Our CEO Christopher talks about Insight Courses

Christopher talks with meditation guide Tom Evans about the new Insight Courses and how their accessible format makes mastering meditation and achieving personal growth easier than ever.

Transcript

So hi,

I'm Tom Evans and welcome to another podcast and I'm thrilled today to be having Christopher Ploughman,

The co-founder of Insight Timer,

Back on the podcast for the fourth time I believe,

Christopher.

Yeah,

I was trying to work out this morning,

Tom,

Is this number three or four?

I don't get as nervous talking to you as I used to now.

I feel like we're old friends.

I'll let you into a secret that I'm always nervous speaking to anybody on any podcast and it's always good.

It's that lovely adrenaline you get.

You're the Michael Parkinson of Insight Timer.

So it's always a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me.

I should share something with you.

People when I first got on the app said,

Oh,

What a lovely voice,

Like an uncle.

But it's now been two and a half years now and I turned 60 last two months ago and some people started saying,

What a grandfathery voice I've got.

So obviously the years must be taking their toll.

Well I'm now seeing ads on Google for life insurance.

So I'm 43.

So someone knows that I'm getting old as well.

We're here to talk about something which I know lots of people,

Meditation guides and also meditators have been looking forward to for some time and you've been talking about it on the podcast for at least the last two or three that you've just launched this week courses on the app,

Which is just absolutely fantastic.

We have insight courses are alive,

Tom,

And everyone's utterly exhausted.

It was a bit of a hectic sprint for the last few months.

But they launched on what's today?

Today's Wednesday afternoon in Bali where I am and they launched on Monday evening.

So they've been up now for a little less than 48 hours,

I think,

If my math is correct.

And it's been utterly amazing.

In the last two days,

I think more than 10,

000 people have started taking the free learn to meditate course,

Which has just blown us away.

People are diving into the classroom and asking questions and so on.

And of course,

We've launched we only launched with six courses initially because we wanted to sort of trial at first and see how it goes.

So we picked six of our popular women meditation teachers,

Tara Braak,

Sarah Blondin,

Bethany Oriel Hagen,

Carrie Grossman,

Kate James,

And Jennifer Peirce.

And we launched six courses.

And we were a bit anxious about it because,

You know,

This is one of the few times on Insight Timer where you actually pay to experience the product.

But actually,

What's happened in 36 hours is more than a thousand people have actually paid for and started a course with one of our six teachers.

So we're just really,

Really happy to see things taking off.

I also check in with you every time I'm on the podcast,

What the numbers are like,

Because it seems to go up on up every single time.

I passed the one million listeners market a week or two ago,

Which is just phenomenal.

I wasn't expecting that to happen.

It did.

I saw that.

You're now one of our million meditation teachers,

Tom.

Welcome to the to the million club.

I'm going to thank you because the app is such a great platform,

Not just for people that want to meditate for free,

But as a showcase and a place for people like me who didn't even know he was a meditation teacher to reach out to people.

So from that perspective,

The app is a fantastic success.

So what are the numbers like nowadays?

How many meditators have you got?

How many guides?

Well,

They're kind of scary.

You know,

It's it's it's becoming a it's super exciting,

Obviously.

And it also it's a bit daunting sometimes.

It feels like a big responsibility to keep all the pieces in place because there are so many people all around the world now who who use insight time for their meditation practice.

We're just about to hit four and a half million meditators in terms of people that have actually signed up to the app.

I think we have about and obviously not all of those are active.

People have different meditation practices and meditate in different frequencies.

But we have about one point five million people who are regularly on the app every single month.

And so it's a big number.

It's a big number.

And we also have now,

I think,

Just on two thousand meditation teachers and musicians.

So it's you know,

It's daunting.

Yesterday,

I was just looking at the stats and I think we had twelve thousand people sign up to the app just yesterday in a single day.

Wow.

So,

You know,

It's super exciting.

It's super exciting.

We've got lots of sort of which I won't bore your listeners with,

But lots of technical and administrational challenges to keep it moving and going.

But we have a great team now working really well together.

And I hope the number keeps growing.

So your servers have got pretty good uptime.

You must have lots of redundancy in the system somewhere.

We do.

We have.

