How Headspace Grows: The Monk Who Built a $3B Meditation App

Lessons on category design and creation, the power of unshipping features, onboarding, and content-driven growth.

👋 Welcome to How They Grow, my newsletter’s main series. Bringing you in-depth analyses on the growth of popular companies, including their early strategies, current tactics, and actionable business-building lessons we can learn from them.

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Hi, friends 👋

Today, we’re going to see what we can learn about product from a Buddhist Monk.

Over the past few deep dives (Roku, Roblox, Jasper, Klarna), we’ve studied platforms and ecosystems, navigating their different layers and how they create all sorts of nice moats. Today, things are a lot simpler—and simpler can be wonderful, to paraphrase a lesson I learned from Headspace.

Headspace—the beautifully designed mindfulness app that popularized meditation for the masses—is just a single product with a wonderfully straightforward business model, and how they’ve launched and scaled brings us an uncomplicated guide on how to win in B2C.

Beyond insights on consumer go-to-market and stellar onboarding, this deep dive brings us two important topics we haven’t really touched on yet:

• Category creation

• The importance of taking features away from customers… 👀

And from a personal perspective, I was quite surprised it took me so long to even think of doing a deep dive on Headspace. It’s one of the few apps I use daily and one of the even fewer I’ve used for over 6 years. But more importantly, it’s an app I owe a lot to, as listening to Andy (the founder/monk who narrates all of Headspace’s content) for 10 minutes every morning has played a huge role in helping me understand the importance of mindfulness, being present, and just understanding more about how I feel/perceive emotions.

There’s just something so powerful about slowing down and paying attention.

On that note, before we jump in, let’s start by taking a moment for yourself.

Breath in…

…aaand breath out.

Okay. Let’s do it. 🧘

Here’s what you can expect in today’s analysis:

• Headspace, and the creation of the meditation market

  • Meditation made simple: The Enlightenment of Andy

  • Mind the market

  • “Better” is a trap: A lesson on category creation

  • A brief breakdown of Headspace’s GTM

• How Headspace Grows: Taking the Buddha to the masses

  • Onboarding: Driving activation, engagement, and retention

  • A deep focus on simplicity: Lessons on endless optimization, and a willingness to take features away

  • Content marketing and SEO as a growth engine

  • From D2C to B2B

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Actionable insights 🧠 🛠️

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here are a few of the tactical takeaways from Headspace — from a building perspective.

• If starting a startup, pick an idea where you have clear Founder-Problem fit. Caring deeply about a problem, ideally with first-hand experience, reduces the risk of burnout and makes it much easier to be obsessed with your customer experience.

• Avoid the “better” trap; create a category. As soon as you’re comparing your product to another (Better, Faster, Cheaper than), you’re competing in a crowded market. Rather, use The Magic Triangle framework (Product, Company, and Category Design) to create a No Ocean.

• When designing a new market, embrace competition. The more companies that enter and try to bring customers into the market, the more consumers will be aware of your niche, making everybody’s TAM bigger. Rising tides lift all boats.

• Follow these 6 high-level steps in a consumer GTM. Turn your idea into a problem<>solution insight → Narrow down an initial audience → Develop a wedge to hook them in → Find an unscalable way to reach and acquire them → Test and iterate to retain them → Build a durable growth engine to reach more customers.

• Onboarding is a bridge between what marketing promises a customer (i.e. the underlying selling point on landing pages, content, ads, etc), and the actual value the customer gets inside the product. That value is the aha moment—the moment a user experiences that this product does indeed solve their problem. But, as Headspace shows us, onboarding isn’t just about activation, it’s about engagement and long-term retention too.

• Unshipping is one of the more underrated skills of a product leader. Having a lot of features will not make your product great. Great products come from having the right features to solve customer problems and having those features designed in the right way. Don’t be afraid to remove features that have unnecessary carrying costs. Fewer high-quality features >> lots of bloat.

• Embrace multiple content platforms, but start with one. When using content as a growth engine, invest in being great on one channel, mastering it, being new, better, or different in your topics, and then continuing to build upon that success with new channels.

