Day: October 25, 2025

• Mel Hoeppner left her job last year after trying to juggle work and two new health conditions.
• After taking time to reflect, she decided to invest in herself and started her own health brand.
• Hoeppner said she’s found inner happiness that she thinks is hard to achieve in a corporate setting.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mel Hoeppner, a 40-year-old CEO and founder of The Healing Habit, based in Tennessee. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Last year, building my career and staying focused on my profession mattered the most to me. I didn’t have time for really anything else.

I’m used to powering through things. I’m a military spouse and I’m raising kids, but over the course of several months, I noticed my health was declining in ways that didn’t feel like typical burnout.

I found out I was suffering from the effects of two undiagnosed autoimmune conditions: rheumatoid arthritis and Hashimoto’s disease. Juggling everything wasn’t working, and I realized I needed to take time off to focus on my health.

I’ve always wanted to put all the work I’ve been putting toward other people’s dreams into my own, but getting sick was the real catalyst for leaving my job and starting my own brand.

Work was my identity for so long. Walking away came with a major feeling of uncertainty.

After I left my job last October, I had a knee-jerk reaction to tell myself that maybe it was just that job. Perhaps I needed to go back and find another job, and then everything would be OK.

I spent nearly three months exploring creative outlets and recovering. I went to yoga, which I had never done before, and painted a lot; I ended up painting every inch of my house. I also started doing a ton of yard work and just processing things I had put off for years.

Then I read this book called “Anticancer” about how we all have inflammation in our bodies, but there are things that you can do to decrease that inflammation and live a healthier lifestyle. I drew a lot of inspiration from this book, and then I began thinking about my own diagnosis.

After my break from working, I launched my own health brand

When I was getting my diagnosis, I had to spend an incredible amount of time doing my own research and really understanding what an inflammatory disease is. I started making this drink blend with ingredients like turmeric, cardamom, and cinnamon, all of which are rich in antioxidants.

I wanted to invest in helping people in a bigger way and do something good at scale. I decided to take a chance and develop a drink blend called The Healing Habit, which supports a healthy inflammatory response.

I began by testing the product in my kitchen and ultimately reached out to a manufacturer with the ingredients that I wanted to use. The manufacturer helped tweak it and determine the optimal ratios for the flavor profile.

Being my own boss is the scariest but most rewarding thing

It’s so scary being my own boss because at the end of the day, nobody’s coming to save me. It’s also the most incredible and rewarding thing that I’ve ever done in my professional career.

I had to dig deep within myself to find the confidence to trust my vision. When I reached that point, it filled me with an inner happiness that I think is hard to find in a corporate setting.

The fun thing about developing a brand is that I play every role. I’m the content creator, the social media coordinator, the email copywriter, the finance person, the CEO — all of it. My day-to-day life is always different, but it doesn’t feel like work anymore because of how passionate I’ve become.

My advice for preparing for a transitional period of life

There’s definitely a big financial investment in all of this. I had set aside some money, knowing that I wanted to do something of my own one day. I don’t have investors. I didn’t use Kickstarter. This was all me at the end of the day.

My dad always told me to have contingency and backup plans in life. Follow your dreams, but don’t do it blindly or without a plan. Ten years ago, my husband and I got into real estate investing. We started small and thought about how to get ourselves to a point of freedom. Not everyone’s in the same position as I am now, but one thing you do have and can use is time.

If you have a full-time job, but you want to make a plan for pursuing some other dream that you have, outline your plan and what it will take to achieve it, and then start working on it little by little.

I don’t regret leaving corporate at all because I’ve redefined success for myself

Success is now taking my kids to school in the morning and being able to follow my passion, it’s spending time with friends, family, and my husband, and learning new things.

When I think about whether I’ll ever return to corporate work, I never say never. I’ve put in the work for the conventional 9-to-5, and I don’t regret a bit of it. However, that’s not the path I foresee for myself and the future I’m creating.

I believe that with age comes wisdom, and now that I’m 40, I’m getting my affairs in order and making a plan for moving forward, trusting myself, and committing to the future I want to create.