I think our Insight Timer actually isn't a single piece of sort of isn't on a single server.

I think it sits on forty five servers around the world.

So for example,

When I'm accessing Insight Timer here in Bali,

I'm accessing a different version of it than you are in London,

Which reduces the lag time and the speed that it takes to deliver content.

Actually,

The app went down yesterday.

Worst timing ever.

We just launched courses and it went down for about two minutes.

But yeah,

It's a big infrastructure to to keep all this going.

I do have another interesting stat for you,

Tom.

You know I'm a Virgo and you know I enjoy my stats.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

But what I've always loved about Insight Timer is the fact that it's sort of a global community.

And we actually discovered yesterday that for our Android users,

San Paolo is actually has more meditators on Insight Timer than any other city in the world,

Which absolutely blew my mind.

So there you go.

There's a little tidbit.

It's not New York.

It's not San Francisco.

It's not Chicago or Paris or London.

Although these cities have obviously very big groups of Insight Timer meditators.

It's a non-English speaking city somewhere else in the world.

That's Brazil.

I think I've got one in Portuguese as well.

You've got a few Portuguese meditations.

We do.

We've actually just employed a Brazilian Portuguese community manager who's going to help us grow that community.

And all the Learn to Meditate,

The free course is about to be launched in about four weeks time in 10 different languages.

So if you don't speak English,

You'll still be able to do the Learn to Meditate course in your language.

That is a phenomenal thing to do.

What a thing.

Anyway,

Let's talk about courses.

So what are these courses?

What's the difference between a meditation sitting by itself and a course?

Well look,

As you know,

We now have 10,

000 guided meditations on the app.

They're all free.

A course is something that we've been thinking about for a long time now.

They're obviously completely optional.

We really are very committed to providing the best free meditation practice to every person on the planet.

You can come to Insight Timer and meditate with the timer and interact with the groups and check your stats and listen to 2,

000 different teachers and you won't pay a cent.

That's absolutely critical to us.

That's the sort of the fundamental promise of Insight Timer.

But of course,

We want our teachers to make an income.

We want Insight Timer to make an income and we spent many years actually trying to work out the best way to do that.

And in the end,

You know,

Having spoken to the teachers,

We realized that so many of them have lots of really in-depth knowledge that they have turned into courses at some point or another.

And of course,

They sell their courses because they take a great deal of time to build and create and curate.

And so initially,

We had just decided we were just going to upload these pre-existing courses.

And then we went and did a bit of research about online education and online courses.

And we discovered an interesting stat,

Which is actually only about 5% of courses which are purchased online are actually completed.

So they're often very expensive.

You often pay a couple of hundred dollars for a course and you don't finish them,

Right,

Which is a terribly inefficient equation.

And so we started sort of asking ourselves why.

And actually,

We realized that most courses sort of require you to sit at your computer,

Download a bunch of PDFs.

You have to set aside two hours on Wednesday and three hours on Friday.

And it's just a very clunky experience.

You've got to hand over your credit card details.

Some course providers then ask you to go over to Facebook and sign up to Facebook.

It's just all very clunky.

And so we came up with this idea,

Having read about a company in China that's doing this,

Which is Micro Learning.

And what this means is all Insight Timer courses are just 10 to 15 minutes a day.

They're in audio.

You don't need to sort of,

There's no video.

Meditation is a closed-eye experience.

And so they're these little nuggets of information and they're stitched up over 10 days,

Right?

So it's a 10-day course,

10 to 15 minutes a day.

And you just do them with your headphones and you can do them when you're out walking.

You can do them when you're sitting on the bus.

You can download them to your device so you can turn off all your internet access and go and do them when you're sitting on a mountain,

If you like.

And you learn something fascinating,

Right?

But you learn it in micro moments throughout the day.

And the other thing we did is we've created these classrooms.

So when you sign up to a course,

You listen to the 10 to 15 minutes of audio for that day.

And then you can post a question inside the classroom.

The classroom is not a Facebook group.

It's built into the actual app on the telephone.

And what happens is our teachers,

This is the bit I'm so excited about and it has been absolutely going gangbusters.

I'm not sure if that's an Australian term or some other term.

I think we can suss out what that means.