• Strategic partnerships are a great way to extend a bridge and tap into other brands’ hard-earned customer bases. When working with other brands, the key is to find an integration point with these other products that (1) benefits both brands and (2) meets the consumer when they might need it most.

Okay, tidbits over. Let’s get to the meat of it. 🫡

Small ask: If you enjoy today’s post and learn something new, I’d be incredibly grateful if you helped others discover my writing. Hitting ❤️ in the header, or sharing/restacking, are all a huge help. Thank you!

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Headspace, and the creation of the meditation market

Long before Headspace came along, around 567 B.C., Siddhartha Gautama was born into royalty in a small kingdom just below the Himalayan foothills of Nepal. Before he was born, his father, who was a chief, was told Siddhartha was destined for greatness. So, to protect him until the time came, Siddhartha was kept in the confines of their palace—shielded from the outside world.

Life was good. He was entertained by dancing women, educated well, and trained in all the tomfoolery a young man in 567 B.C. would be needed, like archery and swordsmanship.

But nobody likes to be confided—and Siddhartha yearned to explore beyond the castle walls. So, one day, he left and began to walk the streets of his town.

While on his maiden voyage, he encountered three simple things:ﾠa sick man,ﾠan old man, andﾠa corpseﾠbeing carried to the burning grounds. Nothing in his life of ease had prepared him for this experience. Taken back, his charioteer told him that all beings are subject to sickness, old age, and death. This lesson weighed heavily on him, and even after returning home, he could not rest.

To cut a long-winded story short, Siddartha resolved to search for the answer to the problem of suffering and find enlightenment. He left his family and home, cut his long hair, donned a robe, and The Buddha was born—setting in motion one of the longest-standing spiritual philosophies based on the belief that life is suffering and that meditation and the practice of mindfulness is one of the main ways to achieve enlightenment. Or, as the Buddhists say, nirvana

And it wasn’t until the end of the 1800s that this Eastern wisdom started to inch its way to English translations, and thus, Europe and America. Then, in the early 2000s, the volume of scientific research and institutional adoption of mindfulness began to boom, validating the efficacy of things like meditation.

However, if you told your friends you meditated back then, you’d certainly get some side eyes (I looked at my dad funny, for sure). It was seen as hippy and weird…until entrepreneurial monk, Andy Puddicombe came along.

Meditation made simple: The Enlightenment of Andy

Unfortunately, Andy’s story as a founder starts in a place of tragedy. When he was 22, Andy was standing outside a London pub on Christmas Eve when a drunk driver crashed into a group of his friends, killing two of them. A few months later his stepsister died in a cycling accident, and then an ex-girlfriend passed away during surgery.

Amid unimaginable grief and hardship, he left school and decided to travel to the Himalayas to train as a Buddhist monk. He joined a monastery and ended up spending the next 10 years as a monk, which took him all over Asia and involved him meditating for up to 16 hours a day. He says that meditation helped him come to terms with everything, changing his life. But while he had experienced the power of it first hand, he knew “meditation as a solution” was not accessible. As he says, "Some people were put off by the language behind meditation or saw it as a bit of a hippy thing to do. It was quite inaccessible. People didn't have time for it, or know how to do it."

Andy saw this as an opportunity, and he felt compelled to return to the UK and bring the benefits of meditation to more people.

So, in 2004, he set up a small private practice in London where he taught burnt-out professionals how to use meditation to help them in their daily lives. One of those people happened to be his soon-to-be founder, stress and anxiety-ridden Richard Pierson—a marketer with experience in brand development.

Richard and Andy got to talking, and as he recalls, “Andy’s first question to me was, ‘How much of your life do you spend in the present moment?’. I didn’t know that was a thing. It fired something up in me.” So, he offered to exchange marketing services for Andy’s operation for private help dealing with his anxiety.

Not long after, in 2010, the two then started an events business together, selling tickets for larger live meditation sessions. Around the same time, Andy’s profile began to rise as a meditation and speaking guru, publishing the first of three books, Get Some Headspace: 10 Minutes Can Make All the Difference, in 2011. This bought their humble little events business more attention, pushing them to scale to something.

