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we did 2.3 million in 2015 we did 7 million in 2016 we did 22 million last year and this year we'll do 80 so we've been still growing yes super quickly in next year definitely north of a hundred million
they should open that they should open up screen time with an API and let developers who are doing stuff like us like you use that moment cuz it's quite fun
I think Apple picked us I think we've made a great product but also I think they were trying to send a message that you can use the phone for good good things you know it's not all bad I think that's what the subtext that they were
they've been very material in terms of opening doors for partnerships even in the hiring process
we were able to you know raise on great terms you know not just a great valuation but great terms
we've got a lot of data science going on behind the scenes to optimize stories
calm ultimately we want to become Nike for the mind
sleep has been a growth a huge part of our growth story in the last couple of years
we have over a million paying subscribers
we did 2.3 million in 2015 we did 7 million in 2016 we did 22 million last year and this year we'll do 80 so we've been still growing yes super quickly in next year definitely north of a hundred million
for the last you know couple years we've been cashflow positive
the valuation of the last round being yeah 250 million
the other last three years have been just insane
the content the product the engineering and and also just building more momentum like we were starting to get some attention from Apple from customers like there's a strong organic component so the flywheel was beginning to turn in 2014 2015
in 2014 we did a few hundred grand in revenue and then the following year we did 2.3 million so it was like really you know fast like a 5x or something for 5x
we got an email from this lady called Tamara Levitt who's based in Toronto saying she wanted to be our community manager and we actually saw that what she could do the content she's an amazing meditation teacher and the community management is great but like why not be the voice of calm and so that was a total pivotal moment too
hiring a brilliant CTO that was that was it was tough to attract engineers to work on comm because it just was so far outside of you know water typically seen as like interesting challenges for most engineers and and so finally convinced a friend of mine Ben Ben darling to join us CTO and that was a pivotal moment
raising the prices was definitely one
I think Apple picked us I think we've made a great product but also I think they were trying to send a message that you can use the phone for good good things
we can do that by teaching these you know these skills and we can do it where people are at which is on their phones right like the you know people are looking at the phone so why don't we use that platform to create something that actually can be
the idea with comm was to really make a product and a brand that people could relate to in this busy modern world create something almost cool you know make it accessible contemporary have beautiful design don't use kind of crazy religious or overtly spiritual language
I thought if I could create a website you know maybe they would could go to it and learn to meditate in a really kind of simple way
we paid 140 thousand dollars
the closer the the viral idea is to your core product the better like with Cy the customers we gained from czechy were really valuable customers um because they were like already in that mindset of like oh I feel distracted I'm trying to find out how distracted I am oh then K offers some ways of helping you be mindful
the conversion rate is generally pretty low right because people come coming for this one thing and you're reaching potentially a very mainstream audience um so that's why you kind of need scale like it's almost like you need to get millions of users to then capture a very small portion of it in order for it to be successful
subscription services and the App Store allowing in app purchases without that it would have been very hard to make calm work
I was just lucky because I'd be meditating for a long time so I was I knew the benefits of meditation and um had been thinking about this idea with my co-founder Michael for a long time um but I think we picked the moment right I think timing is important
it's very much a hit or miss kind of strategy it's very high reward but it's very you know it's potentially low probability of success ... it's low cost it's worth trying
the icing on the cake which was totally out of like the blue as to surprise was Steven coar ... talking about czechy for three minutes ... we had an ad at the end ... of the 650,000 downloads we got for it we got 50,000 thousand downloads for Cal ... this is something that took one day to build ... it was basically like 50,000 free users which could cost you $50,000 $100,000 if you had to pay for it
do nothing for 2 minutes was a minimum viral product ... we captured 100,000 emails for c ... it tested almost sentiment Market fit and that gave us the impetus to start Cal and we had those 100,000 emails