It's been going super well over the last 36 hours.

Because for example,

If you take Sarah Blondin,

She's done a course on the app called Coming Home to Yourself.

And you listen to the course or the day and then you type a question.

And Sarah then receives those questions direct to her phone.

And she can just click a button and she can reply to your question in audio.

That's phenomenal.

I love that.

What this means is you wake up in the morning and there might be three or four or five or ten audio replies from the teacher sitting on the app inside the course.

And in actual fact,

What we've realized is what this means is the pre-recorded audio that forms part of the course,

That is the course,

Actually becomes just one part of it because these courses become living classrooms.

It gets augmented,

Doesn't it?

Yeah.

And they just ask questions that they hadn't considered.

So they have to sit and actually think about this question.

And all of a sudden you see this discourse taking place.

It's a true,

True sort of knowledge sharing experience.

And if you're not someone that wants to post a question,

That's fine.

Because what happens is you can just sit there and look at the questions that other people have written and listen to the teacher answer the questions.

And what I love most of all about this feature is it really allows you to feel the teacher,

Because teachers are after all just people.

There's a course on the app called Body Love for Women by Bethany Oriol Hagen.

And the way she responds to the questions,

It's like she's sitting right there beside you.

They're so honest and true and authentic and funny.

So I'm really,

Really excited about this.

I hope it's going to really take off.

And as I said,

We've only got six courses to start with,

But we're launching another five courses a week every week for the next six weeks,

I think.

We've got 40 courses ready to go for some very sort of well-known meditation teachers and some less known meditation teachers.

And we'll see how it goes.

I always take so long to answer your questions,

Tom,

Because I always get too enthusiastic.

But there you go.

That's what Insight courses are.

That's great information.

So actually what I noticed there,

Because you know I'm a linguist,

Is that I noticed you used the word discourse and course in the same answer.

So in some respects,

They're actually Insight timer discourses as opposed to courses.

We won't change the name of them,

But I think you're correct.

Yeah,

So they become a conversation,

Don't they?

They are totally a conversation.

And this has always been for me what differentiates Insight timer from all other meditation apps,

Right?

It's consciousness,

Actually raising awareness,

Raising consciousness begins as a solitary experience,

Right?

But actually eventually ends up true consciousness,

We believe,

Is how you connect,

Interact with others,

Right?

It's your place in the universe according to your relationships with others.

And Insight timer is one big community of 4.

5 million people talking to each other,

Right?

And it's not social media,

It's not uploading pictures and videos and photos of your parties and stuff.

You actually can't upload pictures to Insight timer.

I'm quite adamant about that because I think that they reduce everything down to the sort of the lowest common denominator.

You've got to type,

You've actually got to talk to people by writing.

And now of course,

You can hear the teacher talking back to you with their voices.

It's fantastic.

It's good.

I noticed that the courses tab at the very bottom has replaced the groups tab.

And if like me,

You wonder where groups were,

And that's gone to top left.

Yeah,

I wouldn't mind just talking about a few more mechanistic questions for people that are new to this.

So one is,

There's a fee,

You can pay two fees,

You can pay a one off and yes,

A permanent.

Yeah.

So this is something we've really spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to get right.

It's super hard,

Actually,

Because,

You know,

As I said,

This is the first time we purchase some content on Insight timer.

But we really wanted these to be affordable.

That's the most important thing to us.

And because our model is different to other course companies,

We have so many people on the app,

We can actually afford to price these at a very low price point.

So you know,

And in the hope is we'll get lots and lots of people who buy them.

Right.

So that means that the teachers will earn an income and Insight timer will be sustainable as well.

But of course,

Is five dollars,

US five dollars.

And that allows you to use the course once it's called single use.

It's not like when you rent something and you've got a you've only got 48 hours to watch the movie or something.

It basically means you pay five dollars and you have as long as you want to complete the course.

So it's meant to be over 10 days,

But you might decide to do it over 30 days.

That's entirely up to you.

There's no time pressure whatsoever.

Or and then at the end of that,

You have 48 hours to continue asking questions and then your access to the course is closed or you can actually pay 20 dollars and have lifetime access to it.

So you can participate in the classroom for as long as you want.

