Building A Future For Insight Timer And The Planet

Our CEO, Christopher, talks to Ed Andrew from the Human Impact podcast about the challenges of growing Insight Timer organically and our plans for the future.

Transcript

Hello and welcome back. Today it gives me great pleasure to have as my guest Christopher Plowman who is the co-founder and CEO of Insight Timer, The world's largest meditation app. Christopher, It's a great pleasure to have you with me today. It's great to be here Ed, Thank you for having me. My pleasure and we're going to dive dive into something. So I saw that a couple of days ago or a couple of weeks ago that for those who don't know Insight Timer, It is a free app, It always has been and we're going to get into that very quickly. But a couple of weeks ago, Calm put up three very significant billboards in San Francisco advertising their services and it's the first time you'd ever advertised and you put up a billboard which was very clever opposite saying don't pay for someone to sleep with you, Sleep with us for free. And I love that's a brilliant bit of marketing, I know you're an ex-startup guy but where does that sit in the whole sort of ethos of the business because I know that's probably a little bit of a break for you. Yes, Look I'm a little bit ashamed that this is the first thing we're talking about because we have always believed that attraction long-term is much more powerful in promotion, Right. If you're sit and you're still that essentially entities gravitate towards you, If you're loud and noisy you tend to propel them away and so we've never done any advertising at all. We've got I think when Nico and I bought the app four years ago it had maybe a hundred thousand users we've now got about six and a half million users and between 10 and 12, 000 people, New people join our community every day all through word of mouth because we've never, As I said we've never done any advertising. But lately you know we've been frustrated I guess that the mainstream media seems to be focusing on kind of only two apps and calm and headspace play an important role in the conscious landscape but our view is it's a very narrow role, Right. It's a very sort of sanitized version of meditation which they've bundled up and called mindfulness and for some people that's great but there's a much bigger opportunity here which is to actually try and raise consciousness around the world and we don't think that those apps alone are actually going to do that. So we've been trying to think about ways where we could sort of elevate our story up into the mainstream. We don't have a lot of money, We don't make money, We're a loss-making platform at the moment, We hope to change that and a couple of days ago a friend of mine sent me a picture of these billboards on the highway into San Francisco which was just Calm's logo and underneath it says come sleep with us and I just had an idea. I thought I wonder if there's a billboard over the road that's available so I tracked down the company that sells them and lo and behold the universe seemed to be supportive of this idea because it turns out that there was a cheaper billboard on the other side of the road. So I quickly with my team came up with a sort of a bit of a joke. We said well don't pay others to sleep with you, Come and sleep with us for free because of course on Insight Timer we have about 15, 000 free guided meditations for sleep and anxiety and stress and Calm essentially charges for all of theirs and so we did something we've never done before which is we took a punt and we spent some money and we bought a billboard and for seven days I've been sitting here dying about whether or not this was the worst thing we've ever done or something that's good clean fun and funny and it turns out that it's the latter because we posted it on Instagram yesterday it's been our most sort of shared post we've ever done so I don't think you'll be seeing us do a lot more of that kind of felt like a one-off thing and maybe I did it as an expression of frustration rather than a considered strategy but I'm glad we did. Yeah I think you know what we're gonna we'll move on from that because I can see your pain that the people who are listening can't we're on video but we're not going to record that. One of the things which obviously you promote very heavily is conscious the fact that the business has a conscious leadership it's run as a conscious business and one of the things you mentioned earlier is that it's loss making so you're a startup founder you've been a successful entrepreneur yourself you know we've all had many ups and downs in that in that life where how do you rationalize the loss making business with running a conscious business because there are so many people many of my listeners who I talk to on a regular basis who they want to do something alternatively which is not just about creating enormous wealth they want to do something to give it back to the planet to be conscious so how do you rationalize that? Are you talking about how do you rationalize the fact that we need to make a profit and we also want to be conscious? Yeah well I mean look through your perspective I'm assuming you don't have such pockets that you can make a loss forever but I mean look I guess I could answer this a lot of people say oh it's wrong for meditation teachers to charge for their time yeah and of course it's just I was going to say it's a silly thing to say it's just not a sustainable thing to say I remember I spoke to one of my meditation teachers once about that he says look we tried the poverty model and it doesn't work you know we have kids and we have mortgages and and we need we need to sustain ourselves and we need to be comfortable so that we can teach and I think you can you can sort of take that line and extrapolate that out to companies companies should also be sustainable and actually there's nothing wrong with profit right what the the problem with concepts like profit is they've been sort of commandeered if you like by greedy people so profits become a bad word because you look at the banks and you look at companies that pull resources out of the ground and you look at what's happening with some of these big tech companies right now is they forget their responsibilities I wrote an article on our blog the other day about the harmony the necessary harmony between rights and