Alex Tew, co-founder of Calm, explains the viral PR flywheel behind his 2005 breakout project, The Million Dollar Homepage.
Disclosure
Tew: Calm raised over $400k from 12 angels after 100+ meetings
“I think in, in the end we raised from about 12, 12 people and they were all individual angels. The biggest concern people had was, how is this going to be a business? You know, you're going to build a business around Calm. You're going to bring meditation. Lik…”
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.”
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.”