Lesson 2: Consider—are you a vitamin or are you a painkiller?

The success of Calm seems obvious now, but at the time we launched, we were building in a deeply stigmatised space. We knew there was strong science showing many benefits of mediation and mindfulness, but when we mentioned the idea to people they thought we were crazy. 

So how did we get tens of millions of people to download and use the app?

One great analogy I like to think about is this—are you a ‘vitamin’ or are you a ‘painkiller’? Are you a ‘nice to have’, or are you a necessity? ‘Vitamins’, people may be willing to try out, they know they should do it but aren’t necessarily willing to pay for it or change their habits around it. Conversely, people will absolutely pay again and again for ‘painkillers’.

So as a product, we had to think about what our ‘painkiller’ was. Because meditation, while it interested people, it was hard to get people to come back and do it every day. It was still a fringe activity. But what we realised was closely linked to mindfulness and mental wellbeing was quality of sleep. 8 billion people sleep every night, that’s a pretty huge TAM: so if we could build something that could help improve your sleep, we’d be creating an incredibly popular painkiller. 

Lesson 4: Scaling in healthcare requires deep domain expertise 

Healthcare is an extraordinarily large market and is a very fulfilling space to work within.  For these reasons, it can be a particularly attractive proposition to founders. But equally, it can be an incredibly hard market to find success. It’s highly regulated and often slow moving.  Connections and long-term relationships matter. 

Many healthtech founders make the mistake of building a product and charging headlong into the market, without realising whether the buyers want it in the first place. Rather, you should look to partner with healthcare providers early on, find out what they want, bring people onto your team to help you understand that world, and forge deeper connections from an early stage.

This thinking was instrumental in our acquisition of Ripple Health, a San Francisco-based healthtech startup. Their CEO David Ko had a deep sector expertise in the healthcare industry, and really understands the market well. We knew his perspective would be invaluable as we built out our Calm Health division (he is now CEO of Calm).

Lesson 6: Talent partnerships are about more than just signing a contract

Our Sleep Stories are the best illustration of our approach to partnerships. The first version came about fortuitously. We’d hatched the idea, but were struggling to get any bite from any of the famous people we’d approached. Ashton Kutcher was one of our early investors, and in passing, told us that Matthew McConnaughey was not just a user but a huge fan of Calm. As iconic voices go, who better to be one of our first Sleep Story readers?  

This taught us a very valuable lesson about what to look for in a partnership with talent. It can be easy just to sign a contract, give them a cheque, and have them fulfil their obligation for a handful of social media posts —but this doesn’t always give you what you want. Instead, we operate on the ICE principle:

• I is for Investment—for big partnerships, we don’t just want to just give the talent cash, we want them to have skin in the game. We either give them the option to put their own money up for shares, or we give them some equity to get them on our cap table

• C is for Content—we always want them create something that is unique, that you couldn’t get elsewhere

• E is for Engagement—we want them to actually use the product, to be a real advocate for what they are promoting

All these things are ingredients for a strong talent partnership. It also shows that, if you see someone with a public profile who is a vocal user of your product (talks about it on social media, etc), that is a golden signal. This person will be so much more valuable to you than someone you’ve just signed a contract with. Find these people and explore the best, more creative ways to work with them.