You can ask as many questions as you want and have all of the course materials available to you.

So we got lifetime access.

So they are the two price points,

But we really didn't want price to be a reason why people couldn't participate with these.

So we've made them as inexpensive as we possibly can.

And that that number is about five dollars.

And the other thing that we do at Insight Timer,

Which is different to most other publishing platforms,

Is we're actually giving the teachers much more revenue than they get on other platforms.

So on other platforms,

A teacher might typically get 20 percent of the course fee and the publishing company takes 80 percent.

And that's mostly because they're traditional publishing companies and they have big infrastructure and all that sort of stuff.

We flipped it on its head.

So obviously,

Apple and Google take a commission on the app store.

But Insight Timer gets 20 percent and the teacher gets,

I think it's 52 percent of the course fee.

So they're actually making more than half of the revenue for every course.

And we're really proud of that.

We hope that means teachers will earn a meaningful income and we'll see how it goes.

Well,

That's much more than any other publishing route.

You know,

You publish a book or something like that,

You might only get 10 or 20 percent,

As you say.

So that's very generous.

Yes.

And this is this is just not sustainable.

Right.

Actually,

I've spoken to many hundreds of teachers on our app and a big portion of them actually do this in their spare time.

A lot of them are teachers or nurses or educators or therapists or what have you,

Because they simply can't afford to actually focus on their practice and knowledge sharing and teaching full time.

Right.

And for us,

That has to change if we're going to really raise consciousness,

Then we need to sort of start going after the number one issue we believe,

Which is ignorance.

And the best people to sort of dismantle ignorance are teachers.

Right.

But they need to be able to afford to actually teach.

Right.

And this is what I love about Insight Timer is we really we hope that this new course platform is going to mean that teachers can now slowly.

I'm not suggesting they all start leaving their day jobs.

But if this actually catches on,

It means teachers will actually be able to focus more on this.

And that for us is a great outcome for the planet.

Fantastic.

And you'll be opening this up to all teachers after the current 40 meditation courses are made live.

Yes.

Well,

Actually,

The process from today,

Just a bit of housekeeping,

If you like.

So we've launched 36 hours ago.

We have the free course and the six the six launch courses.

There'll be another I think 35 courses which are already done,

Which will be rolling out progressively over the next six weeks.

And of course,

There'll be the 10 foreign language translations of the Learn to Meditate course.

The next step after that is we're actually going to be launching 30 day courses.

So we have some teachers now who are already and that's for people that really want to go really in depth to certain topics.

And so we've got some teachers who are very excited about that.

But yes,

This is the this is the whole basis of Insight Timer,

Which is we don't as I said earlier to you,

We don't discern,

We don't decide who gets to publish.

All teachers will be able to create courses and upload them onto the platform and our community will will interact and consume the courses that resonate with them.

Fantastic.

And so from an operational perspective,

If somebody is trying to do their meditations daily,

If they switch to a course,

Does that course meditation count as their daily meditation on their own stats?

Do you know?

Yes,

It does.

And that was a hard thing to pull off technically.

I bet it was.

I can imagine that.

There's actually a little bug on the app at the moment.

I don't like to talk about bugs publicly,

But that's part and parcel of Insight Timer.

When you go to your profile tab and click on activity,

At the moment,

If you've done a course,

It shows up just as it says,

You know,

Tom completed 10 minutes of guided meditation.

As of tonight,

When we launch another update,

It will actually say Tom has just completed day two of so-and-so course.

And of course,

If you're a private person,

You can turn that off and people won't know that you've conducted that you're doing that course.

And what about the other developments that we've been speaking about for so many months now?

You've got some other things just about to turn up,

Haven't you?

Yes,

The list is too long.

It sometimes feels a little insurmountable.

But you will recall,

Tom,

When we launched the subscription product at Christmas,

We talked about donations because we have many,

Literally many thousands,

Tens of thousands of people who write into us often and say,

I'd love to be able to contribute something to this particular teacher.

And there are many companies now that do this who have a sort of a charitable or a giving platform.

So we're launching insight donations next month.

Of course,

Again,

It's completely optional.

It's done very tastefully.

But at the end of a guided meditation,

If you wish to donate money to that teacher,

It could be $1,

$2,

$5.