Rich had amazing vision and saw the potential of what I was doing. He tried to persuade me to do an app – a very new thing at the time – which I thought was such a bad plan, so we launched Headspace as an events series in 2010. After receiving feedback that people had been inspired at our events but didn’t know what to do when they got home, Rich asked me to record some of the sessions. Almost three years later, those recordings became the main material of the app.

— Andy Puddicombe (Co-Founder)

So, in 2012, motivated by proven consumer demand and with the mission of improving the health and happiness of the world, the duo launched the first version of the Headspace app. Version 2 followed in 2014, and since then, they’ve been fleshing out a library of tailored Packs on topics like relationships (patience, kindness, generosity), performance (productivity, creativity, balance, focus), cancer, chronic pain, stress, sleep, anxiety, and sports, which the company spent years developing with British Olympic psychologists and athletes.

Besides these themed series (10–30 sessions each) that develop your ability to meditate on a broader aspect of life, Headspace also has Singles and Minis to serve as one-off sessions targeted at a quick fix or addressing a single event in life. And it’s not airy-fairy fluff—Headsapce is a science-first mental health company that optimizes for results.

During each science-backed session, Andy’s soothing voice introduces the chosen topic with some insights, leads you into a few minutes of meditation, and concludes the session with a pleasant goodbye, and see you tomorrow.

It’s a wonderful and personal experience, and in the world of B2C, a delightful and memorable experience is what helps you reach a valuation of $3B.

Speaking of money and mindfulness.

Mind the market

Headspace created the consumer meditation category (more on this soon), and has been credited with catapulting the meditation industry into a golden age of profitability. Neil Seligman, the author of several books on meditation, notes that Andy and Rich led the mindfulness revolution in the digital space:

The genius of Headspace was to take something as difficult and nuanced as teaching mindfulness meditation, and break it down into bite-sized, snackable videos, audios and practices. This is how they transformed the industry and penetrated the global market.

And Headspace’s work on driving awareness around the benefits of meditation and designing this category opened the door for others to enter, like Calm, which drove further investment and interest in the space. A great thing for the customer and mass adoption.

Today, the business of mindfulness is fast becoming a pillar of the $4.5T wellness industry.

• By 2027, the global alternative healthcare industry—including meditation, acupuncture, breathing exercises, yoga and tai chi, and chiropractic services—will be worth $300B.

• Mindfulness is one of the fastest-growing health trends in America, with over 15% of people in the US having tried meditation.

And Headspace (and Calm) entered the market with good macro tailwinds behind them, which helped drive market growth and enjoy first-mover advantages. Factors like:

• More phones, making meditation apps more accessible

• More science validating meditation

• More wellness-culture normalizing meditation

• More expensive mental health, driving demand for cheap alternatives

• More stress, burnout, worse sleep, and mental health problems driving the need for meditation

But, as mentioned, Headspace was the trailblazer that kicked the meditation category into motion. So let’s look a little more at what that actually means.

“Better” is a trap: A lesson on category creation

How many products can you think of that say they are faster, cheaper, smarter, or more efficient than another product?

A ton, I know.

Unfortunately, this is a comparison game. And the moment you’re comparing your product to somebody else’s, you’ve fallen into what the authors behind Category Pirates call The “Better” Trap. Now, building something “better” and convincing people to buy yours vs theirs isn't wrong or a bad business move—sometimes incumbents need disruption, and being better in some way can bring you big revenues.

However, it means you’re not creating net-new territory for yourself, and rather are making the unconscious decision to compete over a small sliver (~24%) of someone else’s plot of land.

Even the world’s most successful companies have made this mistake…

• Google thought they could build a “better” social network than Facebook— Google+—which became known as a “sad, expensive failure”

• Microsoft thought they could build a “better” in-store experience than Apple, leading to $450 million in losses.

You’re probably familiar with the Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean strategy.

While pursuing Blue Ocean is clearly more favorable, both are strategies for winning in an existing category.

To design and create a new category, and to become known for a niche you own, you need to focus on No Ocean Strategy.

And how do you do that? One of two ways:

• You combine two unrelated categories together

• You “niche down” on a particular subset of customers.

And once you’ve done that, tactically, how do you design your new category?

Simple. The Magic Triangle.

The Magic Triangle is the combination of Product Design, Company Design (or Business Model Design), and Category Design—each side with equal importance, ideally executed at the same time.

