A Charlotte startup wants its customers to use their solution as little as possible.
Built on years of behavioral scientific research, Joyntly helps managers learn and apply essential soft leadership skills through weekly assessments specifically tailored to their needs.
Think of a leadership skills coach, but instead of taking a generic approach, they know exactly what you need to improve on—and you don’t need to take time away from your job to take courses or lessons, a key differentiator of Joyntly’s solution in a highly competitive market.
“From executive coaches to leadership seminars, there are tons of providers out there,” explained CEO and Co-Founder Kate Frear. “Counterintuitively, our differentiator is that we don’t want people to spend a lot of time using our software. We don’t want our solution to take people away from their job.”
Frear’s years of human behavioral experience validates this solution. Before studying psychology in college and getting her PhD in organizational science, she had been working in the service industry since she was 15. Since, she has “always been fascinated by behavior… and how teams work.”
Frear continued, “For many years before starting Joyntly, I was a professor and scholar of organizational behavior, which is essentially the behavioral science for the workplace. Something about what makes teams work, how people resolve conflict, how do personality clashes cause people to work better or worse? It’s all super fascinating to me.”
Through the years of observing and teaching these soft skills, Frear said eventually one starts to recognize patterns and can even start to predict behavior, or when behavioral issues become obvious. Eventually, she said she realized the issues can be prevented.
Instead of going into what she described as a passive solution (using online lessons or teaching these skills to people through courses), Frear decided to go about putting a scalable solution directly into the hands of people who would benefit.
Turning experience into Joyntly
Teaming up with a couple of her good friends, including her first-year college roommate, Frear started her Joyntly journey, taking and codifying behavioral science into algorithms that will adapt alongside an organization’s leader so that the leader can in turn improve culture and performance.
“I could have become… a leadership coach or facilitator, but honestly, I was thinking bigger than that,” Frear said. “There are 100 million people who are employed in the U.S., and… a single leader in a single business needs help with leading teams and dealing with behavioral issues.
“What people may not realize is that the individual issues that they’re dealing with in their own jobs and their own teams are actually the same issues that other leaders and other teams are dealing with too.”
Knowing this, Joyntly takes a habit-based approach. The idea is for the platform to be offered from human resources offices to leaders, who take assessments that identify their strongest and weakest habits.
Then, instead of telling the leader to take a given course or read a given article about how to improve one skill, Joyntly provides personalized goals or tasks that leaders can take directly into their workplace. A leader would then check off that task and add more specific details to what more they can work on throughout the week.
“We want users to keep coming back, obviously. But for each time that they engage with their software, we want it to be very quick,” Frear explained. “Leaders will spend less than 5 to 10 minutes each week on our actual platform, but we will sustain them. We will keep them coming back 50 weeks out of the year to work with repetitive behavior instead of relying on passive content.”
Frear adeed that these behavioral issues are often identified when workers are promoted to managerial positions because of their functional or technical proficiency, but lack the actual leadership expertise.
“The skills that you need to lead that team are a lot different than the skills that you need to execute the work,” she said. “Because people get promoted based on their technical skills, once they change positions, they’re almost at a loss.”
Meeting the market
Currently, Joyntly’s target market is in the production and services industries. But Frear said she is open to conversations and connections to anyone in the Charlotte or greater North Carolina market who is looking to improve leader or manager behavior.
“We’ve had customers in financial and retail services and public service, who are selling to either human resources or their learning/development departments, and, so far, we’ve had really good engagement,” Frear said.
“‘It just fits seamlessly into our day,’ they said, which is music to our ears. We just want it to be easy and embedded as part of their product.”
Since incorporating in 2022 and launching their first MVP in the first quarter of 2025, Joyntly has fruitfully engaged with the support and recognition structures throughout the statewide ecosystem, most notably by way of earning an NC IDEA MICRO grant in 2023 and a SEED grant in May of this year.
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Startup: Joyntly
Founder: Kate Frear
Founded: 2022
Team size: 5
Location: Charlotte
Website: joyntly.com
Funding: Friends & family; non-dilutive grants
Frear explained that beyond solidifying her own personal roots in Charlotte, she plans to keep the company based in that area because of the support and culture coming from the entrepreneur ecosystems both there and in the Triangle.
Frear said that Joyntly is currently iterating their MVP based on user and customer feedback to achieve product-market fit. Overall, she expressed excitement to continue the journey.
“I have this intrinsic motivation for this because, to me, it’s cool and fun to see people put it in action, and I want to see more people put it in action because that’s just really personally rewarding to me to see true motivation accomplish improvement in your business.”