responsibilities and then somewhere along the way these two things have diverged you absolutely have a right to create wealth absolutely but you have a responsibility to be generous and to pay your tax and to do the right thing by others and the problem we've got is a lot of people sort of savagely defend their rights but ignore their responsibilities and when you have rights without responsibilities they become divisive they become greed and they become so when Nico and I first started Insight Timer we kind of decided that there was essentially two types of organizations that existed today one of them sort of the commercial entity which is essentially primarily focused around profit right companies they talk about fiduciary duty and value to shareholders and maximizing profits and efficiency and all this other stuff and a lot of these companies do a very very good job of creating a lot of wealth for their shareholders and a very very bad job of creating a conscious planet right they take it out of the environment they take out of the planet they sort of hoard rather than contributing back so that's on the one hand on the other side you've got the complete opposite in simplistic terms that's called charities organizations that exist to serve the welfare of others the problem with this group of organizations is they depend on the charity the generosity of others they're not sustainable and so they tend to reach a level of entropy at some point or they're constantly spending all of their time trying to find people to support them which is very distracting a lot of the funding that they earn has to go into sort of organizing teams of people to raise funding right yep and so we looked at these two things and we thought well neither of these two things actually are going to sustain a conscious planet we actually we have to create something that's in the middle right if you want to get smart people out of school and university to come and work for you need to create the possibility for them to build a career and to create wealth and to be comfortable and so this is kind of what we're trying to do it inside timer which is we're absolutely unapologetically trying to create a profitable company but we won't do it if it means at the expense of respecting our responsibilities which is actually considering the planet considering all of the stakeholders and that's very challenging you know because we give meditation away at the moment to 6. 25 million people for free and we have about 50, 000 people that pay a small five dollar subscription every month and we we could be profitable much sooner right we could turn off some content and lock down this and turn that off but we won't do it we're very fortunate we have we have a great group of investors that believe in inside timer and we hope we'll get there eventually but that's the challenge it's like how do you give your product away for free and really give meditation away to every person on the planet and make a profit in the process and the answer is it's very very hard yeah and look you know i it's one of those things that you know if we just go back to sort of startup world for a little second it's one of those things where you know there are two schools of thought always do you start with free or do you start with pay because very hard to convert there are lots of businesses who've done had a real struggle converting free to paid regardless of how conscious you want to build your business anyway yours is i think a slightly different space and how you build a product and how you change that product in in in time as well yeah i mean a good a good comparison there for you just for your listeners is if you look at apple music and spotify and they're two very reputable businesses very successful and two very different models apple's model which is a subscription business is you have to pay to play right you don't get anything unless you pay a monthly subscription same as netflix of course they give you a month or two free to try it out but essentially if you want to consume the content you have to pay spotify's model is very very different it says you can listen to whatever you want and that's great for artists and it's great for the audience because we're creating sort of connections between artists and music and listeners but if you want to do certain things on our app well you have to pay for that and we've kind of taken the spotify approach if you want to download and things like that or take a course then you pay for the delivery of that correct but if you want to actually have a meaningful daily meditation practice with the timer and all the support groups and 15 000 titles and access to 3 000 teachers all of that's free yeah and look it is absolutely staggering i mean one of my favorite uh one as a family favorite is sarah blondin we just love her style of delivery and you know i was checking out some of your meditation teachers earlier and you know you've got some like mary maddox has been around for forever you've got jack cornfield's been around forever but these are mainstream teachers right on your platform as well and you know sarah's had 6. 2 million people listening so in the in bringing other new meditations i've got friends who have just become vedic meditation teachers and are doing different things around the world and you know it's something i want to recommend to them to do that i i don't know you'll know the answers but when they're coming on when people are listening to the free side of the presumably they then reach out or have the ability to reach out to the instructor and say can i come and you know do you have any courses i can come and do and they're happy to pay for that is there flow back to those teachers even from the free side yes actually it's it's it's slightly better than that ed for the teachers so firstly insight timer really is the best platform for a meditation teacher to reach a whole new audience of people without spending money their own money on advertising when you upload new contents uh for the first time in our app you might get 10 or 15 000 people that day who will play your guided meditation and they'll rate it and i'll tell you what they think and then they can follow you on the app and join your group if you have one and then you can start a discourse with them and all of that is just part of the free service what we do which is also very different