Why I changed my mind on Calm

Turns out it's not just for Silicon Valley colonizers.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been getting a ton of ads for this app called Calm recently. It shows a relaxing nature scene with a short little timer that tells you to “Do nothing for 30 seconds”.

I’ve heard of Calm before, and I knew that it was an app that was meant to help people meditate. On paper, it’s something that should appeal to me. I’ve been meditating since I was a freshman in college and I strongly believe that it’s something everyone should do. Studies have shown over and over that meditation helps to reduce stress and increase creativity, among a million other benefits.

That being said, I always thought the concept of meditation apps was incredibly stupid. Part of the reason why I meditate is so I can get away from social media and technology. Using an app to meditate sounded like it was totally defeating the purpose.

Plus, human beings have been meditating for thousands of years without having to use apps. I had the impression that the company was a bunch of douches from Silicon Valley trying to colonize an ancient practice. 

Why I downloaded the Calm app even though I thought it was stupid

Even though I thought the app was a stupid idea, I had to admit the company was actually doing pretty well. Calm was estimated to have made $92 million in 2019. And the market for meditation is booming, especially with people being stressed out and stuck in their homes. Currently, Calm is seeking a valuation of $2.2 billion.

Right now, Calm has several subscription packages available to customers. To get access to the full Calm library, you need to pay $12.99 a month, $59.99 a year, or $299.99 for a lifetime subscription. 

It was hard for me to believe that a $60 subscription to a meditation app would be worth it, and it was even harder for me to believe that a meditation app company could be worth billions of dollars. After all, you can find guided meditations and relaxing music on YouTube and you don’t need to pay anything for it. Or better yet, you could just sit quietly by yourself to meditate.

But as someone who works in marketing, I had to admit that the company’s ads were great. They stand out right away because they’re just so different from any other ad on your feed. Plus, it shows you right away the benefits you can get from just chilling out and slowing down even for a few seconds.  So I decided to try out Calm’s 7-day free trial just to see what it was like.

My initial impressions of the app

The first thing I realized about Calm is that it wasn’t just a meditation app like I was expecting. 

According to the company’s founder, the Calm team noticed that people were using the app a lot around 10:30 at night. They realized that customers were using Calm to fall asleep. That inspired the company to create “Sleep Stories” where dudes with smooth voices like Matthew McConaughey (he’s actually on the app) talk in soft voices to help you relax before bed. 

Calm actually doesn’t call itself a “meditation” company. It calls itself a “mental fitness” company. The app’s got content designed to get you in the right mindset for anything. For example, there’s a series where Lebron talks about the techniques he uses to stay relaxed during games. There’s also music from artists like Toro y Moi that you can play when you’re working or studying. 

 While I personally wouldn’t use the Sleep Stories,  I already do listen to ambient music when I’m working and watch videos of Kobe talking about the “Mamba Mentality” on YouTube when I need something to break me out of procrastination. So even without the meditation, there was already a lot of content I could use on daily basis. 

Are Calm’s meditations just for douchey Silicon Valley colonizers?  

After I listened to Lebron talk about he uses meditation to hit game-winning shots, I tried out some of the guided meditations on Calm. While my expectations were pretty low, I came out feeling pretty calm and pretty relaxed. And I'm not the only person that feels that way. A study showed that 99% of Calm users felt happier after using the app.

I realized I was being too judgemental (which ironically, is something that meditation is supposed to stop you from doing) about the concept of meditation apps. Meditating by yourself is pretty tough, even for someone like me who’s been doing it for years. So if an app helps you build a positive habit, it’s not any less meaningful because it came from some developer in Silicon Valley and not some Buddhist monk who spent thirty years fasting in the Himalayas. 

Even though you probably don’t need an app to meditate, you could say the same thing about a lot of the things you pay for. You don’t really need a Spotify subscription to listen to music since you can find most of it for free on YouTube or even pirate it if you want to. What you’re really paying is for convenience. The same way Spotify makes it easy for you to listen to music, Calm makes it easy for people to turn meditation and mindfulness into a daily habit. 

A potential problem for Calm

One big advantage that Calm has as a company is its low operating costs. Unlike most startups, Calm is already profitable because it doesn't cost that much money to create guided meditations and sleep stories.

But the fact that guided meditations are so cheap to create raises a potential issue: it’s easy to copy. I checked out another meditation app that’s pretty popular, Headspace. Even though I thought that Calm had slightly more content to choose from, the two apps are pretty similar. You can easily switch from one to the other without missing that much. That shows me isn’t that Calm doesn’t have anything that differentiates it from the competition just yet. 

 Calm might have to deal with even bigger competitors soon. I really don’t see what’s stopping companies like Amazon or Apple from creating their own meditation apps. They can pour money into them to develop great content and include them in their existing subscription bundles. After all, both of them have already created subscriptions for your physical health (Amazon Halo and Apple Fitness+), so doing the same thing for mental health would just be a natural next step. 

If Calm really wants to stand out, the company should spend more time and money investing in unique content. Just like Netflix manages to stay ahead in streaming by investing billions in original TVs and shows, Calm can stay ahead of the competition by making sure that its library is miles ahead of anyone else and that it’s got content that can get you in the right mindset for any possible situation.

In conclusion 

Now that I’ve actually used the app, I see why people pay for the subscription. Personally, I’ve had months at work where I was absolutely killing it and months where I felt like I was messing up every day and wondered how I even got hired. The only difference between those months was my mindset. So if using an app like this helps you sleep better, be more in the moment, and feel less stressed, then it’s totally worth it. 

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