How I'm going to compete with Calm and Headspace | Hacker News Reader

How I'm going to compete with Calm and Headspace

dantekim.com

19 pointsGoodD0ctor24 comments

When I think of where we are as a civilization and a culture, few things are more perfect an example than the idea of competing to profit off of making meditation "sticky".

It's a weird ball of everything you need to know about us as a species right now.

If you could explain to me how you would make a instant gratified, phone addicted population on board with the idea of sitting down and doing absolutely nothing for 10 minutes every single day, while also simultaneously making it a non profit Im all ears.

Let's start with respecting your potential users and not fitting them into some phone junkies stereotype.

And as others have pointed out, Meditating should be rewarding in and of itself, if done right.

Lol says the one bashing all of civilization instead of doing something about it. Not bashing my users just trying to follow your brilliant logic. I understand people should be meditating for the act itself, the app is suppose to help users stick with the habit until they make that realization themselves. Meditation isn’t something that is instantly gratifying so why should people stick with it? Unless they’re extremely disciplined which is definitely not the majority of the population. Simply using technology to help people man don’t know why you automatically have to hate

I am not sure what part of my comment reads as hatred towards this product. Also not sure if you've noticed, I'm not the GP.

If meditation is not instantly gratifying for you, let's not extrapolate that to everyone. Every craftsman needs to respect the craft and the eventual user. Thinking of your user as some dumb person with no agency is extremely counter productive.

I understand that you're trying to help people: You've posted an idea and people have pointed out why that might do the opposite of what you're trying to achieve.

This kind of rhetoric is unacceptable for someone dealing with an at-risk population. I hope you don't talk to your users with the same tone.

The comments seem to be consistent in messaging that this is very much against the spirit of meditation.

Unfortunately, I think your idea will easily succeed because people can't delay gratification, which is exactly what meditation requires for success and exactly what gamification discourages with its incremental rewards.

Good luck on your endeavor. I hope you find a pattern that maintains the spirit of meditation rather than undermining it.

Attempting to hijack your brain's reward centers as a way to succeed with a meditation app is kind of tone-deaf. At the same time I don't think it would be successful either - does anyone really care about building a fictional garden? The whole things strikes me as doing the wrong thing and probably failing at it too.

They should have leaned more into the journaling / gratitude /overall mental health aspect - at least that's kind of a differentiating feature.

> does anyone really care about building a fictional garden?

I think the market already answered your question, given that some of the most popular video games from the past few years have been based around gardening and farming.

Yes, but those games are made to distract you, the opposite of mindfulness, ie being present in the now.

That wasn't the question being asked and has nothing to do with my response, so please don't derail a thread for pedantic reasons.

To be fair, at least it’s an attempt to do it for something good. Humans are driven by feedback loops, and some habits, such as meditation, are good for you, so if they can find a way to make the brain stick to it, I’m totally onboard!

Not sure if your familiar with gamification, but pretty much takes boring tasks and makes them fun. It’s on pace to be a $30 billion industry by 2025, simply trying to adapt to the psychology of the population. Not making a data mining social media app, simply an app that encourages people to stick with meditation. I’m not brain washing users either literally giving them the equivalent of a digital sticker which acts as a virtual pat on the back and keep it up.

Problem 1: We're too distracted by modern technology and its games for our attention.

Solution 1: Try meditation!

Problem 2: My friends and family aren't following through with their meditation.

Solution 2: Let's gameify meditation!

GOTO Problem 1.

What an uplifting, encouraging comment.

Tell me about it.

Most comments here are probably from people that never meditated. You can be hooked on something like an app for meditation, and yet while meditating you can be detached from that. While you form a habit you can use tricks to get the habit to stick, we do it all the time with children.

If you measure success by active users I doubt it will become popular but the meditation habit can absolutely be families until it becomes natural.

I think you need to reframe your pitch. Your messaging is heavily focused on "not being just another app with points and badges." Yet, the primary mechanism of your app is receiving coins (points) to buy plants (badges), which all gets put on a rated monthly calendar (points) representative of your mood (badge). And then in your roadmap you even mention wanting a leaderboard (points and badges).