You'll be able to do that through the app.

And again,

We've really tried to ensure that the teachers get the lion's share of that revenue.

So after App Store commissions,

I think the teacher gets 85% of that donation,

Maybe 90.

I have to check my stats and Insight Timer will take a small commission on that as well in order to pay for our infrastructure and so on.

And so we're very excited about that as well,

Because this means that our teachers in the next sort of four to six weeks will have the courses platform and they'll have the donations platform.

And both of these things are optional.

If you're a user on the app who doesn't want to buy courses and you don't want to meditate,

You're still an integral and welcome member of our community and the whole thing experiences free.

And actually the free element just grows and grows.

It's just not like because courses are started.

That's the end of people uploading free meditations.

This podcast is obviously made freely available to everybody as other mindful podcasts are doing will be.

So there's going to be just increasing amount of free,

Freeness,

Free,

Premium content.

Yes.

I mean,

Look,

We have a bit of a problem at the moment,

To be honest,

Is that we have so many guided meditations that come through the request for publishing system at the moment.

Maddie,

Who you know very well,

Our publishing manager is really struggling,

Frankly,

Because there are just there are thousands of them banked up.

We release 10 every day because we'd like to give each guided meditation due respect and due space to be considered and listened to by our community.

But there's just a lot of a lot of guided meditation.

So we do our best to sort of do that,

You know,

As impartially as we can.

And yes,

You are right.

There will just be lots and lots and lots of more guided meditations and music tracks,

Which you can listen to for free.

And they'll continue to be uploaded 10 a day for the rest of my life,

I guess.

Well,

You've done an amazing job.

Got us in a really thank you the team.

I know that it looks like it's a swan on top,

Gracefully on top of the water.

But there's lots and lots of paddling going on underneath.

And people should remember that you're doing this on Apple,

Android,

Tablets,

Phones and as an ex developer,

I know that just one of those platforms is tricky enough to try and make it backward compatible on every single version of phone iOS and all that sort of stuff is tricky work.

It is very tricky work.

I'm very,

Very thankful that we have an amazing team.

I'll give them a shout out.

But Cyrus and Damon and Stefan and Ori and Chris,

Who are the sort of the leadership team of our product and technology group,

Have been working around the clock to get this built.

And we really are so very lucky that we've got such an amazing group of people that are coding it.

And you might be pleased to know,

Tom,

That in about two or three months from now,

You will be able to actually purchase the course over the website.

So if you're not someone that uses the telephone,

You'll be able to purchase your course through your computer as well.

Oh,

That makes a huge amount of sense,

Doesn't it?

Yeah,

But it's just another it's another platform for us to worry about.

But yes,

That will be coming soon.

And a big call actually to all the people that have been using the app for free is that actually you've got some very,

Very generous benefactors that have been keeping this platform alive for all these years and so will help.

Each person just contribute a little bit,

You know,

Five dollars even.

It just helps keep the app going,

Keep all these wonderful people in employment and hopefully some of these meditation guides and employment as well.

Look,

It does.

We've been,

You know,

I've said before,

Right from the start,

There was two people,

Particularly Bo Sheo,

Who set up a conscious fund and a good friend of mine,

An Australian woman called Gretel have really sort of spotted this from the start and they have funded us all the way.

And we now,

Of course,

We have many more investors who've been helping us achieve our goals.

But you are correct,

Tom,

If you know,

We never reach out to our users and say this directly,

But it does make a difference.

You know,

People who buy a course,

Someone who subscribes for the premium features,

That money is used very sparingly.

We're very grateful for it and it helps a lot.

So it doesn't mean you should feel obligated,

By the way,

If you're someone that doesn't spend money on Inside Timer.

But for those people that do,

We are genuinely very grateful.

And we're talking of a price of a cup of coffee,

After all,

Aren't we?

So it's not exactly a huge you spend.

Yes.

I mean,

Look,

It's your rights.

And we worked very hard to get it down to US $5.

But US $5,

For example,

If you convert that into an Australian currency,

It's about $8.

You know,

The numbers are for some people,

You know,

It's not easy to it's not easy.

And we understand that.

But I think we've got the pricing about right.

