Investing in Insight Timer (part 2)
Twelve reasons we love investing in this conscious platform.
It’s been more than two years since I wrote my first Medium article about Investing in Insight Timer. The article continues to receive a lot of interest, so I’m guessing it is time for an update. Insight Timer is a platform in which we not only invest, but also use…daily. In fact, I just crossed over my 1,000th day on the platform.
When I think of a perfect storm for Bridge Builders Collaborative to make an investment, here’s the scenario: find a passionate, skilled, integrated CEO with a team that has a mission to positively impact the world and expand our collective human consciousness; add to that a business that can scale globally and create abundance for multiple stakeholders, including us as investors; and, you’ve got, Insight Timer, the #1 free app for sleep, anxiety and stress.
Here is list of 12 additional reasons why we believe Insight Timer is a great investment for Bridge Builders Collaborative.
1) The Community. When we invested over 2 years ago, over 4.5M people had download the app. Triple that, add some more, and now there is a community of 16M people from around the world. Over 500,000 use it every day, and the platform has surpassed 800,000 individual daily sessions. More than 2M people use it every month. The platform has expanded to over 40 languages. Speak Farsi, they’ve got meditations for you. Are you from Iceland? You’ll find meditations and teachers in your native tongue. Speak Czech, mate? No worries, we’ve got you covered.
Last year, there were over 3B minutes of meditation on Insight Timer. The community meditates together. We befriend one another, form groups together (there are over 7,000 self-formed groups on the platform), and share content. At any time, the app can tell us who is meditating with us and where in the world they are.
Increasingly, the world needs authentic communities for connection. Facebook isn’t that. Instagram isn’t that. Insight Timer is.
2) The Teachers (Publishers). Insight Timer prioritizes teachers. When we invested about 2 1/2 years ago, there were 1,900 teachers on the platform. Now, there’s over 7,000. These are mindfulness teachers, scientists, business leaders, musicians, and instructors from multiple global spiritual traditions. You can find meditations from Sharon Salzberg (meditation teacher), Russell Brand (comedian), Dr. Judson Brewer (scientist), Sadhguru (spiritual teacher), Scott Shute (Head of Compassion for LinkedIn), Pablo Arellano (musician). And, as of last month, you can find my wife, Maureen Pelton (mystic). I’ve really enjoyed supporting the company by introducing many friends and great teachers to the platform as well as supporting others to expand their audiences.
Courtesy: Insight Timer
There are many benefits for teachers to become publishers on the platform. First, there’s exposure to a large and growing audience. For example, a teacher like Jennifer Piercy, who published 9 meditations and 1 course regarding sleep, has generated 215,000 followers and 15M plays for her content. When a teacher’s work gets featured on the platform, they get exposure to at least 500,000 people who use the app everyday. When Maureen launched, over 10,000 people had listened to her meditations within 3 weeks.
Second, teachers split revenue with Insight Timer 50/50. It’s great for many to earn extra income.
Third, teachers get feedback from the community. It appears that around 10% of the listeners rate and provide comments to the teachers. Teachers appreciate learning from the feedback.
Finally, they can publish without hassles and it’s easy to sign up and submit content. There are no contracts and no worries about who owns content. Teachers own their content and can take it off whenever they want.
3) B2B, Differently: Bridge Builders Collaborative has invested in several start-ups who sell into Fortune 500 companies, insurance companies, health care providers, and other organizations. In almost every case, start-ups underestimate the amount of time it takes to get their products sold into these systems. Typically, a pilot is requested. Inevitably, the pilot process includes: time to launch, generating results, demonstrating a scalable opportunity, going through the legal process, implementing privacy and HIPAA compliance requirements, technology infrastructure integration, etc. And invariably along the way, the champion within the company gets promoted, fired, or leaves; or the company goes through a restructuring, or is sold. Then everything the start-up has worked on for years evaporates overnight.
Insight Timer approached all of this differently. They announced, Teams, a product that was free to any team in any company. The intention of Teams is to create an opportunity for people in organizations to meditate together, share insights, create communities, and create challenges. Within a couple of weeks of announcing Teams, groups from over 6,000 companies signed up. They actually had to shut the beta down temporarily because of the overwhelming response. No matter where you work, feel free to sign up (they’re still in beta, launching worldwide soon). There are 45,000 free meditations awaiting you and your team on Insight Timer, and you’ll soon get free reporting tools too. Your teams can meditate together and share their favorite meditations.
4) A Self-Sustaining Platform of Abundance: As an investor, we do look for returns on our investment. We’ve invested in some of the most successful companies in our field: Headspace, Happify Health, Pear Therapeutics, gloo. We love impact and we love to create abundance for investors, as well.
What’s cool about Insight Timer is that there is global circle of abundance that is generated through this community. Here’s how it works:
For everyone on the planet: There are 45,000 free meditations on Insight Timer. They’ll always be free. So this app is available to anyone with a smartphone or an internet connection. It’s in 40 languages. So I’d estimate 95% of the world can find a teacher in a language that they can follow. The timer is free.