• Product Design: The purposeful building of a product and experience that solves the problem the category needs to be solved. The goal here is what the business world traditionally calls “product-market fit”—which we see as strategically flawed thinking. What you really want is “product/category fit”

• Company Design:ﾠThe purposeful creation of a business model and an organization with a culture and point of view that fits with the new category. The goal here is company/category fit, meaning you have engineered the right business model and missionary team for the problem you are looking to solve.

• Category Design:ﾠThe mindful creation and development of a new market category, designed so the category will pull in customers who will then make the company its Queen. In marketing terms, this is about winning over popular opinion and teaching the world to abandon the old and embrace the new.

All three elements—Company Design, Product Design, and Category Design—work together and balance each other to exert great force on a company’s success and value. And the legendary, enduring companies get the three elements of Company Design, Product Design, and Category Design in such a state of synchronicity that they reinforce each other.

— The Magic Triangle: Why Category Design Is The Single Point Of Failure

Let’s use that framework here with Headspace.

First, Andy and Rich created the category of micro, on-demand, meditations for the everyday person. Meditation existed, but as we saw with Andy’s initial practice in London, it was more workshop-based and long-form. That was the real blocker for mainstream adoption.

So, to create a category that gave meditation global appeal, they followed The Magic Triangle:

• Product Design: Headspace was designed with fun illustrations, a simple UI, and focused on bite-size content that was laid out for consumers in a straightforward and structured way

• Company Design: Both Andy and Rich exemplify founder-problem fit, and built a mission-driven team to bring meditation to the masses. B2C subscriptions were not novel, but they did bring that business model to the mindfulness market.

• Category Design: The biggest challenge they had was rebranding meditation and educating people on the benefits in a way that didn’t get their eyes rolling. That led to the idea of Packs, targeting areas like sleep meditations, performance, and exercise-focused content created with Nike and the NBA.

Together, Headspace made a new ocean for themselves, and as they did, more companies (Calm) entered and helped grow the category. And just a note, if you ever are in the business of creating a new category, having competition come and join you should be welcomed because it means category growth, which in the early days of a budding market is great for everybody. Rising tides lift all boats. 🚣

Okay, but creating a new category in and of itself doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. You still have to know how to launch and grow it. And when looking at Headspace, we can see they give us an excellent example of a consumer go-to-market.

A brief breakdown of Headspace’s GTM

Putting together a GTM strategy for a product can seem daunting, but the more complicated you try to make it, the less effective it will be. Simply, it’s an action plan to create awareness and acquire an initial set of users that will allow you to validate a hypothesis or insight, and take incremental steps towards PMF.

GTMs are often confused with growth plans. That comes later. A GTM’s job is all about outlining early-stage tactics. To illustrate, here’s what Headspace did to launch their category and get growth going.

They:

1. Turned their insight into an idea: Knowing the benefits of meditation, but realizing how unaccessible it was, Andy and Rich saw a gap for a consumer meditation app. This shaped their Job-to-be-done.

2. Narrowed down their initial target audience: Headspace’s addressable market is really anyone who is stressed, or needs a way to relax; i.e. everyone in the world. But that’s too wide to target, so they identified one or two subsets of this target base (a beachhead) and profiled their Ideal Customer Profile off the people attending their events.

3. Developed a wedge to hook them in: Andy and Rich already had feedback from their event customers that they wanted a way to practice meditation at home (AKA, outside of their event sessions). So, this became Headspace’s value proposition and GTM hook: bite-size meditation sessions in your pocket.

4. Found an unscalable way to reach and acquire them: Leveraging their events community and Andy’s social media presence as a meditation expert, they leaned into this community to convert IRL customers to app users. Tapping into your own (relevant) network is an excellent way to find your first few users.

5. Kept testing and iterating to retain them: They closed the loop by collecting user feedback through reviews, complaints, social media posts, user interviews, and data analysis. They used these insights/learnings for managing their roadmap and for future growth strategies. We’ll see shortly how they didn’t just use these learnings to build, but also to take away.

