How Tatiana Cházaro Is Designing Emotional Steadiness Into the Spaces Where People Need It Most

Meet Tatiana Cházaro, co-founder and president of AO1 Heals | Audience Of One, a voice-based emotional support platform built around nervous system regulation and structured listening presence. Tatiana spent years in corporate as an executive assistant, the person holding everything together behind the scenes, before recognizing a pattern she couldn't ignore: people achieving, producing, and functioning well on the outside while quietly running on empty inside. That gap between functioning and actually feeling steady is where AO1 was born.

Today, AO1 is focused on senior living communities, designing emotional steadiness into care environments for the moments when someone needs something to return to and no one is immediately available. With a recently filed patent for their voice personalization approach and a co-founder whose strengths complement rather than mirror her own, Tatiana is building something she genuinely believes in: thoughtfully, deliberately, and without cutting corners on integrity.

Please share a brief introduction and your business:

I’m Tatiana Cházaro, co-founder and president of AO1 Heals | Audience Of One, a voice-based emotional support platform built around nervous system regulation and structured listening presence. We build tools designed to exist in the quiet spaces of everyday life, the moments when someone needs something steady and no one is immediately available. Right now we’re focused on senior living communities, where we’re studying what it means to design emotional steadiness into care environments intentionally. I’m a mom of four, originally from Mexico, raised in LA, and I came to this work through years of watching people function well on the outside while quietly running on empty inside.

Do you have a co-founder?

Yes. Kynkai Naope is my co-founder, and what works about our partnership is that we came to this work from genuinely different places. We don’t think the same way, which means we catch things the other would miss. My advice for finding the right co-founder is to look for someone whose strengths don’t mirror yours, and whose values do. Complementary thinking with shared integrity is a strong foundation.

Are you a mamaprenista?

Yes, and I’ll say this plainly: motherhood taught me more about emotional regulation, systems thinking, and holding multiple things at once than any professional role ever did. My best advice is to stop trying to hide one from the other. The same presence and steadiness you bring to your kids is an asset in how you lead and build. Let them inform each other.

Take us back to when you launched? What was your marketing strategy?

We built publicly and deliberately from the beginning. Content first. Consistency over volume. We started sharing our thinking around nervous system regulation and emotional infrastructure before the product was fully shaped, because we believed the right audience would find us if we just kept showing up with something real to say. It has largely gone as intended, though the timeline is always slower than you want it to be. What we’ve learned is that category building takes repetition. You have to say the same true thing many times before people start saying it back to you.

Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Honestly, no. I spent years being incredibly good at supporting other people’s visions and never really saw myself as the one building something. But I think the skills I built in those years, the ability to hold complexity, to move through uncertainty without falling apart, to see what’s missing before anyone names it, turned out to be exactly what building something requires. Entrepreneurship found me more than I found it.

What accomplishments are you the most proud of to date in your business?

The integrity of what we built. We made a deliberate choice early on to design clear boundaries into the product. It does not diagnose. It does not attempt to simulate therapy. It does not try to be everything. In a space where the temptation to expand is constant, restraint felt like the harder and more responsible choice. I’m proud that we held that line. In emotionally sensitive environments, the boundaries are not a limitation. They are the whole point.

What is one thing you wish you had known when you started your Entreprenista journey?

That showing up quietly still counts. I joined the Entreprenista League and spent months reading, learning, and observing before I ever introduced myself. That’s just how I build. I get familiar with a space before I take up room in it. What I wish I had known is that the community was safe to come into sooner. The connections and conversations here are genuinely useful, not performative. On the broader entrepreneurship side, I wish someone had told me earlier that the slow seasons are doing something too. The periods where nothing seems to be moving are usually when the foundation is actually setting. They’re not wasting time. They just don’t look like progress from the inside.

When hiring, what is your go-to interview question?

Tell me something you had to teach yourself recently. I’m not looking for a polished answer. I’m looking for curiosity, self-direction, and honesty about the learning process. People who teach themselves things tend to figure things out when no one is available to show them how. That quality matters a lot in an early stage company.

