with your whole heart.
The state of work today
Researchers in 2025 have a name for the dominant experience of corporate employment: quiet cracking. Not quiet quitting — that implied a deliberate choice. Quiet cracking is what happens when the mismatch between who someone is and what they do accumulates over years into a slow psychological collapse.
Every disengaged forty-two-year-old was once a seventeen-year-old who made a career decision without the tools to make it well.
The exposure gap
Students are making life-defining decisions on almost zero information.
They know job titles. They know salary ranges. They've absorbed social expectations. None of this tells them what Tuesday afternoon actually feels like — or whether they would do it heartily.
This failure begins upstream and compounds for decades.
The Exposure Gap
Students have almost no honest access to what real careers look and feel like before committing to them. Job shadowing is ad hoc — dependent on who you know.
The Self-Knowledge Gap
Most students confuse social prestige with personal reward. They mistake tolerance for passion. Nobody helps them interrogate what they would actually do heartily.
The Downstream Cost
Career regret touches a majority of professionals by midlife. The disengagement data is the long-term consequence of decisions made at seventeen without adequate support.
Nothing Addresses the Root
Engagement programs treat symptoms. Job boards facilitate transactions. Career quizzes produce personality types. Nobody is working on the upstream decision itself.
The solution
Find the work you'd do
with your whole heart.
Heartily is a career discovery and placement platform that helps students find the work they would do heartily — before they commit to a path — and then connects them to it.
Honest, unglamourized day-in-the-life content across every career. The question the content always answers: would you do this heartily?
A longitudinal self-discovery engine built on behavioral signals, not a quiz. Surfaces cognitive style, reward triggers, appetite for difficulty — over weeks, not a session.
Transparent career maps — salary trajectory, wellness data, decision gates, practitioner voices. Editorially framed. Never just a credential checklist.
The framing beneath everything
Every career worth having
is a craft.
We use the word “practice” for the careers we respect most — and then forget what it means. A practice is something you enter imperfectly and improve at over time. You don’t practice a career by studying it. You practice it by doing it.
The differentiator
The self-discovery engine.
Not a quiz. A conversation that develops over weeks. The platform learns from how students engage — what they return to, skip, share — not just what they explicitly answer.
When a student filters only for low stress, high salary — Heartily pushes back. Not preachy. A specific, honest observation. The intervention is the soul of the product.
The platform experience
A product that helps students look honestly.
Medicine & Surgery · 7–12 year pathway
General Surgeon
Would you do this heartily?
"I'd do it again. But the training years are harder than anyone tells you, and the paperwork never gets shorter." — Dr. M., 8 yrs post-residency · verified practitioner
Your profile is 34% complete — keep exploring to unlock deeper insights.
You've spent most time on careers with high autonomy and above-average pay — but several have low meaning scores. Some of the careers you've been skipping past have meaning scores in the top 10%. Want to see what they look like on a Tuesday?
Business model
Three constituents.
One flywheel.
Students engage freely. Schools subscribe. Employers pay for a pre-qualified pipeline. Each layer makes the next more valuable.
The moment Heartily costs a student anything, it ceases to be the platform it intends to be. Free access drives the scale that makes everything else valuable.
Career guidance tools, interest dashboards, curriculum alignment. Annual contracts, low churn, embedded in guidance department workflow.
Pre-qualified students who chose the field with open eyes. Not a cold applicant pool. For employers who understand the true cost of a bad hire.
DOL, Lumina, JPMorgan Chase workforce initiatives actively funding this category. Bridge capital and institutional credibility signal.
Market timing
The conditions have been building for a decade. They are converging now.
The college consensus is cracking. Employer degree requirements are falling. Policy funding is expanding. And the technology to build what Heartily requires is finally mature.
Student debt crisis
The college-for-everyone consensus is cracking. ROI is questioned across all fields, not just trades.
Universal skills gap
Every sector reports credentials without practical instinct. The mismatch is structural, not generational.
New collar movement
Google, IBM, Apple have dropped degree requirements. Skills-based hiring is now mainstream.
Policy momentum
DOL apprenticeship funding and state earn-and-learn mandates are looking for platforms to attach to.
Technology ready
Behavioral AI and marketplace matching are mature. This was not buildable at this quality five years ago.
The window is open. It will not stay open indefinitely.
First-mover advantage in the student discovery layer is meaningful — if captured in the next 2–3 years.
Brand identity
Built to earn trust
across three audiences.
Honest over inspiring
The brand does not sell dreams. It signals that this is a place where real — sometimes uncomfortable — information lives.
Warm without being soft
The platform asks students to be vulnerable. The brand must earn that trust without sacrificing seriousness.
Premium without exclusivity
For every student, regardless of background. The brand signals quality without signaling "not for you."
The ask
Raising $1.5M Seed.
To prove the hook, build the flywheel, and establish the data moat that no late entrant can replicate.
Are you working hard?
Or heartily working?
When the work itself is the reward — when effort doesn’t feel like effort because the thing you’re doing is the thing you were made to do.
hello@heartily.work · heartily.work