to most other platforms is we share exactly half of all of our subscription revenue with our teachers right there's that great line which is a platform should create more value than it captures that's another reason why we're not profitable at the moment because if you take a dollar that someone spends on insight timer 30 of that goes off to apple and google for the app store commissions that leads 70 we keep 35 and the teacher takes 35 for that and we pay teachers that 35 for their free content right so if you're a teacher that uploads regularly and creates great new content and gets good ratings at the end of the month we take the 35 of all the money we've earned and we split that up between all the teachers who've been uploading contents so even though their content's free they're actually getting paid for from the revenue we generate through the subscription that's fantastic but we've only had a revenue engine if you like up for about a year now it's very early days but we it's been very well received by the community our biggest challenge ed is we don't have enough users on the platform we've got about six million users we only have about 50 000 subscribers i guess but 50 000 times five dollars times 35 doesn't add up to enough to actually pay our monthly bills right so and what we need to do is we need to get to 50 million yeah people meditating for free on the app and that makes you might have half a million subscribers right one percent and the there is that that means we'd be sustainable and our teachers would be earning solid monthly income so it sounds like you need to do some promotion christopher that's why i know you don't want to well that's why i'm talking to you this morning i don't know any less yeah but i've come here to tell the world i could definitely um put you in touch with a few others if you want to go down that path um who've got very significant shows and can help in that respect as well but that would be great i essentially have a rule now where i just say yes to any not any person obviously and it's very exclusive yeah of course thanks for that no i'm this is kind of i think my role now for the next 12 months is just to demystify what mindfulness and meditation is and talk to people about the fact that you don't have to pay 100 bucks a year for a meditation practice it doesn't mean you don't have to if you like it but the point is there's a free alternative with 3 000 teachers and of course we'd love you to end up subscribing for a bunch of other things on the app of course we would but what we won't do we won't lock you out after seven days yeah if you don't subscribe you will continue to be a welcome member of our community and we will nurture you all the way through for as long as you like on our app as a meditator and that's brilliant practice this this morning uh well you know an hour or so ago i'd used the timer and a bell and everything else and they come up with came up with seven you know seven days get the free content so that's great to hear for people who are actually listening and to hear that message right from you you're not going to get locked out and there are a couple of things i want to touch on because i know our time is short today um one is you know you've you've talked about two struggles that you've had yourself one is you know the early stage of a an entrepreneur you had like all of us successes and failures but you know it hurt it hurts you and you talk about success and failure do you think it's about time and i'm really passionate about this we stopped we started reframing around success and failure to just their adventures life is not a failure or a success it's a series of projects it's a serious adventures we have some we do better than others but every single time we learn from that because that's what you know meditation teaches us it teaches us not to be reactive it teaches us to observe it teaches us to be calm it teaches us to be much better at resolving problems from our heart base and from our mind yeah i think the big challenge with entrepreneurs is you have to detach your personal identity from your company and it took me a long time to understand that uh i had a web development company when i was 24 and financially speaking it was a disaster i ended up with three million dollars worth of debt um i couldn't pay the staff and this was back in the tech wreck of 1999 2000 2001 and i could have done what most companies did at the time which is just call it in declare bankruptcy but i owed my mum money i owed my brother's money anyway i spent eight years paying it back and i paid back every last cent but for a long time afterwards i felt like a huge failure money and family cause cause you know challenges and i really defined myself personally as a failure because my company had been a failure and i mean when i say a failure it was a it was a it was a disaster and then what happened was i started another company which was a discount ticketing business and for six or seven years that was a failure too and then it came good at the end and i suddenly i felt oh jeez i'm not a failure anymore because i suddenly have a successful you made money yeah we made money we made a profit you made a profit and of course now as i get older i look back on that web development company and i realize in hindsight that kind of everything i learned in that company is stuff that i'm applying to how we grow and protect insight timer if i hadn't have been through that experience for 10 years building that web development company i don't think insight time it would be what it is today right so you start to look back on your failures in inverted commas and then you start to consider them as assets yeah i don't think people really understand how hard it is they all think you know there are lots of people promoting the the glory of being of having your own business yes it can create wealth for you there are other ways of doing that as well but it's not for everyone i've seen many people it's just not they just cannot get their head around what it takes and and to move through and the other thing i wanted someone told me the other day that the startup's like jumping out of a plane and trying to nick the parachute on the way that means that many of us hit the ground right well 93% is it yeah i find the analogy a bit generous because it implies that if you know how to knit and you're fast you