6. Built a durable growth engine to reach more customers: Headspace is really a media app, and this gives them a ton of fuel for their core growth engine: content marketing. Through brilliant content partnerships and leveraging their content on social media, they’ve created a solid engine for acquiring new customers.

And that’s how Headspace got started.

You know what’s next…

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How Headspace Grows: Taking the Buddha to the masses

As we unpack Headspace’s growth, we’ll get into lessons on (1) onboarding, (2) unshipping features, (3) content-led growth, and (4) executing the shift from consumer to the world of enterprise.

Onboarding: Driving activation, engagement, and retention

Onboarding is like a bridge. A bridge between what marketing promises a customer (i.e. the underlying selling point on landing pages, content, ads), and the actual value the customer gets inside the product. That value is the aha moment—the moment a user experiences that this product does indeed solve their problem.

Getting users to find that initial aha moment is called activation.

For lots of people, onboarding stops there. But really, onboarding is just as equally about getting those users to form habits around aha moments, discover other parts of a product's value, and ultimately drive people to upgrade and stick around longer.

Headspace knows that the core job of onboarding is to get users their first few moments of stillness by engaging them in a mini-practice. This will create a hot lead for them to turn into a paying customer.

After reviewing Headspace’s onboarding flow (which they routinely experiment around), they accomplish this in three ways: Investment, Usability, and Return.

Let’s break it down.

1. Investment (in oneself, and the product)

Investing in oneself is the primary theme that is gracefully woven into Headspace's onboarding sequence. This journey begins with the user sharing their personal goals, paving the way for a tailor-made meditation experience to help them achieve them.

Intros and capturing user intent

Friendly animations and introductory screens serve as gentle guides, instantly building rapport with the user. While the sequence may appear simple, the questions asked during onboarding serve to capture user intent. This dual-purpose design not only helps in personalizing the user's journey but also educates them on the various use cases of the app.

For instance, users are asked a simple: What’s on your mind? I want to…

• Feel calm and relaxed

• Be present and mindful

• Sleep soundly

• etc

Rather than teaching users just the basics of meditation and how to use the app, Headspace's onboarding helps users think inwardly to understand why they're meditating, enabling them to set personal goals based on what brought them to Headspace and then build meditation into their daily routines. This approach helps develop users' intrinsic desire to practice meditation—a key psychological hook to get people to form habits.

Also, I just love how the loading screen of the app—the first interaction a person has after downloading Headspace—is a basic breath-in-breath-out exercise, immediately bringing the user value before asking them a single question.

Getting users to invest in a meditation

Headspace understands the apprehension that a new user might have around committing to a meditation practice and ingeniously flows people during onboarding into "Basic": A 10-day course with each daily session just 3,5 or 10 minutes long (users can choose). The goal of this first-mile onboarding is to get users to finish the first day’s meditation in their first session. This bite-sized approach makes the mental investment palatable, encouraging users to envision long-term use while also hand-holding folks through 10 days of usage.

Headspace has definitely tested that and found if users log in every day, for 10 days, they are more likely to form a habit and retain.

Honestly, this makes me wonder though why they require users to opt-in to their 2-week trial before being able to access the Basic course, or any other content within the app. AKA—Headspace’s aha moment is paywalled. 👀

While I’m not privy to all the A/B tests they’ve run, I think there’s a big opportunity to delay asking users to commit to a subscription. Let folks at least get the Basic pack for free. Teach them the value of meditation, show them what the product experience is like, and over 10 days consistently deliver them value and kickstart a habit. Then hit them with a paywall.

Right now, Headspace makes it difficult to see the promised land unless you trust them enough to agree to pay.

Just a thought.

2. Usability

The home screen, and the Headspace Daily

One of my favorite things about Headspace’s design is the complete elimination of noise. Logged in, there are just three tabs:

• Today (Home)

• Explore

• Profile

And for the past year, I don’t think I’ve navigated beyond the home screen. My daily interactions probably consist of 1 or 2 taps in the app. Simply, they’ve done an excellent job at removing the need to think while on Headspace. Each day, you get a personalized list of exercises from any courses you’re taking, suggested content to enjoy in the morning, during the day, and at night (like a sleep track) as well as the Headspace Daily: a new lesson and meditation on some topic you’re interested in.

