In 2023, Tayla Cannon moved from Australia to the United States to take a job in a city she had never seen before.
“No family, no friends, just a fresh start,” she told TechCrunch. Suffering from chronic back pain, she began working in physical therapy, considering it might help change the lives of others. However, the traditional model of physical therapy never quite ignited the spark in her.
She switched to interventional cardiology, but became much more disillusioned with the physical rehabilitation model, “its localized, reactive and volume-based nature,” she said.
Meanwhile, in her spare time, she became a content creator, sharing her perspective on “proactive” and “holistic” ways to get rid of pain online.
It took on a lifetime of its own.
Now he has more 130,000 followers on InstagramAND a company called Athletic Rebuild, which provides rehabilitation and performance training for athletes, and currently a platform called Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant mentoring app designed to help rehabilitation professionals run their very own businesses online; The premiere is scheduled for early next yr.
“I wasn’t trying to build a company; I just put my head on the Internet and helped people rethink what care could look like.”
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Cannon and her work caught the attention of Slow Ventures, which on Tuesday announced it had invested $1.1 million in a seed round. She is one of the first creators to receive a check from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund, which goals to support content creators and online influencers.
Cannon said she didn’t have a plan when she began sharing her thoughts on social media in 2024 and then decided to make it her career. “There was no strategy behind it, no action plan and certainly no business model,” she said. He credits his success with what most content creators do – staying authentic and sharing unfiltered but authentic thoughts.
However, growing a brand on social media is not without its challenges. Her social media presence, and subsequently brand, was growing rapidly, which was good, but also a problem. It was immediately faced with the need to understand its business logic, consumer awareness and content strategy to reach latest audiences. “None of them are taught in health care,” she continued. “We are trained to help people, not build brands.”
The turning point got here when she realized she was a bottleneck in her own business. “I couldn’t keep scaling something that depended solely on me. I had to build something that could grow without me,” she said, adding that she eventually hired people to help with her projects.
She also refined her strategy by moving away from simply talking about what was broken in the rehab world and began working on solutions to help fix it. Rebuildr is intended to represent “a complete shift from localized, reactive care to a proactive, holistic mode,” Cannon said, “connecting consumer solutions, physicians, education and software to deliver it all at scale.”
She was introduced to the Slow Ventures team by a friend who invited her to one of the company’s events in Austin. “I had no intention of raising capital,” she said. “I wasn’t even casting. I wasn’t even preparing a deck.” Still, she connected with Megan Lightcap, an investor in Slow, and told her about what she was building with Rebuildr.
“The conversation started something,” Cannon said, adding that Slow helped her “imagine a version of Rebuilder that is even bigger” than she imagined.
Other personal trainer software available includes TrainHeroic, Trainerize, and Everfit. Rudder hopes her product Rebuildr will fundamentally change the rehabilitation industry.
“I want to provide access to high-quality rehabilitation anywhere in the world, without geographical restrictions, insurance or 30-minute visits,” she said.