can actually get there but statistically you know i think the analogy would be more accurate if it was you know you jump off a 30-foot wall and try and hit the parachute on the way down and the other thing i wanted to touch on is like you're in bali um you went there i think in 2012 i went there in 2014 i went there for all sorts of different reasons as well and we were touching on this earlier you know i went there because i was diagnosed with cancer i just lost a bunch of money in a tech startup but you know and i was building another business and we needed time out we needed to really to go to a location where the energy was good it's reasonably clean in the sense of there's not too much white noise going on i mean it can be you have to try and tune out of it it's good for the kids and what i figured we're talking about all the nutrition i was a raw vegan all the exercise all the meditation all of the energy healing all the shamans i saw the one thing that i believe and my cancer left when i was meditating i'll put that out there right now so that's one reason to be doing stuff it really does work but the one thing was that i really believed it was going to happen and you were saying that you know in your experience of many people who come to the island many people who are looking to heal wherever they are in the world the one thing that the biggest impact is they know it's going to happen um sorry i didn't understand that saying that out of all the mechanisms for healing the one thing which really is most impactful is having the right mindset that you're going to get better or that you're going to yes this is a this is a this is um this is a tough one to answer um i do think there is a direct correlation between mental states and health i don't think that's i don't think anyone would dispute that there also is now research which suggests a very high correlation between what's going on in your gut your stomach and your mental health and that that these things are all very sort of symbiotic or codependent call it what you like and i'm hesitant to go sort of too much further than that because different people deal with ailments and diseases and cancers and things in their own way but i do think the mental state is the primary state and that worries me because i'm you know running a startup is a stressful is a stressful thing to do i'm we can't explain yet why someone who perhaps eats a lot or smokes a lot can live to 95 but someone who's extremely healthy can die early i read something about a year ago which said happy mind happy cells and i kind of do think there's some correlation in there so the last question i had for you is you know you talk a lot on on other shows about you know your own daily struggle with meditation as well as fitting the time in and getting yourself into the right space so for any meditators out there are people who are thinking of starting to meditate because they you know they want to experience the benefits of it what would you suggest how would you suggest they use the app as a first-time meditator yeah i always i'm getting uncomfortable as i as insight time it grows because i'm often asked about my meditation practice i think i'm the worst person that you could ask and then i remind myself that my honesty around this is actually i think what the community appreciates right we're not those people that sit up on a hill and say you must meditate we we know that meditation is definitely beneficial and i know that when i'm meditating corners in my life seem a lot rounder things seem a lot smoother i'm slower to react negatively to things and i know when i'm not meditating the opposite is true the the big question is how do you maintain a regular meditation practice and the answer to that is that if someone knew the answer to that question that you're solving it what i do know is there are things that you can do which can help a lot the first one is stop using the word meditation because i think a lot of people think oh should i i don't know what that is and it conjures up all of these woo woo stuff you know what we're talking about is taking you know 10 15 20 minutes twice a day to sit in a quiet space and just stop right and if you can do that and think of it that way it's just time out and there are things that you can do such as breathing right regular breathing is a great way to get into a meditative state there are great music tracks on the app you can listen to which will help you get into that meditative state and just start there we have a seven-day course on the app which is free as you know and there's that's done by Sarah Blondin and that will talk you through some more specific stuff but don't beat yourself up about it and don't think i don't understand it because if you're sitting quietly with your eyes closed for 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the afternoon just that is a great start right and then of course as you start to do that more often you'll possibly become curious about all the various different types of meditation and you might get interested in one or the other that would be my that would be my guidance don't elevate meditation up on a pedestal just throw that idea out and just sit with yourself for 15 minutes a day quietly and go from there that's a perfect message to end on and i was normally say where do you find where do people find you but i think that's a pretty obvious answer right yeah it's no doubt on android and ios and the website is brand new insight timer. Com Christopher it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for joining me i've enjoyed it next time you're back in Bali look me up we'll uh we'll go out and we'll hang out

Reviews

It was really informative talk and very insightful. I love the app even more now.

Awesome to see how far Insight Timer has come!

Quite fascinating to listen to this interview & appreciate this platform a lot more. I have often felt that sharing our failures is inherently more valuable than sharing our successes. I guess that means being prepared to be vulnerable…

Thank you Chris and the Insight Timer team for everything you do. I have used the app for a number of years and been subscribing for a couple of years. I love the ethos, love the content and love the additional features you have implemented. I am grateful for Insight Timer and the community. Namaste 🙏✨💕

Great to know IT is in good hands.