As I said,

If you don't want to purchase a course,

And you're happy with the guided meditations,

Then we'll see you tomorrow on the app and we'll we'll love to see you.

Absolutely.

And I've got a whole stream of free stuff I'm going to continue to upload and looking forward to my course being one of the ones that are made available over the next few weeks as well.

Well,

Tom,

We've got yours on time management.

I've been sitting here reviewing the creative where I'm not sure which week Maddy has slotted you in.

But it's coming.

I'm very excited by it.

And there will be a Tom Evans course on Insight Timer courses very,

Very soon.

Yeah,

The art of timefulness.

How about that?

So the art of timefulness.

I apologize.

Yeah,

No,

I'm excited.

I love flavor words.

So I've also started to work on a book with somebody called the art of winefulness.

However,

Drinking wine every day is could be a good thing for the soul and the spirit.

I don't know if we turn that one into a course,

But maybe we could discuss it privately over a glass of wine.

That would be that would be that would be a two week retreat.

Probably.

Anyway,

Thank you so much for all you've done.

Thank you for spending the time there on this podcast and creating the most marvelous app and experience I think on the planet for so many people.

Well,

Tom,

You're welcome.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you very much.

I look forward to coming back for interview five when we've launched donations.

That'd be lovely.

Speak to you soon.

Take care.

Thanks,

Tom.

Bye.

I've been Tom Evans and thanks for listening to this podcast.

You find out more about me and my website,

Www.

Tomevans.

Co.

And a big shout out to any of my fellow meditation guides on the app.

It's got a course coming out.

If you want to share your wisdom on this podcast and even do a live meditation,

Contact me through my website.

Bye for now.

Reviews

It seems like only yesterday that courses were released. I remember it well! Great to be reminded of the game play along the way. And count me in for the Winefullness course! 🥂
Looking forward to the Wineful SoulStorm soon, more expansive than a brainstorm!

I absolutely loved this talk! And I hope everyone there at insight timer knows the huge impact this is had on the world’s combined conscience! this app has completely transformed my life, and at a time when it was so desperately needed. I can’t thank you enough🙏

IT makes a wonderful difference in my daily life and I’m thankful for its existence. Very interesting to hear details about its establishment and courses from the CEO. Thank you, Tom. 💫

Thank you for sharing all this great information.
I love insight timer. It has changed my life for the best in so many ways. After

Good to hear the background to Insight Timer and what plans you have for the future.

Excellent! Dry informative!! Thank you..❤️🙏🏽

Awesome, inspiring and truly motivational! Huge shout out to founders, investors, back end support team, humble teachers and community members for making this app such a beautiful platform to build and share one's consciousness.

Concise and effortlessly effective.

Thanks for the great look under the hood of insight timer!

Exciting. Thanks for sharing the news.

Very informative! Thanks!

Christopher, I am full of gratitude for all your hard work you and your awesome team have done to make Insight Timer so very special.
_/\_ Namaste _/\_

Wow! My heart goes out to all at IT for this wonderful app. I'm so happy it's going from strength to strength. The ethics are so awesome and full of integrity. Thank you Tom and Christopher for a great insight into the new courses, sorry for the pun! Big love to all, Anna 🙏💕

Always good to hear what Christopher thinking and Tom makes sure to ask all the pertinent questions. I subscribe to the download option so I know someone is getting some $ for all the effort that goes into this wonderful app.

I am so grateful for IT and look forward to the courses. I recommend the app often and feel fortunate to be part of this virtual community. 💗Thank you to all involved!

Tom, I agree, I think this is the best app on the planet too. I really appreciate the conversations you have with Chris. I really enjoy knowing what is happening with Insight Timer and how dedicated Chris and the team and the instructors and musicians and the users are in raising our conscious awareness. Thank you! 🙏🏻

Great job Tom and Christopher! I’m looking forward to the new platforms.

So exciting! Thank you! I agree Insight is the best meditation app on the planet! It has changed my life, and I am so grateful for it! I look forward to giving back. ☮️💟🕉

So thankful for all that you have done! This APP has saved me in so many ways! Bless each and everyone of you! 💜

Great insight into the company. I actually see how I can add value & serve.