Do you have a career pivot story to share? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

• Amar Saurabh created a custom GPT to aid his job search, landing a role at PayPal.
• He found ChatGPT inadequate for personalized job applications, prompting the custom tool.
• The custom GPT improved interview responses and helped negotiate his PayPal job offer.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amar Saurabh, a product manager at PayPal in his 30s, based in San Mateo, California. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I spent the last five years of my career at Meta and later at TikTok as a product manager.

While I enjoyed the high-growth, fast-paced culture at TikTok, I was looking to work for a more established company with stability in the US, so I started applying to other jobs in April.

During the first two months of filling out job applications, I only landed two or three interviews. After not finding much help from ChatGPT, I came up with the idea of creating a custom GPT.

It took less than two hours to create, and the tool helped me land my lead product manager job at PayPal. If I needed to find another job, I’d absolutely use it again.

ChatGPT kept making mistakes

At the start of my job hunt, I reached out to recruiters on LinkedIn, but personalizing each message took a lot of time. I tried using ChatGPT to draft messages, but it kept making mistakes.

I realized that, on ChatGPT, I’m not just chatting about my job search; I’m also chatting about recipe ideas, workout plans, budgeting, and travel itineraries. When ChatGPT would give me an answer, it would often get mixed up or provide generic answers that weren’t customized to me.

It also kept asking me to reupload my résumé or share more details about myself. That’s when I came up with the idea of building a custom GPT, a specialized AI assistant that performs a specific task, exclusively for my job search.

Building a custom GPT was super easy. Here’s how I did it.

You can access custom GPTs through ChatGPT’s free tier, though a paid subscription allows you to upload more documents. I use the paid version, which costs $20 a month.

I clicked on “custom GPT” and named it “PM job search advisor.” I shared my résumé, a link to my LinkedIn profile, and additional details about the projects I’ve worked on. Then I provided context that I was looking for a senior-level product management position.

It probably took me about an hour and a half to fully prep it with my initial input before it was ready to work for me.

My GPT writes messages, customizes my résumé, and helps with interview prep

Next, I started the outreach stage by asking my custom GPT to draft customized messages to recruiters or other members of the team I was applying to.

I could ask it to write a LinkedIn connection request with a character limit of 300, or I could request a longer, email-style message. I even asked my GPT to find me the right people to reach out to for a role and the email address to contact them at. When I applied for jobs, I had it refine my résumé to fit the job description.

It also helped me with interview prep. Before an interview, I would input the job description, tell it the date of my job interview, and ask, “What should I highlight from my experience? What questions should I expect from the recruiter?”

It saved me hours that would’ve been spent trying to remember everything I’ve done in my career.

My custom GPT makes mistakes like a human

There were a couple of times when it would forget certain details about me, and I’d have to remind it, “Hey, you have all my information. Do you remember this conversation we had?”

It would come back saying something like “oh yeah, sorry for not taking that into account,” and it would. It was like talking to a person. Overall, my custom GPT worked really well for me.

The number of applications I filled out didn’t change as I implemented my custom GPT, but what did change was the number of responses and interviews I got. In two months, I landed at least 7 interviews with companies like Reddit, Intuit, and PayPal.

I officially quit TikTok and signed papers to start my new job at PayPal

My GPT helped me write my custom email to the PayPal recruiter and prepared me for each round of interviews. When I did get the job offer, I even used it to help me negotiate my salary.

If I were in the job market in the future, I’d use this method again. The benefits of a custom GPT are confounding and will only get better as more information is added. My next step would be to build out my GPT to have agentic capabilities, meaning it could apply to jobs and answer application questions for me.

Do you have a story to share about landing a job in a unique or unconventional way? If so, please reach out to the reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com.

• Reddit has sued Perplexity and data scrapers, accusing them of illegally stealing its data.
• In the lawsuit, Reddit detailed a trap that it says Perplexity fell straight into.
• It was the digital equivalent of a “marked bill,” Reddit said in its lawsuit.

Employees at Reddit knew something was wrong.

Perplexity — the $20 billion artificial intelligence company that competes with OpenAI and Google — had agreed to follow Reddit’s instructions, blocking it from scraping content from the site, according to a lawsuit Reddit filed Wednesday.

But, the lawsuit said, Perplexity continued to cite Reddit in its AI-generated answers — more than ever. The CEO of another AI company even speculated that Perplexity and Reddit secretly struck a content licensing deal.

