Follow the Beat: Urska Srsen’s Path to Heart-Driven Success

Follow the Beat: Urska Srsen’s Path to Heart-Driven Success

by Cristina Deptula

Urska Srsen is the co-founder and CCO of Bellabeat Inc., a Silicon Valley company building tech-powered wellness products for women. The Bellabeat team is behind the Leaf health tracking jewelry for women, named by Digital Trends back in 2015 as one of the best new mobile products, and Spring, the first smart water bottle powered by AI.

“Our core mission at Bellabeat is to inspire women to be healthier so that they can be successful at other things. I believe it’s really important to have a healthy life and work balance. It’s okay to take care of yourself first, because if you’re falling apart, you won’t be able to do your job.”

Bellabeat helps women (and some FTM transgenders) track their workouts and menstrual cycles, get ideas for healthy eating, sleep and relax with guided meditations, and follow their pregnancies and hear their babies’ heartbeats.

Unlike other fitness-tracking or meditation apps, Bella Beat uniquely integrates tracking users’ ovulation and menstrual cycles into its health recommendations. So users can receive extra help with stress or customized workout suggestions that take into account how hormones are affecting them.

Srsen’s passion for women’s health goes back a long way. Her mother was an obstetrician and gynecologist heading the perinatology department at Slovenia’s University Clinical Center.

According to Srsen, women, who do a lot of the world’s caregiving, often don’t receive the care they themselves need. And women tend to be slower to adopt new technologies, so she intentionally streamlined the interface of Bellabeat and the information it provides.

“Women … tend to be focused more on everything else than themselves. Jobs come first, relationships come first, kids come first, and they themselves come last. My advice to [women] is that it’s okay to be selfish sometimes!”

Srsen also studied design and intends for her products to fit seamlessly into a woman’s look and personal style. Built from recycled wood and other ecofriendly materials, Bella Beat’s products are inspired by nature.

‘I wanted to create technology specially designed to track the health of women but also to pay attention to the aesthetics of the product. I wanted to design technology that was not just useful but also beautiful, something women would actually be happy to wear and use.’

She believes there will be an increasing consumer market for ‘smart jewelry’ in the future.

“I think it’s clear that smart jewelry will become even smarter while more integrated into our style – either with versatility or by transforming into subtle additions, becoming a seamlessly integrated part of our everyday wear.”

In 2016 Urska was chosen by Forbes as an ambassador of the technology field for their first European 30 under 30 lists. She was nominated as the best female entrepreneur in Croatia in 2016 by Veuve Clicquot and has also received the Jabolko Navdiha (Apple of Inspiration) award from the President of the Republic of Slovenia.

When asked for advice she’d share with other up-and-coming women entrepreneurs, she had this to say:

The most important lesson was that your unique idea is the most valuable thing about your product and that you should never compromise on the things that you wholeheartedly believe in and make you different from the rest.

Accomplishing that means sticking to your understanding of what the market needs rather than following what’s already being done just because others seem to be successful with existing ideas. Also, harnessing the skills and knowledge you have to bring your idea to life.

If we had designed in a more conventional way, we might not have been as successful. So while we saw that there was a gap in the market, what we did also went back to the skills we had at that time.

Also, she reminds new founders to make sure they have a solid business plan in place.

For hardware companies, in the past couple of years, sustainability and profitability have become really important. Founders really have to find business models that make sense financially - that’s the first thing you really have to evaluate.

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