Your entire concept is points and badges, so trying to make it sound like something completely different comes across as disingenuous and somewhat antithetical to the actual purpose of the app. You're probably not going to attract users with that strategy.

More importantly, I think you're missing a huge part of the marketing picture. You're banking on paying for influencer placement and random TikTok luck, and then saying you'll make your own content "sometime down the road" and "when you can afford to." But if you can afford to pay influencers, you can definitely afford to make content, at which point you'd be making additional revenue while also promoting your app to a captive and targeted audience.

And since you need to at least be producing a minimal amount of social media content as standard business practice, it's not exactly a huge leap to be producing longer form content. In fact, it would make far more sense to focus on producing videos that serve as their own content and marketing, but can also be cut up into social media posts.

The most obvious example would be to start your own ASMR YouTube or Twitch channel based around the garden concept. Perhaps even integrating it, so that watching the ASMR videos will grow your garden. The material startup cost for a market-competitive ASMR channel is roughly $1,750 worth of equipment, and that includes a capable computer, monitor, camera, video capture device, lighting, audio interface, mics and all of the necessary cables. For the same amount of money you spend on influencer placements, you could pay two people to produce and edit videos, and at that point you are simultaneously creating highly reusable content, generating additional revenue, marketing and legitimizing your brand, and creating a dedicated community around your product -- all while avoiding paying some influencer to get 1/100 the results.

That's just one of countless methods that don't involve sinking your entire budget and available time into hoping something goes viral on TikTok. Content is king. If you're not the one creating it, you're paying a heavy price to the people who are.

Appreciate the feedback and will definitely keep these in mind.

Content such as blog posts take months to years for anything to come into fruition. A single 15 second tik tok talking about the app can get millions of hits within a 24 hour window. Not saying this will happen, but it has the highest risk/reward ratio and bang for buck. Almost sounds like I'm playing at a casino, but will keep you updated on this

I also have an instagram and pinterest which are doing pretty well, so it's not like I'm making no content. But I don't want to be posting crappy articles I spent a couple of hours writing, good articles they a lot of effort and the meditation space is very competitive on google. I've dabbled with SEO but am no expert by any means.

I'm also on a time constraint, have to get traction before and hit certain MMR before I graduate which is in a couple of months. But will definitely dig more into it.

You seem to be very focused on blog posts both in your post in and your reply, as if the only options are blogging and paying TikTok influencers, and there's nothing in between -- but there are tons of options for content that aren't blogging. Blogging was never a very good marketing strategy, even back when blogs were still popular and the SEO was still easy.

And I still think you're putting way too much emphasis on virality as a marketing strategy. Product placements are almost universally NOT the Toks that go massively viral, and even when they do, it's not as big of a payoff as you're hoping. One million views will result in 100-300 people actually trying the app, and at least half of those users will drop off within a matter of days. So, your entire strategy is to pay other people lots of money in hopes of an extremely rare event that gives a marginal bump in users (if you're lucky).

Even traditional paid advertising is far, far more effective than that, and you'd only be paying ~$2 per customer acquisition.

I recommend listening to the sub club podcast (founders of revenue cat) but multiple app founders that have gone on to the podcast this past year have said they have literally gone from unranked to being in the top 100 of the App Store thanks to this “virality”. Almost all agree it’s one of the best marketing funnels right now and one of the best to invest into if your app is new. If your app is some B2B software then yeah probably you’ll get a small conversation rate but considering my app is relatively broad and meditation is something most people want to get to I consider it a good investment

Podcasts book people who are successful, but there are a thousand failures for every success, so you're basing your entire strategy on becoming an outlier. I think you're making a bunch of mistakes in both methodology and philosophy, but please come back in two months and prove me wrong.

I don't know why people insist on building the same product when they're going to make the same mistake vis-a-vis monetization. You'll lose to Calm and Headspace on principal alone.

Lol not sure if you read the article, but retention numbers for the app are extremely good and I constantly get feedback that the app is super unique and not just "another meditation app".

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