Insight Timer, Plowman told me in a rare moment of transparency for a startup, costs $1,000,000/month to operate. But it’s also the sort of scruple that many (most?) in the startup community and growth marketing community would quickly forget or set aside. “Because we’re in the kind of the mindfulness space, we’re in the mental health space, you know, it’s not right that companies are billing people that they know don’t want to be billed, right?” “This to me is a real problem,” Plowman says. Normal even, for growth marketers.īut certainly also with a degree of moral hazard. Result: the company stopped sending that email. And annual membership renewals also get marked with an email warning of the refreshed charge on your credit card because, as Plowman says, “we don’t want people on our platform as subscribers who don’t want to be subscribers.”Ī competitor, Plowman says, found that when people were emailed about their subscriptions renewing, some fraction immediately unsubscribed. The free seven-day trial, for instance, comes with no fewer than four emails throughout the week, each with a big unsubscribe button so you won’t accidentally pay for a membership that you don’t want. And, of course, precisely what an online sales pitch might say.īut rather than spamming its community to join the paid tier, Insight Timer bends over backwards to not sell. Listen to the interview behind this story in the TechFirst podcast :Ĭhristopher Plowman, CEO of Insight Timer Christopher Plowmanĥ0% off happiness sounds pretty good. We go there, Plowman says, to be observed by others, and therefore fail to participate in their true nature. It’s also the simple nature of social media as an observation platform. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps thanks to the fact that Insight Timer has set up its own community and social space, Plowman has opted out of most the modern world’s social media, saying that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are “incredibly toxic.” The toxic part, however, isn’t just what you might think: the anger, the self-righteousness, the judgement, the arguments, and the vitriol that thrive on social platforms. But a lot of this stuff is kind of trained out of us as we get older.” “We’re taught performance, and we’re taught rules and societal agreements, and all these sorts of things. “We’re not taught happiness, actually,” he says. Plowman says the goal of Insight Timer is very “cheesy” but simple: making people happier. Probably informed by the company’s mission, the oddity doesn’t stop there.
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