“The increase was so dramatic that an outside observer hypothesized that the increase was due to Perplexity entering a licensing deal with Reddit and thereby obtaining full access to Reddit’s data,” Reddit’s lawsuit said.

“In truth, there is no license between Perplexity and Reddit,” the lawsuit said, adding that it was the result of “a scheme by Perplexity to obtain Reddit’s data through the circumvention of the technological measures protecting Reddit data.”

So Reddit set a trap. The company created a test post that could only be crawled by Google’s search engine, according to the lawsuit. While Google has a content-licensing deal with Reddit, Perplexity does not.

It was the digital equivalent of a “marked bill,” Reddit’s lawsuit said. According to the lawsuit, the only way Perplexity would be able to get the data in the test post is if it bypassed Reddit’s guardrails using Google’s search engine page results, or SERPS.

If the content from the post was ingested by Perplexity through Google, Reddit would know, according to the lawsuit.

A few hours after it set the trap, Reddit got its answer.

“Within hours, queries to Perplexity’s ‘answer engine’ produced the contents of that test post,” the lawsuit says. “The only way that Perplexity could have obtained that Reddit content and then used it in its ‘answer engine’ is if it and/or its Co-Defendants scraped Google SERPs for that Reddit content and Perplexity then quickly incorporated that data.”

Reddit described the test in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, against Perplexity and three data-scraping companies: Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and SerpApi. Reddit alleged the data-scraping companies may have taken its posts without permission and sold them to Perplexity.

Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer told Business Insider in response to the lawsuit that the company “will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.”

Perplexity said in a Reddit post after the lawsuit was filed that it “does not train AI models on content.”

A representative for SerpApi said the company plans to “vigorously defend ourselves in court, while Oxylabs’ chief governance and strategy officer, Denas Grybauskas, said the company was “shocked and disappointed.”

“Oxylabs has always been and will continue to be a pioneer and an industry leader in public data collection, and it will not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations,” Grybauskas said.

AWMProxy, identified in Reddit’s lawsuit as a former Russian botnet, could not be reached for comment.

Reddit’s trap resembles one set up by internet infrastructure company Cloudflare. In an August blog post, the company said it set up web pages with code that instructed Perplexity not to crawl those sites’ content. It found that Perplexity’s crawlers went to those websites anyway.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince compared Perplexity to “North Korean hackers” for the behavior. Reddit cited the characterization in its lawsuit.

“Some supposedly ‘reputable’ AI companies act more like North Korean hackers,” Matthew Prince wrote on X in August. “Time to name, shame, and hard block them.”

Cloudflare did not respond to a request for comment.

• Whole Foods is opening more small-format Daily Shop stores.
• Business Insider visited the newest location, which opened on Thursday in Arlington, Virginia.
• The store seemed to fix one issue that faced Whole Foods’ last small-store attempt.

Whole Foods is getting in on the small grocery store trend.

On Thursday, the Amazon-owned chain expanded its Whole Foods Market Daily Shop concept with the first location outside New York City. The store is located across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, in Arlington, Virginia — right around the corner from Amazon’s HQ2.

At about 10,000 square feet, this Daily Shop location is about a quarter of the size of a normal Whole Foods store. And, as the name implies, Amazon’s goal isn’t really to offer the store’s patrons everything they might need for their weekly grocery haul.

“If you want a quick lunch, need some ingredients on your way home from work, or you’re stopping in for a meal to go ahead of a flight, we’re ready to serve you,” store team leader Jose Gomez said in a statement about Thursday’s opening.

A Whole Foods spokesperson said that Daily Shop offers a similar product selection to regular Whole Foods stores, “but you won’t see things like a hot bar or full-service meat and seafood cases that you’d see in our traditional, larger store formats.”

“Each category will have a smaller selection, but every category is still represented with various options and price points for the customer,” the spokesperson said.

The Daily Shop format is designed for dense urban areas, Amazon said when it introduced the concept last year. Other smaller-format supermarkets, such as Aldi and Grocery Outlet, have been expanding rapidly in the US.

I headed to the latest Daily Shop location on opening day to see what shopping there is like. Here’s what I found.

This Whole Foods Daily Shop store is located in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia.

