First 1000 - 🧘🏻Calm
Hello folks 👋, First of all, I would like to welcome the 618 new members to our little family 👨🏽🍼 since last week. Today's case study is on Calm. Calm is one of those companies that seems obvious in hindsight. When they got started in 2012, there were already 20m American who practice meditations and the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA had a modestly popular meditation audio-files you could download on your MP3 Player/iPod. It's not hard for me to imagine that a small portion of those 20m meditation practitioners would prefer to access constantly up-to-date content using an app/website as opposed to listening to the same 3-4 meditation audio files they had on their mp3 players over and over again, I know I would. But when Alex Tew first came up with the idea of Calm, he had his eyes set on the 93% of Americans that didn't mediate. This goes against most, if not all, the 50+ case studies I have written about so far. For instance, When Conor from Roam was looking for his very first early adopters he looked for people who most exhibit the behavior that his app was meant to facilitate. Same goes to Jason Citron from Discord, Payal Kadakia from Classpass...etc. It wasn't until years later that these founders started investing the time, energy and resources to educate a mass audience on establishing a new habit through their offering. In the case of Calm, Alex went after the mass audience from day 1, bypassing the common startup wisdom of finding "the right customers". He did so by building a website that had orders of magnitude more potential to go viral than Calm and used it as lead generation machine for his meditation website (the app would come a few months later). This website was http://donothingfor2minutes.com/. Today we will explore:
The WhatI hope after reading this issue, many would agree that Alex Tew is perhaps among the top 10 product creators that ever lived. Right there with Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey. Alex's speciality was and has always been building products that go viral seemingly overnight. I put together a list of a few examples of such products that he worked on before his time founding Calm. In University, Alex built this website with the goal of "becoming a millionaire in two weeks." The idea was to sell 1 million pixels for $1 each. In 4 months he sold every pixel on the website netting him $1,037,000. The million dollar homepage was built in 2 days. A game that Alex and his team built in 3 hours right after the George W. Bush shoe throwing incident. It got 9 million unique visitors in 7 days, after getting picked up by mainstream media all over the world such as The Telegraph and The Guardian. Way before the Calm launch, Alex built this website where people were asked not to move their cursor or keyboard for 2 full minutes, otherwise the counter will start over. Again it got picked up by mainstream media as Techcrunch & CNN and got 2 million unique visits in 10 days while capturing 100k+ emails for Calm before it even was a product. Looking at these 3 examples, there are a lot of commonality on what you need to build. It should be
The HowWhen thinking about how to execute on that strategy, there are a few things to consider:
Let's take a closer look into how Alex did it with Calm and Do Nothing for 2 Minutes 🧐 Coming up with a viral idea When Alex was looking to validate the idea of building a meditation app via attempting to create a viral product the goal was to test the sentiment that people were more distracted than ever, and that this problem resonated with a large audience. The criteria you want use to validate virality potential is
Seeding & growing your (potentially viral) product When Alex built http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com he did not have the social following he did today. Instead, he had a few tricks up his sleeve
The Hackernews post landed him in #2 of the day and captured the attention of reporter Alexia Tsotsis that wrote a Techcrunch article about it the next day. This was the start of an intensive media coverage that included heavy weights such as Huffington Post, zdnet & CNN. Grabbing mainstream media attention To grab the media's attention you want reporters- who live on the internet - to stumble upon your product in the wild. More accurately you want them to stumble many times upon your product in a very short window of time. The two things that worked for Alex in that regards Social sharing that works: In this particular case, whenever I or anyone else visited the website, we were more likely to hit the share button. The main reason? Sharing was more of a social brag "I just completed this challenge can you?" and less of a favor "please help us reach more people." I personally feel that I don't owe app creators anything to do them a favor every time I use their app. I am sure many feel the same way ( 5% conversion is considered an above average share rate.) Easy for reporters to contact him: Alex added CTA in the product "build by @tewy" which linked back to his Twitter. Anyone could then slide into his DMs without having to do any research on who created this project. The WhyThis is a lot harder to quantify. In 100 parallel universes, everything being kept the same I would bet this would've worked maybe 20-30 times. As is the case with going viral on Social Media, it is hard quantify, and a lot harder to predict. This is why, if I was attempting to build a product with the exclusive motivation of going viral I would aim to spend not more than 6 hours working on the thing. High risk, High reward. In the case of Do Nothing For 2 minutes, the reason why this worked was that it held a mirror at societal problem and highlighted in a fun shareable way. For Awe and Sock, the reason it worked was that it tapped into the zeitgeist at the time and highlighted it in a fun and shareable way. And for the Million Dollar Homepage it allowed people to own a small part of internet history and it did so in a fun and shareable way. I am starting to feel a little bit of a pattern here 😐. Until next Sunday, Imagine the only time I write about a company in your domain you accidentally miss it because of some random email algorithm 💩. |
Older messages
📅 Superpowered (YC S19)
Sunday, August 15, 2021
How Superpowered used Product Hunt to get hundreds of paying customers?
