“If you spend a dollar with us on a subscription, Apple gets a third, the teachers get a third, and we get a third,” Plowman says. Plus, there’s a long line-up for each dollar of revenue that does come in. And despite the 18 million users and 15,000 new users arriving daily, managing 5,000 music tracks, 45,000 talks and mediations in 50 languages, building the app, and managing the community all mean that the company has not yet hit break-even. Insight Timer, Plowman told me in a rare moment of transparency for a startup, costs $1,000,000/month to operate. But it’s also the sort of scruple that many (most?) in the startup community and growth marketing community would quickly forget or set aside. “Because we’re in the kind of the mindfulness space, we’re in the mental health space, you know, it’s not right that companies are billing people that they know don’t want to be billed, right?” “This to me is a real problem,” Plowman says. Normal even, for growth marketers.īut certainly also with a degree of moral hazard. Result: the company stopped sending that email. And annual membership renewals also get marked with an email warning of the refreshed charge on your credit card because, as Plowman says, “we don’t want people on our platform as subscribers who don’t want to be subscribers.”Ī competitor, Plowman says, found that when people were emailed about their subscriptions renewing, some fraction immediately unsubscribed. The free seven-day trial, for instance, comes with no fewer than four emails throughout the week, each with a big unsubscribe button so you won’t accidentally pay for a membership that you don’t want. And, of course, precisely what an online sales pitch might say.īut rather than spamming its community to join the paid tier, Insight Timer bends over backwards to not sell. Listen to the interview behind this story in the TechFirst podcast :Ĭhristopher Plowman, CEO of Insight Timer Christopher Plowmanĥ0% off happiness sounds pretty good. We go there, Plowman says, to be observed by others, and therefore fail to participate in their true nature. It’s also the simple nature of social media as an observation platform. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps thanks to the fact that Insight Timer has set up its own community and social space, Plowman has opted out of most the modern world’s social media, saying that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are “incredibly toxic.” The toxic part, however, isn’t just what you might think: the anger, the self-righteousness, the judgement, the arguments, and the vitriol that thrive on social platforms. But a lot of this stuff is kind of trained out of us as we get older.” “We’re taught performance, and we’re taught rules and societal agreements, and all these sorts of things. “We’re not taught happiness, actually,” he says. Plowman says the goal of Insight Timer is very “cheesy” but simple: making people happier. Some people may not enjoy comparing their meditation process to that of others.Probably informed by the company’s mission, the oddity doesn’t stop there. The user can create a personal profile with stats, milestones, messages, notifications, and groups. In addition, the user can bookmark their favorite meditations and teachers. There is an extensive library of guided meditations and talks. The app has preset timers to keep you on track for your own meditation sessions. Users can upgrade to the premium version to access their “Daily Insight,” additional material, downloadable content, and the entire catalogue of 150 courses. The upgraded version also has 10-30 day courses that the user can take, in subjects as diverse as anxiety, grief, Buddhism, Chakras, addiction, fertility, masculinity, tantra, attracting love, Ayurveda, and mindfulness for teens. The user can listen to thousands of different music tracks and stories to help them sleep. The user can search for topics centered around different emotions, benefits, types of practices, and traditions. Insight Timer has a large library of guided meditations (60,000 free meditations) as well as talks from a wide variety of teachers. The user can set the duration, number of intervals, and ambient background sound to create different presets for your meditation sessions The Insight Timer app is also a way of timing your own meditation practice, with different starting bells available, including the traditional Tibetan singing bowl. The user can make friends, see who else is using the app at the same time, and even send them a “Thanks for meditating with me” message. Insight Timer is an online meditation community, which allows the user to connect with other meditators around the world.
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