Olympian Derval O’Rourke hopes to corner SME market with wellbeing app

Olympian turned wellness entrepreneur Derval O’Rourke wants to corner the market with her new workplace wellbeing app for SMEs, as her new venture builds on the success of her online community at Derval.ie.

The Cork Olympic athlete and former athletics World Champion has announced the launch of the “Saol” app with co-founder Greg O’Gorman, which will focus on providing active wellbeing solutions for small to medium businesses.

Ms O’Rourke said the new app builds on the success of Derval.ie, an online subscription-based fitness and wellbeing platform that has grown a community of 15,000 over the past five years.

“Pre-Covid we had spent two years telling people you could do a lot online for health and wellbeing, and then during Covid everyone was doing stuff. I was getting a lot of corporates asking me would I do some work in that space,” she said.

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“I was doing Zoom talks, bits and pieces, but actually what we were doing on our service provision on Derval.ie, I felt loads of it was really applicable to the workplace wellbeing market,” she added.

After 18 months of development, Saol has officially launched, providing on-demand and live offerings for members, including fitness and wellbeing programmes, “under 15 minutes” fitness classes for people in a hurry, cook-along classes, on-demand mindfulness meditations, and a community forum to connect with other users.

Ms O’Rourke said the community aspect of the app was particularly important, to help those who may be hybrid working to feel more connected to colleagues.

“I didn’t want it to feel like there was nobody there. We wanted a platform that puts people being connected at the middle of it, so the community and the connection and the chat piece is really important,” she said.

“The SME market is something that’s always appealed to me, because I have a small to medium enterprise, I am one of those people. There’s about 1.1 million people employed by 309,000 SMEs in Ireland. If you’re an SME and you’re looking for a solution for your workplace wellbeing, I wanted us to be a really simple solution that also didn’t feel too prohibitive cost wise,” she said.

In what she admits has become a very busy space in the past three years with online fitness offerings exploding during Covid, Ms O’Rourke said she had “ambitious goals” for Saol, as 320 companies had already registered interest in joining the app before the launch.