Alex Tew describes the difficulty Calm faced raising its initial angel round because investors doubted people would pay for meditation.
What-if
Tew: Early capital constraints forced Calm to innovate sleep stories
“I think if we had raised tons of money very, very early, we may have not had the scrappiness to, say, do sleep stories. You know, we may have just kind of been drunk on, you know, expensive, unprofitable user acquisition. So I think we kind of got the foundati…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tew: Early Million Dollar Homepage advertisers got massive returns
“People were getting something in, in return, you know, they were getting an advert that people could click on, and some of those early Advertisers got an insane return on their investment.”
Insight
Tew: Press attention drove the Million Dollar Homepage's viral loop
“Every piece of press was making it more valuable. I remember one of the early interviews I did was on the BBC breakfast show. So this is like Good Morning America, right? But in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sitting on the couch and they're like, you know, why i…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tew: 'Do Nothing for Two Minutes' gained 2M visitors in a week
“We just, we built it one afternoon and tweeted about it, and it just went viral. And within a week, had about two million visitors.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tew: 10% of early Calm mobile app downloaders paid the $5 fee
“There was like a couple of audio recordings for free, and then you'd pay five dollars to unlock the full app. There was no subscription. In fact, at the time, Apple hadn't embraced subscriptions at all but it was encouraging because 10% of people who downloade…”
Assertion Supported
Calm hit its first $1 million month in January 2017
“She helped do our first successful user acquisition, and it was in, I think, January, 2017, we had our first million dollar month, and it's because we had cracked the UA code.”