Juno: The Costco of Student loans
Monday, August 9, 2021
+ Growing through an early adopter community
👟 Nike
Sunday, August 1, 2021
The story of a 7 year pivot, a hostile takeover, and behind the scenes on the creation of one of the most beloved brands in the world. The Nike case study is the best one yet!
📊 Mixpanel
Monday, July 26, 2021
For all the people building B2B companies out there
👯TikTok
Sunday, July 18, 2021
Hello folks 👋, First of all, I would like to welcome the 2023 new members to our little family 👨🏽🍼 since last week. First 1000 is this close(👌) to 20000 members. Today's case study is on Tiktok.
You Might Also Like
SaaSHub Weekly - Apr 18
Thursday, April 18, 2024
SaaSHub Weekly - Apr 18 Featured and useful products Ant Design logo Ant Design An enterprise-class UI design language and React implementation with a set of high-quality React components, one of best
[SaaS Club] Scaling a SaaS Community Platform to $19M ARR
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Hey Reader Let's connect on LinkedIn! Follow me to stay in touch! Here's a quick round up of what's been going on at SaaS Club: 🎧 Podcast Circle: Scaling a Community Platform to $19 Million
The Most Profitable Software Company in Q1 2024
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Tomasz Tunguz Venture Capitalist If you were forwarded this newsletter, and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here. The Most Profitable Software Company in Q1 2024 image Ethereum
Clippa and PrivacyBox
Thursday, April 18, 2024
A browser extension for PrivacySandbox control with passive income BetaList BetaList Daily Clippa Create short clip videos for social media in a few clicks PrivacyBox A browser extension for
I think I figured it out
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Read this in 1 min, 2 sec I was scrolling through our YouTube channel last night... And something finally clicked. Why are all these founders we interviewed successful? What do they know that others
stealth startups in industrials
Thursday, April 18, 2024
intel on hidden gems within the market inside Hi there, Never miss an outlier. Check out this list of target companies in industrials. These startups are hidden gems within the space. See them here The
digital health bounces back
Thursday, April 18, 2024
digital health rebounded in Q1'24. our experts are going live to explain what's going on in the sector. State of Digital Health Save a Spot Hi there, Q1'24 data is in for digital health.
[Replay] Start Your Ecommerce Business
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Free summit replay for only 24 hours - you asked, we answered: We recorded the entire Start Your Ecommerce Business Summit so you can digest the lessons at your own pace and go back to any sessions
Today's featured projects in 10 words
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Today's projects: OnTheFly • Dumbbe • lockrMail • Convert My Bank Statement • Mailmo • Distrobird 10words Discover new apps and startups in 10 words or less OnTheFly: A scalable live streaming
📂 Events create memorable experiences with potential customers
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Today's newsletter is proudly supported by xFusion 🎉 A few years ago I referred one of my consulting clients, SavvyCal, to xFusion to get help with customer support. And after seeing