BNRG Update from Q4, 2024

Balancing B2B and B2C Sales at the Start of 2025

6 min readJan 3, 2025

Welcome to 2025! I hope everyone had a good end of year. Hard to believe another year has passed, but certainly it has been an event-filled year.

2024 was an encouraging year with mixed results. As always, we are iterating and approaching anew based on what was learned.

Before the new year of work officially begins on Monday, let me share a quick set of highlights including an update on purchasing BNRG tokens.

Budget 2024 Changed the Conversation

Perhaps the most encouraging news from 2024 is that Singapore’s Budget 2024 conversation. Singapore is spending $3.5 Billion over the coming years in support of ageing. Clearly, the government set a clear priority on the ageing society and workforce. Organizations seem to have heard the message.

This immediately changed the conversation from, and I say this to illustrate, “that’s interesting work” to “what are you doing that could help us?”

The work started small but was well received.

Webinars reached an estimated 2000+ people, including major global banks.
New tools, such as a Brain Health Scorecard, were built and successfully implemented
The SkillsFuture course Train Your Brain: How to Improve Brain Health and Thrive After 45 completed three successful cohorts and is running again in 2025 — enrollments doubled.
Spoke to standing-room-only crowds at the Media Corp event careers event

So what’s the challenging news? Well, indeed we did face some challenges.

Extend My Runway was a finalist for the Institute of Adult Learning Innovation grant, but sadly we were not chosen as a winner. No grant was awarded.
B2B sales remain a work in progress.

Missing out on the grant was particularly disappointing as that would have seen the full AI development through to the end. So, we retool and go again.

Before We Retool…. the Customer-Funded Business Model

Sales efforts focused on supporting and enabling Singapore’s ageing workforce, and also on European sales.

Pitched to larger organizations and MNCs in the following sectors: finance, healthcare, insurance, education, technology and big pharma.
European sales focused on technology, insurance sales, and talent/manpower groups.
We received inquiries from South Africa with preliminary discussions, too.

We currently have two organizations that are continuing to discuss offering the AI nudging platform into their ageing workforce initiatives. This will resume somewhere around CNY 2025.

The big insight is that many organizations are spending money on pushing information to employees — and we all know that information does not change behavior. So, let’s translate that lesson.

Organizations are aware they need to adapt to an ageing workforce but are currently spending money on “minimalist” interventions that frankly hold precious little hope of changing behaviours and unlocking the opportunity to age.

That leaves EMR here — we do not have a library of use cases to support sales and illustrate the approach (making it easier for buyers to “see” what we offer).

If we want to move organizations, we need to demonstrate that the approach works. Hence, the need to retool for 2025 and go again.

Retooling by adding a B2C Effort alongside the B2B Effort

Where organizations are wondering, a second lesson we learned in 2024 is that individuals are looking for help or solutions right now. Currently, individuals appear to have more urgency than organizations that are still finding a way forward.

Starting on January 1, 2025, we have launched a B2C initiative to attract individual users, build a community, and begin gathering the success cases on an individual level.

As stated differently, we simply flip the script

2024 saw us push B2B first with upsell to B2C products such as coaching or executive classes.
2025 is selling B2C communities and solutions so that we can build a library of cases that will later this year support B2B sales.

It’s just a flipped marketing model. No major tech changes. The reinforcement learning approach is showing impressive results in healthcare, and we remain committed to building a Large Behaviour Model (LBL) that is predictive rather than a Large Language Model (LLM).

Some of the newer initiatives we have launched include:

Thrive After 45! is a community and coaching programme that helps individuals unlock peak brain performance in just 90 days.
Thrive After 45 book. Interviews are underway and a New York Times journalist has come on board to help write a great story.
Man Morning, Singapore. Connecting one-on-one with men 45+ who want something more, are transitioning, or seeking a place to simply discuss what we are celebrating and navigating
Podcasts (forthcoming). Dr. Michael will host a podcast sponsored by a company out of Australia. He will also produce a podcast series for Thrive After 45 and Extend My Runway.
Thrive After 45! Thought leadership on properties such as LinkedIn, Substack and Instagram.

By helping individuals, we believe we can more quickly provide the kinds of evidence that support the B2B sales of reinforcement learning technology. And perhaps more importantly, we can help more people sooner.

Implications for BNRG and Token Buyback Programme

Again, the model and the goal remain the same. The AI will use the blockchain to offer token payments and rewards. Nothing here has changed in the technology design (shifts are in the go-to-market approach).

This design will contribute to demand.

We can launch the buyback programme as soon as we secure an AI sale.

Everything starts with a sale, and not just an in-kind exchange of services we have used to get the platform this far along
Buyback will then start with the individual private sale investors who stepped up first.
Second-round buyback then moves to the token owners who did not engage in a private sale.
The date will be announced, buybacks will be on a first-come, first-served basis, and all buybacks will require that BNRG tokens be transferred.
Tokens will be bought back at a higher rate than what you paid (exact amount TBD at the time of announcement).

If you were unable to remove your BNRG tokens from Kick, then please direct your questions to the Kick community. There are one again, off-again rumours that Kick is not dead. I personally have no insight on this matter.

All of the people I worked with at Kick are gone.

But to wrap this up, the buyback programme begins after the sale of AI services and not before. This is a customer funded business model, and customer funding is the first step.

We had hoped to have such a sale completed in Q4, but we are still in conversation. With a bit of effort, hopefully, we can start this in Q1 2025.

The Road Ahead

I sense no high-level changes in SG’s interest in and support for supporting and enabling both an ageing workforce and society. We need to focus on opening the right door for launching the proof-of-concept projects inside an organization and building the cases that demonstrate success.

A little traction can go a long way.

We will continue to sell B2B, but are adding B2C marketing as a means to more quickly demonstrate some success.

To that end, you should expect to see some live virtual events for individuals announced before Valentine’s Day.

Wishing you all a happy 2025 as the EMR project continues.