Calm: The Sleeping Giant - [Business Breakdowns, EP. 08]

Calm is one of those companies that seems obvious in hindsight. When they got started in 2012, there were already 20m American who practice meditations and the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA had a modestly popular meditation audio-files you could download on your MP3 Player/iPod. But when Alex Tew first came up with the

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But the Calm meditation app was supposed to pass $100 million in revenue last year. I’m intrigued by Knowable, a sort of audio MasterClass. The co-hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast currently generate around $166,000 in revenue per month from their Patreon. And just today, Stratechery founder and analyst Ben Thompson launched a new podcast produ... See more

It’s brutal out there. But it’s not hopeless. There are a number of consumer apps that have stood the test of time, including some of my favorites: Grammarly, Duolingo, Noom, Calm, Flo, Future, and Spotify. To answer your question, I went deep into these seven companies (along with a few up-and-comers like Copilot, Centered, Mighty Health, and Greg... See more