This space housed an Amazon Fresh location before it closed last year. The area around it includes several apartment and condominium complexes, a Metro stop, one of DC’s airports, and one of the major freeways leading into and out of Washington, DC.

Amazon has a big presence in Arlington.

Amazon selected this part of Arlington as the location for its HQ2 in 2018. Since then, the company has opened offices and other facilities in the area, such as this AWS Skills Center.

Daily Shop isn’t Whole Foods’ first attempt at a smaller store.

Whole Foods used to operate small stores under the name Whole Foods 365. This chain focused on the company’s store-brand products and prepared foods. The stores were aimed at younger, price-focused consumers.

The company shuttered the stores in 2019.

Daily Shop seems to avoid the mistakes that 365 made.

While it’s also a small-format grocery store, Daily Shop avoids some of the mistakes that Whole Foods made with its 365 locations, said Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst and editor of the website Supermarket Guru.

The 365 stores carried mainly store-brand products to compete with other grocery chains on prices, Lempert said. “365 was just searching for a way to get the Kroger shopper to come to the store,” he said.

Lempert, who has visited other Daily Shop stores, said that the new stores carry items at multiple price points and are more focused on convenience than price. On my visit, for example, I spotted store-brand items as well as fancy French cheeses.

It helps that Amazon has cut prices on many items at all Whole Foods stores since it acquired the chain in 2017, he said.

“I think the Daily Shop store is back to food and really understanding the consumer,” he said.

A Whole Foods spokesperson said the format is meant to be quick and convenient, bringing stores closer to some customers and extending the company’s reach into surrounding neighborhoods.

“This format is designed to provide customers a quick, convenient shopping experience with easier access to the fresh, high-quality offerings they expect from Whole Foods Market,” the Whole Foods spokesperson said. “These stores bring Whole Foods Market closer to existing customers, while extending the company’s reach to others in surrounding neighborhoods.”

Whole Foods’ focus on ingredients and food quality could be seen around the store.

This sign, a reference to Whole Foods’ quality standards, appeared above the prepared food department.

I found multiple ready-to-eat products, from these tequila lime tortilla chips…

I picked up a bag of these tortilla chips. The tequila lime flavoring was tasty, though they needed more of it.

…to fresh pizza.

I’ve enjoyed Whole Foods’ pizza bar at other locations, so I was happy to see it at Daily Shop.

Daily Shop also has specials to draw in Prime members.

This Friday-only discount on tiramisu and tres leches cake was for members of Amazon Prime.

The store had a decent selection of store- and name-brand products.

While 365 products were throughout the store, I usually saw at least one name-brand equivalent, whether I was looking at breakfast cereal or toothpaste. That supports Lempert’s point that Daily Shop isn’t as focused on cheap groceries as its small-format predecessor was.

Despite the stores’ small size, there was also a decent selection of fresh food.

Bananas are a staple at virtually every grocery store, though if you wanted one or two, you might be better off getting them for free down the street at one of Amazon’s community banana stands.

There was also this return point for Amazon purchases.

Many Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh locations let Amazon customers make returns at their stores, and this Whole Foods Daily Shop location was no exception.

With a few items in my hands, I headed toward the checkouts.

I headed for one of the open self-checkouts, though there was at least one regular checkout staffed by a person if I had wanted that.

The store wasn’t as busy as I worried it might be on opening day, so I didn’t have to wait in line to pay.

Checking out was easy, especially with just a few items.

The checkout area was small, likely a reflection of this format’s focus on quick trips.

My shopping bag reminded me again of Whole Foods’ quality standards.

Whole Foods has a list of about 300 ingredients that it doesn’t allow in any of the food it sells, from foie gras to some food colorings. The shopping bag I got at checkout had dozens of them printed right on it.

Overall, it was a good shopping experience.

Daily Shop seems to live up to Whole Foods’ promises. It’s not meant to replace a larger grocery store, but it’s a reasonable option if you need a few ingredients for a recipe or want something easy to heat up for dinner on the way home from work.

This Daily Shop store has competition on both fronts, though, with several restaurants on the block, and a Costco and a full-size Whole Foods about a 10-minute walk away.

That will be part of the challenge for these urban stores: Cities usually have lots of easy, quick food options, and Daily Shop will need to stand out in a crowd.

Do you have a story idea to share about Whole Foods? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com.