From Burnout to Breakthrough: How Amy Perez Launched myDream and Mindful Software

0:00Welcome to Enterprise Radio, the signature show of the Enterprise Podcast Network, featuring some of the most prominent business professionals in the world today. And now your host, Eric Dye. This is Eric Dye and once again welcome to Enterprise Radio, a part of the PN, the Enterprise Podcast Network today on the program. We're speaking with Amy Perez, founder and CEO of My Dream, a platform helping people decoges subconscious dream insights for greater emotional clarity and career alignment. And Amy, we thank you for joining us here today on EPN. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. And you're more than welcome. Amy, good to have you with us, looking forward to hearing from you today. So tell us, let's dive right into this. Give us the backstory on My Dream. What inspired you to create this and what was that spark that took it from an initial idea to an actual platform? It really was a dream to be quite honest. I had a dream when I was working a very high stress job and it really shook me to my core.

1:00It actually ended up giving me the motivation to quit that job because I was so burnt out. And what I realized is that we could build something that helped people turn something as mysterious as a dream into an insight they can actually use in their waking life. I had wondered how many times had I been receiving those similar messages in my dreams and I just wasn't paying attention until it literally hit me with a two by four in a really powerful dream. And I started to understand the history of dream interpretation, how it used to be really revered before we kind of came into the scientific 20th century evolution. But it is something that is famous authors and inventors have used their dreams to create amazing novels, ideas, inventions. And so there's so much power in understanding what our subconscious is processing. And the goal here was to really make the process faster. So I have 15 years of process improvement in my career.

2:02And one of the things that was so frustrating about dream interpretation was the process took so long. It took almost an hour sometimes to just do the journaling and the research and the cross-referencing and figure out what do the symbols mean for you and what is my brain trying to tell me through my images. And when I was dealing with that frustration, I turned to my husband who is actually our co-founder and brilliant software engineer, I said there should be an app for this. And fast forward to 2024, we decided to quit our jobs and build the app because we realized that with the power of AI and my ability to understand how to responsibly and ethically implement AI actually consult for Stanford on that, we were able to build a really powerful tool that leverages AI but also human intelligence with a team of dream experts in order to provide these interpretations to you in seconds so that you can get these kinds of insights without having to do all of that background work and the commitment that it would use to take.

3:04Well, certainly is interesting and not only that, but you took an idea and you made it a reality and you have an actual platform that's pretty awesome and that's motivating no matter what industry one happens to be in or has an idea for. So also walk us through how it actually works in real life if someone is using my dream for the first time, what's the best way for them to dive in and get the absolute most out of it? Absolutely. So you can speak or type your dream in in about eight seconds, get a personalized interpretation that you can then deepen with life context. So essentially we've got a great widget. I use it all the time on the lock screen to go straight to the dream entry screen and just use that voice to text if you like or you can type it in if you're sitting next to somebody you don't want to disturb them. And then there is an option to personalize you can identify your emotions and your symbols and what they mean to you and the apple learn that and gets to know you over time and also pulls any patterns over your dream. So we also have a trend section that you can go and check and see, okay, what's been showing

4:05up for me over the last month, over the last three months in terms of my emotions, in terms of recurring patterns or themes or symbols. So it's really easy. It's available on the app store and you can download it and try it out for free. And we may we we spent a solid year making sure that it was extremely intuitive with a lot of user testing before actually getting it out. I'd be curious, Amy, tell us when you were building my dream, who are you picturing as your ideal user and who's getting the most value out of it once they actually jump on the platform? Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Obviously, we all dream, right? There's actually an interesting study that just came out that 81% of Americans believe their dreams have deeper meaning and one in four have actually made a decision based on a dream. So really, it could be used for anyone. But what I would say the people that are most likely to get a lot out of it are people that are already in this space of curiosity of self-awareness. You're already doing journaling. You're already in wellness. You're doing maybe some meditations, some therapy. Just working on that personal growth, you're going to get so much out of this because it

5:08really will provide that feedback loop that you maybe have been missing. It also really helps strengthen your intuition. If you are someone that's been wanting to get into understanding yourself better, that is a really great entry point into trusting your intuition, into trusting what your dreams are telling you. Working through what those lessons are, those clues are, those signals are. We just have amazing user stories. One of our users, her name is Jenny. She reached out to us because this was so powerful for her. She's 50 years old. She has three kids in high school. The others are out of the house. She had a dream that both she and her sister were pregnant. She woke up in that dream also. Her sister was ready to give birth, but Jenny was not. She woke up panicked thinking, I can't be pregnant. I'm about to get the last kid out of the house. It was not what at all she had in her life plan. She plugged it into the My Dream app.