As you make your way through their suggestions, you “check” stuff off, hinting at gamification and people’s desire to complete things they’re presented with.

The combination of personalization and simplicity in an app where the core UX looks like a to-do list makes onboarding really smooth, and it’s clear their home screen is solely focused on getting users to continue their meditation journey and form a habit.

Personalized content suggestions

People use Headspace for a variety of reasons, and a single dose of meditation in the form of a Basic might not be customized enough for somebody’s problems of the day or week. So, to cover the surface area of issues on people’s minds and demonstrate all the ways meditation can help people, Headspace offers a wide range of different programs similar to Basic that focus on more specific internal problems. Some are simple, some are more advanced.

In this sense, customization comes in the form of their targeted series, catering to various internal struggles like relationships and health. This modular approach ensures that users find what they need without feeling overwhelmed.

Besides personalization and expanding the product offering for existing customers, each new Pack launched opens a door for Headspace to attract customers from new segments of the market: people experiencing issues in X.

We’ll touch on this more when we get to Headspace’s content strategy.

Designing for the mass market

Over the course of a Headspace guided meditation—or just across any branded touch point—there is no spiritualizing or ohm moaning: ideology and gimmicks are completely avoided. Their process is entirely based on physical and internal processes of listening, breathing, and noticing. This approach is absolutely necessary for ensuring Headspace avoids many of the biases people might have against meditation and lowers the bar since it can be done anywhere and at any time with some earphones.

Towards the end of the first session during onboarding, Andy asks the user to simply notice their internal state post-meditation to the internal state pre-meditation. This simple comparison, which is continued into the following sessions, is where Headspace essentially points out the Magic Moment for the user. If you don’t notice a complete sense of inner calm, at the very least, you hopefully notice tangible steps towards that aha moment of feeling more relaxed.

3. Return

Headspace’s habit-forming strategy is a testament to their understanding of human psychology and the art of subtlety.

Leveraging priming

Besides personalization, this is where capturing user intent becomes valuable yet again. Users have already told Headspace exactly what they want to get out of the app, so, they leverage that to routinely remind people that “Hey — you’re doing this for the direct benefit of yourself, and your life just might improve in X way because of this app”.

This is priming, where a user is exposed to something that influences their behavior later on (without even being aware that the first thing guided their behavior).

For instance, if you’ve told Headspace the biggest problem you want meditation to help with is better sleep, then they’re not shy to drive how Headspace can help you (if you routinely invest time in meditation) overcome that during onborading screens, though push notifications, after your first meditation session, when you first return, general open-ended animations, etc.

Simply, their messaging is almost entirely grounded in speaking to the user about why they came to Headspace.

Clever push notifications

Headspace has two types of notifications.

First, motivational messages, that support, inspire, and remind people to keep their practice going to meet their goals. These timely nudges remind people to come back to Headspace around the time they usually use the app.

Then, my favorite, they have mindful moment notifications. These have no clickthrough, no call to action. Simply, they impart some wisdom and prompt a moment of reflection. The purpose is to share valuable micro-learnings with people and make mindfulness something people think about daily. And luckily, when they do, Headspace’s branding is right there to relate the two.

Measuring success along the pursuit of happiness

No one has quite cracked the code on how to measure happiness (yet), but Headspace combines qualitative and quantitative feedback together to get a pretty good idea of how their product helps, and at what point a habit is likely formed. Headspace’s customers share life-changing stories about the product — ranging in levels of intensity from lowering everyday stress and anxiety to finding support and solace through life’s darkest times.

In addition to qualitative customer feedback, Headspace monitors an ongoing Net Promoter Score survey along with product analytics around how people are using their product and which actions drive long-term success and retention (both with meditation and Headspace).

And with this data, Headspace brings us an excellent lesson on how consumer businesses need to rapidly iterate, always be optimizing, and be comfortable getting rid of features. 👇

A deep focus on simplicity: Lessons on endless optimization, and a willingness to take features away

We all know the value of building new things and improving existing products to better help our users. Roadmaps and backlogs are full of ideas for things to add. That’s the bedrock of product evolution.

