![]() ![]() ![]() How do we do that? By really focusing on solving people’s needs. Kim: In the next five years, I want Simple Habit to be the destination for mental wellness. They ultimately allow us to create a better product for customers. Some of them are executive coaches or psychologists. These are people who teach at Columbia or tech companies, like Google. Kim: The fact that we were able to build such a high-quality network of teachers. Valet: What has been your greatest success? For the sake of growth, I'm sometimes tempted to build a tool for employers to track engagement, but that's going to take away from our customer business. We get reached out to by companies who want to buy Simple Habit in bulk and offer it as part of their benefits. Valet: What has been your biggest challenge? We share a subset of that revenue with our teachers, based on their number of listens. You can use our product for free, but if you want to unlock all of our meditations, you can pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee. Kim: From the user side, we are a freemium model. Eighty percent of our users meditate seven or more times per week-that’s just off the charts. If you go to the App Store and search “meditation,” we’re the first result. Our marketplace platform means a variety of content, and because we have so many teachers on the supply side, our content quality will only improve as we grow on the demand side. We were the first platform to allow teachers to monetize. ![]() If we could reduce that, even by a few percentage points, by making self-care more accessible, that’s billions of dollars saved. alone, we spend trillions of dollars on general healthcare costs, and somewhere between 70% to 90% of primary care doctor visits are stress-related. It’s the leading cause of disability worldwide, and treatments are often very costly or time consuming. In fact, one in five Americans has anxiety, and another one in five has depression. Since then, we've grown the business five times and are doing over $5 million in annual recurring revenue. After graduating, we closed a funding round of $2.5 million from investors like New Enterprise Associates, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Gusto CEO Joshua Reeves. Last year I dropped out of Stanford Business School and went through Y Combinator. I wanted to prove to myself that I had a viable business and a meaningful mission. Kim: Initially, I bootstrapped, because I knew what kind of commitment it would be to raise money from investors. We actually have a web presence, as well, and we’re rebuilding it so that it’s much stronger. Kim: It works really well for millennials, because they consume everything on mobile and our meditations are customized for on-the-go. Every week we have new meditations for all kinds of problems-from getting over an ex to feeling nervous before a presentation or an exam. Kim: We have over 75 teachers constantly creating new content. Valet: What sets Simple Habit apart in this growing space? Oftentimes, meditation apps don’t work this way-they take more of a publisher approach, where they create content in-house. It’s a two-side marketplace: On the supply side, there are meditation teachers, and on the demand side, there are users. We ask them to share their audio, and after our vetting process, we let them on our platform. Kim: Meditation teachers apply to Simple Habit and we vet them to make sure they’re top-notch. Let's build it." Teachers can focus on creating content, and we’ll create the platform for them to distribute and monetize. I thought, "There's no meditation Spotify. Kim: There are so many prominent meditation teachers who don’t have a presence on the web because they haven’t had the time to build their own app. ![]()
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