Spreading smiles across America
For a small tech startup, it’s like getting invited to the prince’s ball.
The Smile Epidemic, a fledgling company based in Waterloo’s Accelerator Centre, is bound for Austin, Texas, where they’ll tell the digital world their story at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival.
Their goal? No big deal, just trying to build “the happiest community on earth,” as they like to put it.
The company will start by using a coveted invite to present to the heart of internet culture at the festival, where thousands from the tech sector are converging to find investors, employees, ideas and customers.
To get there, seven people from the Smile crew will cram into a rented RV and drive south from Waterloo, making stops at a shelter for foster kids, homes for families of sick children and an inner-city school in New Orleans.
Along the way, they plan to “smile bomb” crowded American streets, buy breakfast for strangers and do other random acts to make people smile – including visiting New Orleans’ hard-hit Ninth Ward, still recovering from hurricane Katrina.
The road trip to Texas represents a pivotal moment in the young life of the startup.
“This is our big push. We’re putting ourselves out to the world. We’re committed to doing this. And we’re going to find a way to do it,” said Jim Moss, the company’s co-founder.
“It’s the ultimate exposure for social media companies.”
The Smile Epidemic took a simple concept – sharing gratitude through digital media – and turned it into a business with a charitable mandate. Along the way, they’ve caught the attention of the Oprah Winfrey Network and the administration of Wilfrid Laurier University, who are using their software to gauge their own students’ happiness.
One of their most popular applications works like this: take a digital picture of yourself holding a note about something that makes you happy, and share it with the Smile Epidemic community. They have an app that puts “sticky notes” over people’s faces, where users can type whatever they’re grateful for.
Users can pledge to do that every day for 30 days, after which the Smile Epidemic says their outlook on life will be dramatically altered. It’s a simple tool, but it works, they say.
The psychology behind it is based on the idea that about half of people’s sense of optimism comes from their genetics, but the other half is flexible. We can train ourselves to be more positive, Moss said.
“A lot of people think we are who we are. But you can teach an old dog new tricks,” he said. “The problem for many people is that once you become an adult, we start to train optimism out of us.”
Its root is in the old concept of gratitude journals, updated for the modern era of social media. Moss and his chief education officer Greg Evans, who has a PhD in positive psychology, will tell that story at the South by Southwest festival on March 12.
The Smile Epidemic say they’ve expanded the basic concept to make money, by working as consultants to institutions and corporations. They say they can use the power of positive psychology to motivate employees, improve customer satisfaction, decrease sick days and increase productivity.
They licensed software originally designed for health and safety training and tailored it to their psychology training. The goal is that firms will pay for this, which will fund their non-profit work, such as visiting schools and speaking to kids.
“The people who stand to benefit financially, the companies, pay for it. The people who stand to benefit in real life, the families and schools and non-profits, they get to use it all for free,” Moss said.
The startup is the creation of Moss and his wife, Jennifer, who know a thing or two about gratitude. In September 2009, while living in California, Moss was struck by an autoimmune disorder that took away the use of his legs.
He thought he’d never walk again. His 10-year career as a professional lacrosse player was over, and Jennifer was worried she’d lose her partner and father of her children, too.
“We went through a pivotal moment in our lives. I was faced with two children and worrying he wouldn’t be around,” she said. “I was eight and a half months pregnant, facing a future without my husband.”
Moss started a blog, chronicling the things that he was grateful for, and he found it therapeutic. He slowly recovered, and he and his wife were permanently changed by the experience.
The young family moved to Waterloo where Moss started studying psychology, focusing on how our brains can be trained to be more positive. His blog grew into a social sharing project, and the company’s early roots took off from there.
“We want to create a movement of gratitude and happiness,” Jennifer said.
The Smile Epidemic may be the happiest little tech firm in the country. Moss calls himself the “chief happiness officer.” Their tech guy even built a program that locks him out of his laptop if he doesn’t smile genuinely every 20 minutes.
But this isn’t just feel-good, rose-coloured glasses stuff. They point to the science behind what they do – and research that shows it actually works.
“Everybody deserves to have the tools to be as happy as they can be, and we want everyone to have access to that,” Moss said. “And we can reach them with technology in a way we couldn’t 10 or 15 years ago.”