Why would you take something out of your product? More features just make the product better, so taking away features would obviously make the product worse. Sure, not everyone will use every feature, but that’s why you have so many of them. What if you take away something that even just a small portion of your customers use and you alienate them? Customers always ask for more features— not less— so in the end, the product with the most features win.

What’s more, taking something away that we’ve spent time designing, developing, and marketing seems like a total waste. It’s seen as a stamp of product failure.

Not so fast.

Having a lot of features will not make your product great. Great products come from having the right features to solve customer problems and having those features designed in the right way.

Removing features can, and should, be done with all products. Good product people confront and prepare for this more difficult aspect of the job, even though it’s tough and uncomfortable and requires delicate stakeholder management. Similarly, good PMs only remove features once they fully understand the implications (both short and long-term) of any changes to the product and the customer.

Of course, the first step to removing features is to not add unnecessary ones that bloat the product in the first place. Too often, irrelevant features are added for various reasons— a knee-jerk response to a customer complaint, someone’s pet idea, or most likely a lack of understanding of customer needs due to bad discovery—and teams end up iterating for ages to get it right at the expense of doubling down on another feature that could be a winner.

Headspace gives us an important lesson: Don’t be afraid to remove features.

A somewhat perfect lesson from a mindfulness app, where a common takeaway is that it’s often the simpler things that matter most.

I’ve been using Headspace consistently since ~2017. Throughout the years, I’ve seen several bigger features come and go, as well as many seemingly smaller ones. Things like

• Buddies: Bringing social to Headspace, where you can meditate at the same time as friends

• Social stats: Leaning on the friend graph, Headspace had a gamified leaderboard and stats

• My Journey: A feed of all the series and packs you’d completed and were taking

• Badges/Rewards: As part of their gamification, users unlocked badges and rewards for habitual usage and course completions.

• Music Integration: In meditation, users could add a backtrack to their session.

• Group Meditations: Community-based sessions.

In reflection, I personally never used any of those and wasn’t even aware they were gone. That’s not to say though that nobody did—I checked Reddit and some other forums and there were definitely people who did and were upset they were taken away.

But just because people use it, doesn’t mean it’s helpful and drives net new subscribers, improves LTV, and helps people reach their goals. Simply looking at adoption is not enough (and could be misleading), it’s important to do analyses and look for obvious and non-obvious implications of a feature. For example, Headspace could well have found that the gamification of meditation and sizing people up against friends created stress and was “anti-mindful”.

This willingness to cut back shows they are ruthless about what stays in the app, and that’s why when you onboard or just open Headspace, it feels dead simple to use with zero clutter and a super clear path to hitting the most valuable moment.

They’ve taken a strategy of eliminating hard-to-see carrying costs (like cross-functional maintenance, associated meetings, etc) and got rid of the drag that complexity creates.

In large part, this is because Headspace took a step back, held off from focusing on immediate/short-term revenue growth, and looked holistically at what would drive long-term growth.

In early 2019, the Conversion team at Headspace focused on quick wins to the checkout and in-app purchase experience. These fast A/B tests demonstrated movement to the larger org and moved the conversion rate metric incrementally. Looking back, we wereﾠattached to some of those quick wins, making it hard to kill parts of our checkout design until we took a more holistic portfolio approach later that year.

— Keya Patel, Ex-Director of Product Growth at Headspace

That’s an important insight into what can be a leading indicator of future feature removal: a focus on short-term growth (a common optic for venture-backed companies). So, how can you counteract this pitfall?

• Surface long-term growth: Create opportunities for the company to discuss long-term (2+ year strategy). This can be through company-wide show and tells or roadmap reviews. From there, the operating teams should consciously set milestones to monitor growth along longer horizons, which is not always as apparent in the day-to-day.

• Celebrate non-revenue related wins: Normalize thinking about longevity and durability. Share celebratory messages for initiatives that cannot easily be quantified in revenue value. This includes pull requests that eliminate hundreds or thousands of lines of code, a switch to a new vendor that helps reduce downtime, or accounting closing the books within 2 business days of month end instead of one week after month end.