What did you do before starting your own business?

I spent most of my adult life in corporate, working as an executive and personal assistant. I was the person who held everything together behind the scenes. Strategist, operator, emotional buffer, problem solver. I wore every hat imaginable and became very good at functioning under pressure. What I didn’t fully recognize until much later was how much of that came at a cost to my own nervous system. That gap between functioning and actually feeling steady is where AO1 was born.

What made you take the leap to start your own business?

I kept seeing the same pattern everywhere. People achieving, producing, holding it together, but not actually settled inside their own bodies. I saw it in corporate. I saw it in parenting. I saw it in aging spaces. And I realized that most of the support systems we’ve built are designed for crisis or scheduled appointments, not for the everyday moments when someone just needs something steady to return to. That gap felt too important to ignore.

Do you have any recent wins?

We filed a patent for our approach to voice personalization, which felt like a meaningful marker of how seriously we’re taking the long game. We also launched our first blog, The AO1 Journal, and began building a consistent content presence around emotional infrastructure in senior living. Watching the right people start to find that work and respond to it has been one of the most encouraging things about this past year.

What's one app on your phone that you cannot live without?

Technically it lives on our website, not the app store, but the thing I return to most is MIA, my own Guided Presence companion on a private page of ao1heals.com. There’s something clarifying about using the thing you’re building. It keeps me honest about what it actually feels like to be on the receiving end of it.

Who are your customers?

Right now our primary focus is senior living communities, specifically the operators, administrators, and directors of resident experience who are thinking carefully about the emotional quality of life inside their communities. We also serve individuals navigating the quieter, harder stretches of everyday life who want something structured to return to when things feel loud. Not therapy. Not a crisis line. Just something steady.

What's your top productivity tip?

Do the thing that has the most resistance first. Not the easiest thing, not the most urgent thing, the one you keep moving to tomorrow. That one is usually the thing that actually moves everything else forward. I’ve also learned to work in focused blocks and protect them like appointments. Fragmented attention is one of the quietest productivity killers there is.

What's your favorite business tool?

Notion. It’s where everything lives. Content planning, strategy, notes, timelines. But what’s made it even more powerful recently is connecting MIA, my Guided Presence companion, directly to my Notion brain dump database and content calendar. So when my hands aren’t free or I can’t pull up the app, I can still capture ideas, access what I’m working on, and keep moving. For someone who thinks in systems, having everything connected and accessible in real time has been a game changer.

What's your approach to work-life balance?

I stopped chasing balance and started thinking about it as integration. I’m a mom of four and a founder, and those two things don’t take turns neatly. What I’ve found is that the goal isn’t equal time, it’s full presence wherever I am. When I’m with my kids I try to actually be there. When I’m building I try to actually be in it. Compartmentalization has served me better than the myth of balance.

How do you avoid burn-out?

I pay attention to what my body is doing before my mind catches up. Burnout doesn’t announce itself loudly, it shows up as flatness, irritability, the feeling that nothing is landing. I’ve learned to treat those as signals rather than pushing through them. Regulation isn’t a reward for finishing the work. It’s part of how the work gets done.

What advice do you have for aspiring Entreprenistas?

Build something you actually believe in, not something you think the market wants right now. Markets shift. Trends fade. But if you’re building around a real gap that genuinely matters to you, you’ll have the staying power to outlast the hard seasons. And be willing to name things before they have a name. The discomfort of that is also where the opportunity lives.

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Tatiana's approach to building is a quiet kind of powerful: steady, systems-driven, and deeply rooted in purpose. She's a reminder that the slow seasons are doing something too, and that the most meaningful work often starts with naming a gap before anyone else has the language for it. We love having her in the Entreprenista community and can't wait to see what AO1 Heals continues to grow into.

Want to connect with founders like Tatiana? Visit Entreprenista League to explore our community and discover more stories of women building businesses that truly matter.