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 idea of Calm, he had his eyes set on the 93% of Americans that didn't meditate.

What does Alex build to get 100k signups before Calm launched? Million Dollar Homepage: The idea was to sell 1 million pixels for $1 each. In 4 months he sold every pixel on the website netting him $1,037,000. The million-dollar homepage was built in 2 days.

Sock and Awe: A game that Alex and his team built in 3 hours right after the George W. Bush shoe throwing incident. It got 9 million unique visitors in 7 days, after getting picked up by mainstream media all over the world such as The Telegraph and The Guardian.

Do Nothing For 2 Minutes: Way before the Calm launch, Alex built this website where people were asked not to move their cursor or keyboard for 2 full minutes, otherwise the counter will start over. Again it got picked up by mainstream media as Techcrunch & CNN and got 2 million unique visits in 10 days while capturing 100k+ emails for Calm before it even was a product.

How does he goes about ideating and building this product? Coming up with a viral idea. When Alex was looking to validate the idea of building a meditation app via attempting to create a viral product the goal was to test the sentiment that people were more distracted than ever, and that this problem resonated with a large audience.Seeding & growing your (potentially viral) product

For Twitter (the first place he launched), he framed the launch as an automated tweet to make the website seem more prevalent than it actually was.For Hackernews, he framed it as a challenge. Challenges are more intriguing than announcements.

To grab the media's attention you want reporters- who live on the internet - to stumble upon your product in the wild. More accurately you want them to stumble many times upon your product in a very short window of time.Why did it work? In the case of Do Nothing For 2 minutes, the reason why this worked was that it held a mirror at societal problem and highlighted in a fun shareable way. For Awe and Sock, the reason it worked was that it tapped into the zeitgeist at the time and highlighted it in a fun and shareable way. And for the Million Dollar Homepage it allowed people to own a small part of internet history and it did so in a fun and shareable way.

Ali Abouelatta • 🧘🏻Calm