6:08My dream helped her understand that pregnancy actually often can represent new beginnings or opportunities. It helped her realize that the dream was actually about a new business opportunity that her sister had recently proposed. Jenny was really feeling like she had to say yes to the opportunity, but what the dream and the interpretation made her realize was her subconscious was saying, I really want to say no. She was, she's someone that would always go with the norm and do what she felt she had to do, but in this case, she was able to say no to her sister and she felt like it was the right choice for her and she knew that in her core. It was so profound to her that she actually reached out and told us about it. That's just an amazing example. Those messages are there for us. We just have to listen. How about that? That is certainly a good example. I'm sure you have quite a few more you could share. Thanks for sharing that one in particular. We're speaking with Amy Perez, founder and CEO of My Dream app platform, helping people decode subconscious dream insights for greater emotional clarity and career alignment.

7:13She's joined us here today on Enterprise Radio, a part of the PN, the enterprise podcast network, not continuing on Amy behind every great platform. Obviously, as a solid team, what kind of expertise and backgrounds make up the crew behind My Dream to bring all this together? Excellent question. So AI is definitely a part of the experience, but the methodology has been shaped by seven dream experts with more than 180 years of combined experience. We did not want to build a generic chatbot that simply produces a dream interpretation. We really wanted the methodology behind the technology to be informed by people who spent decades studying and working with dreams. We have a young Ian psychiatrist on the team. We have a couple of psychologists, one that's actually a dream researcher. We have three members of the International Association for the Study of Dream. One of them is also a lucid dreaming specialist. And we also have a master hypnotist that is able to understand the connection of the subconscious on another level. So it really is designed by this group of dream experts.

8:14They are key stakeholders. We're making sure that their information and their clinical expertise is brought into the app. We also, I mentioned my husband, he is our CTO. He has over 20 years of experience in IT and software engineering. And then we also have a whole entire team software team as well as UX designers that are supporting the platform. The real need of it though, I have to give full credit as do as our dream experts. I run the team as CEO and my background is 15 years of project and program management in government. And I still work for Stanford. I mentioned this a little bit earlier that I am currently a consultant for Stanford and helping them implement AI responsibly and ethically. And that's why it was so important for me that we have these dream experts working alongside with us. Because there's so much we're putting into AI and we're not necessarily trusting that the, we can't trust that the information is accurate unless a human has actually reviewed it. So that's a really important part to this whole team and the product that we've built.

9:18I've got a hand it to you. You've done very, very well. I'm bringing a team of expertise like you have and that is certainly a challenge and it sounds like you've really nailed that one well. Good stuff. Now looking down the road here, what's getting you most excited right now? That'd be curious. What's next? Also all now rise and for my dream when it comes to growth or new features share any information on that if you would. Yeah. Oh, I'm so excited about what we're building. We're building a much more deeper dream companion. And so one of our biggest upcoming features is actually a chatbot that will help users drive deeper into their dreams through an ongoing conversation and be able to ask follow up questions and explore those symbols or emotions more connect the dream or close to what's happening in their waking lives. We're also building a lot more support around sleep and dream recall because there's definitely a lot of people that are interested, but they struggle to remember their dreams and a lot of times that that comes from not having a good sleep as well. So we're building those pieces out in meditations and sleep support to help the users wind down,

10:21sleep more intentionally and create those conditions that can make dreams easier to remember. So really the bigger vision is to support the entire dream journey from preparing to sleep to remembering a dream, interpreting and exploring what it may mean in waking life. Amy, we thank you for joining us here today. Certainly appreciate you're introducing my dream to the audience and certainly impressive what you have accomplished here. For our listeners who want to check it out for themselves, where's the best place for them to learn more and connect with you as well? I would love that. We are on the Apple and Google Play stores. It's my dream, Colin dream interpretation is the is our app. If you'd like to check out more information as well, we are at www.mydream.io and we have articles on there. We've got videos on there so you can certainly learn a lot more and then there's obviously links to the app stores there if you'd like to try it. It is free to try. We are really trying to make sure that everyone has access and then if it's a good fit for you, it's a really inexpensive subscription to continue.

11:22So we hope you'll try it. Once again, it is my dream.io and of course you can pick up that same link within the show notes of this broadcast at any time for your convenience. They all the best and thanks again for joining us here today on Enterprise Radio. Thank you so much Eric. I had a great time. And I did as well and thanks again. We've been speaking with Amy Perez, the founder and CEO of my dream, a platform helping people to code, subconscious dream and size for greater emotional clarity and career alignment. And again, for all the details, visit my dream dot. I know and that wraps up another episode of Enterprise Radio. We do thank you for tuning in today. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a second to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app under Enterprise Podcast Network. It helps other business leaders also find the show and head on over to epodcastnetwork.com to tap into show notes, links and resources. I've mentioned in today's episode, I'm your host Eric Dye wishing you continued success and until next time, take care.