If starting a startup, pick an idea where you have clear Founder-Problem fit. Caring deeply about a problem, ideally with first-hand experience, reduces the risk of burnout and makes it much easier to be obsessed with your customer experience.
Embrace multiple content platforms, but start with one. When using content as a growth engine, invest in being great on one channel, mastering it, being new, better, or different in your topics, and then continuing to build upon that success with new channels.
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While on his maiden voyage, he encountered three simple things:ᅠa sick man,ᅠan old man, andᅠa corpseᅠbeing carried to the burning grounds. Nothing in his life of ease had prepared him for this experience. Taken back, his charioteer told him that all beings are subject to sickness, old age, and death. This lesson weighed heavily on him, and even after returning home, he could not rest.
Headspace created the consumer meditation category (more on this soon), and has been credited with catapulting the meditation industry into a golden age of profitability. Neil Seligman, the author of several books on meditation, notes that Andy and Rich led the mindfulness revolution in the digital space:
The genius of Headspace was to take something as difficult and nuanced as teaching mindfulness meditation, and break it down into bite-sized, snackable videos, audios and practices. This is how they transformed the industry and penetrated the global market.
Company Design:ᅠThe purposeful creation of a business model and an organization with a culture and point of view that fits with the new category. The goal here is company/category fit, meaning you have engineered the right business model and missionary team for the problem you are looking to solve.
Category Design:ᅠThe mindful creation and development of a new market category, designed so the category will pull in customers who will then make the company its Queen. In marketing terms, this is about winning over popular opinion and teaching the world to abandon the old and embrace the new.
Company Design: Both Andy and Rich exemplify founder-problem fit, and built a mission-driven team to bring meditation to the masses. B2C subscriptions were not novel, but they did bring that business model to the mindfulness market.
Together, Headspace made a new ocean for themselves, and as they did, more companies (Calm) entered and helped grow the category. And just a note, if you ever are in the business of creating a new category, having competition come and join you should be welcomed because it means category growth, which in the early days of a budding market is great for everybody. Rising tides lift all boats. ?
Turned their insight into an idea: Knowing the benefits of meditation, but realizing how unaccessible it was, Andy and Rich saw a gap for a consumer meditation app. This shaped their Job-to-be-done.
For lots of people, onboarding stops there. But really, onboarding is just as equally about getting those users to form habits around aha moments, discover other parts of a product's value, and ultimately drive people to upgrade and stick around longer.
Headspace knows that the core job of onboarding is to get users their first few moments of stillness by engaging them in a mini-practice. This will create a hot lead for them to turn into a paying customer.
Investing in oneself is the primary theme that is gracefully woven into Headspace's onboarding sequence. This journey begins with the user sharing their personal goals, paving the way for a tailor-made meditation experience to help them achieve them.
Friendly animations and introductory screens serve as gentle guides, instantly building rapport with the user. While the sequence may appear simple, the questions asked during onboarding serve to capture user intent. This dual-purpose design not only helps in personalizing the user's journey but also educates them on the various use cases of the app.
In this sense, customization comes in the form of their targeted series, catering to various internal struggles like relationships and health. This modular approach ensures that users find what they need without feeling overwhelmed.
Besides personalization and expanding the product offering for existing customers, each new Pack launched opens a door for Headspace to attract customers from new segments of the market: people experiencing issues in X.
First, motivational messages, that support, inspire, and remind people to keep their practice going to meet their goals. These timely nudges remind people to come back to Headspace around the time they usually use the app.
In addition to qualitative customer feedback, Headspace monitors an ongoing Net Promoter Score survey along with product analytics around how people are using their product and which actions drive long-term success and retention (both with meditation and Headspace).
Having a lot of features will not make your product great. Great products come from having the right features to solve customer problems and having those features designed in the right way.
In large part, this is because Headspace took a step back, held off from focusing on immediate/short-term revenue growth, and looked holistically at what would drive long-term growth.
In early 2019, the Conversion team at Headspace focused on quick wins to the checkout and in-app purchase experience. These fast A/B tests demonstrated movement to the larger org and moved the conversion rate metric incrementally. Looking back, we wereᅠattached to some of those quick wins, making it hard to kill parts of our checkout design until we took a more holistic portfolio approach later that year.
Surface long-term growth: Create opportunities for the company to discuss long-term (2+ year strategy). This can be through company-wide show and tells or roadmap reviews. From there, the operating teams should consciously set milestones to monitor growth along longer horizons, which is not always as apparent in the day-to-day.
Celebrate non-revenue related wins: Normalize thinking about longevity and durability. Share celebratory messages for initiatives that cannot easily be quantified in revenue value. This includes pull requests that eliminate hundreds or thousands of lines of code, a switch to a new vendor that helps reduce downtime, or accounting closing the books within 2 business days of month end instead of one week after month end.
Once you have identified a feature that falls into one of these categories, take a look at why the feature was added in the first place. Was it designed to attract a specific type of customer? Was it built in response to some market change (e.g. Covid)? Regardless of the validity of the reasoning, the first step is understanding it. From here, you can reassess where that reasoning is still valid. For instance, it may have made sense given the original product strategy, though now it contradicts the current strategy.
Look at what the success criteria were, chat with who was involved, and even review some of the discovery notes. Then, and this is essential, perform some sort of impact analysis with a researcher where you look to understand how this feature has impacted things like upgrades, NPS, retention, etc.
This is all about external messaging. As customers discover a product or feature is winding down, it might disrupt their workflow and cause frustration if they are paying for and relying on the product. Worst case, loyal and prospective customers will write in to support, switch to a competitor, and head to Reddit and Twitter (X is still Twitter, sorry) to complain. The best way to proactively avoid that is:
The sooner you can let people know the better. Also, give a clear timeline as soon as you have it, and if people need to do anything (like export data, etc) to avoid disruption, make that crystal clear and send reminders to be as helpful as possible.
Content-led growth, in short, is when stuff like blog posts, podcasts, and really any consumable media is key to driving leads to the product, creating brand awareness around the problem, and allowing sustainable business growth.
Simply, like lots of things with Headspace, they produce content that their audience finds valuable, like self-care ideas, getting caught in the self-improvement trap, using phones before bed, etc. Within their content, the call to action is always clear; always the same: Download the App. Start Your Free Trial.
To reach as big an audience as possible, Headspace delivers their content through a multi-platform approach. You can find Headspace content on their website, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, in search engine advertising, social ads, radio, their own Podcast shows, their blog, and on TV.
However, as a note to operators, Headspace definitely did not start with a multi-platform approach. They evolved that way over time as their team grew to support it, slowly investing in new channels as they mastered existing ones.
This started back in 2011 when they teamed up with Virgin Atlantic to create an in-flight Headspace channel to help passengers learn about meditation, relax, and get some sleep. Since then, Headspace has collaborated with 12 different airlines, reaching an audience of over 800M passengers each year.
Also, aware that people often think that relaxing through a Netflix binge is mindfulness (but, end up walking away after a binge often anxious and restless), they teamed up with Netflix and Vox to produce three shows to catch people when they just might need it.
Video content is expensive, and a long-term bet! It will take months to create an audience, and that means dozens of videos. If you have to hire someone for the production, it will be an expensive bet and one that few companies will be able to afford. Even if you're doing it internally/yourself, it's going to take away a big chunk of your time. Most startups need customers faster, in a way they can more directly control for scale, and YouTube is not ideal for that.
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