and make the world a better place
We are focusing on people because:
- Content targeted towards people is generally much more widely read
- Researching how to improve people's lives and developing associated content/products/services is much easier to monetize compared to improving society, and starting with people is a common strategy for an organization to gain customer understanding, traction, and market adoption before it expands to B2B in the future
- Improving people's lives is perceived as socially beneficial and has an easily measurable impact
- People are the ultimate promoters of and beneficiaries of social change
We believe a compelling element of our starting strategy is that it enables growth and monetization while having a direct impact on individuals and broader global issues. We will leverage our work on bettering people to further understand and expand into bettering organizations and society.
Our starting strategy has a similar theory of change to the nascent field of Life Improvement Science (LIS). Besides LIS, our starting focus is related to the evidence-based parts of the fields of self-improvement, self-help, personal growth, personal development, personal effectiveness, and related fields.