For those who want features and courses: Those wanting access to some deeper features can pay an annual subscription (currently $59.99). The money goes to employ the great Insight Timer teams in Australia, the Philippines, Bali, the UK, Brazil, and several other countries where the the platform is managed.
For teachers: Read number 2 above.
For Insight Timer employees: They get to use their skills to help change the world.
For companies: I’ve already talked about the new Teams platform.
For investors: We are thrilled with the abundance and value created since we first invested. We’re in this for the long haul. See number 12 below.
5) The Largest Conscious Library on the Planet. Seven thousand teachers have provided 45,000 meditations, talks, and songs for free. I don’t need to say anything more about why that’s awesome.
6) Going Deeper. Many meditation apps can be described as “gateway drugs.” They have wonderful content that is available for many people to be introduced to mindfulness. They help people become calm, maybe sleep better, and learn meditation. On Insight Timer, you can do all of that and you can go much deeper into many spiritual traditions or into consciousness itself. There is no one path, only one’s individual path of growth on the platform.
As I have been talking to people from multiple communities, I find repeatedly that while meditation users might sometimes start on other meditation apps, many graduate to Insight Timer. And they enjoy being part of a deeper global community.
7) Now, Everyone Can Be a Content Provider — Playlists. Insight Timer continues to provide innovative new features. Since we invested, they launched “Courses,” and “The Daily Insight.” A couple months ago, they launched a feature which allows users to create their own playlists, which you can share with others. So if you want to find playlists on dealing with stress, finding calm, or connecting to love, you can either find one or create one. Here’s one I created called “Peeps I Love,” a group of teachers whom I love or have introduced to the platform.
8) The Increasing Importance of Mental Health. Recently, I spoke about innovation at the Minnesota Health Action Group’s Employer Leadership Summit. Patrick Kennedy, nephew of JFK and author of the Mental Health Parity Act, was the first speaker at the conference. He made an important observation when he said, “The second COVID is going to be the mental health crisis from the first one.” Mental health is increasingly front and center for companies, government, schools & universities, and the healthcare system. Our healthcare workers are experiencing significant trauma as they tend to the pandemic. People have been quarantining in their own homes. Some of them are experiencing abuse, trauma, or loneliness to a greater extent. To have a freely accessible resource like Insight Timer is a gift to the world at this time.
It is wonderful to see other apps providing free subscriptions to impacted populations at this time. Some of these are genuine offers of compassion, and some, I believe are opportunistic. Those free offers may go away over time, but Insight Timer plans to always have this resource available for free, globally.
9) “Time…is on our side, Yes it is.” For many meditation apps, the #1 measure of success is revenue. Don’t get me wrong, as investors, we love revenue. However, from an impact point of view, we love this statistic from AppInvestive blog by Peeyush Singh, “More meditation is done on Insight Timer in the U.S. than all other meditation apps….combined.” While there is financial benefit from getting subscription revenue, we want people to actually use the app for their benefit, to love the experience, and to keep coming back. We want the world to be meditating more than we want the world to be subscribing. And, yes, there are great benefits to being a subscriber of Insight Timer. And as I mentioned, subscriptions are only $59.99 for a year versus $69.99 for Headspace and Calm.
10) Marketing (or lack thereof): Insight Timer has paid for marketing once and I was the instigator. On my drive to the San Francisco airport, I saw billboards for Calm, which said “Come sleep with us.” They were some of the first offline ads I had seen in the meditation space, so I took a photo and sent it to Christopher Plowman, CEO of Insight Timer. Feeling frustration with Calm’s sanitized version of meditation versus what he saw as a bigger opportunity to raise consciousness in the world, Christopher rented the billboard next to them. With some cheeky Australian humor, it read, “Don’t pay others to sleep with you, sleep with us for free.” I think that billboard cost around $20,000. So this platform has achieved 500,000 daily users with a total ad budget of $20,000. The reason is people love the app and recommend it to others. Teachers love it and suggest it to people. A platform of abundance creates abundance. Over 15,000 people download the app every day — without an ad budget.
11) It’s a Hell of a lot of Fun: This is a bonus feature. When we invest, we want to look for enterprises where we are going to have fun adding value to the team and the platform. Supporting this mission and team, and the teachers, is joyful. The team is grateful. Bridge Builders feels appreciated. Life is too short — we want to have cheerful collaboration.
12) Last, but not Least — ROI: We are long term investors, and want to create global scale and impact. We believe Insight Timer will be a great return on our investment. We believe it can be a platform for hundreds of millions of people and if we’re even close to that, this will be a spectacular investment that will reward the founders, the team, and us (as investors). It’s funny that people describe us as angel investors, trying to find unicorns. It’s all a bit mystical. That’s great, and…we like cash returns too.