• Portfolio approach: In roadmap planning, make sure that ‘quick win’ experiments are coupled with medium/long-term bets, which can allow for step-wise changes in performance metrics. These medium/long-term bets should take up at least 20%+ of the roadmap. Using a portfolio approach can prevent teams from merely producing quick wins, which in turn proactively prevents more easily killable features. Make sure the leadership team is bought into this diversified approach that can allow for sustainable growth.

Ok, with that context in mind, let’s get to a practical takeaway on feature removal. To oversimplify it, there are three high-level steps to removing features—identifying which ones to remove, a plan to take them away, and explaining to your customers why you are getting rid of them. 👇

1. Identifying which features to remove

The first step is knowing what to look out for. Generally, watch out for features that:

• are costly to support

• present a liability to the product

• another feature solves the same problem

• detract from other value-adding features and clutter

• the problem it solves is obsolete

• do not fit with the product strategy

• are not used by customers

Source: Reforge

Once you have identified a feature that falls into one of these categories, take a look at why the feature was added in the first place. Was it designed to attract a specific type of customer? Was it built in response to some market change (e.g. Covid)? Regardless of the validity of the reasoning, the first step is understanding it. From here, you can reassess where that reasoning is still valid. For instance, it may have made sense given the original product strategy, though now it contradicts the current strategy.

Look at what the success criteria were, chat with who was involved, and even review some of the discovery notes. Then, and this is essential, perform some sort of impact analysis with a researcher where you look to understand how this feature has impacted things like upgrades, NPS, retention, etc.

Importantly, as Mixpanel notes:

The positive metrics impact is likely the least intuitive part of unshipping, because most teams have an ingrained mentality around ‘What do we lose’ versus ‘What can we gain.’ In reorienting around ‘What can we gain,’ there are two sets of metrics to monitor with unshipping: (1) Internal – employee and organization related metrics to monitor and (2) External – customer impact.

Also, be mindful that long-tail insights—the non-obvious discoveries that have outsized implications—are key to look for here as all features form part of a system, and sometimes a bolt in one place that isn’t used much actually holds the entire frame together.

AKA—don’t be afraid to remove stuff, but approach analytically and with caution.

Once you’ve found that which no longer serves you and your customer, thus, must go—next is getting it done.

2. Executing the removal

Even though it’s necessary, unshipping still isn’t fun. But after figuring out what to get rid of, you want to avoid getting into a limbo state, where you know the feature should be killed, but the team doesn’t move forward with removing it.

It only gets worse when you wait.

People come to Headspace in high stress states and we wanted to be a trustworthy tool — which wasn’t always the case as we built up carrying costs over years on the Android app. By late 2019, we faced several complications: weekly incidents, decreasing Play Store rankings, support team frustration, internal hesitation to run Android experiments around old code, and more. Instead of ripping out and reevaluating features sooner, we were caught in a pile of debt. We luckily overcame it in mid 2020 with a major redesign of the Android app, killing some old features along the way.

— Keya Patel, Ex-Director of Product Growth at Headspace

So, to actually get rid of the feature after you know you need to:

• Get internal alignment

  • This will be the biggest challenge—convincing the team and leadership. The best advice around how to do that is (1) to focus on the data and relate it to your current strategy, (2) to argue for simplicity and overall product quality, and (3) determine an ultimate decision maker.

• Map out what parts of the product could be affected by removing the feature

  • Think about the system. Does this feature touch another? Could some workflow unintentionally break? How could user data be affected? These are important things to consider when unshipping something.

• Get it done

  • Don’t wait around, get the work scheduled, and prepare for the customer-facing part of unshipping. 👇

3. Explaining to your customers why you are removing these features

The final hurdle is the most important—respect your users.

This is all about external messaging. As customers discover a product or feature is winding down, it might disrupt their workflow and cause frustration if they are paying for and relying on the product. Worst case, loyal and prospective customers will write in to support, switch to a competitor, and head to Reddit and Twitter (X is still Twitter, sorry) to complain. The best way to proactively avoid that is:

• Being transparent about the why

  • Aim to be as honest as possible about why you’re pulling away from a feature. Also, take the opportunity to let people know about what they can be excited about going forward. If you have some high-level public roadmap, share that with folks.

• Giving appropriate time, and be clear if there is any action item

  • The sooner you can let people know the better. Also, give a clear timeline as soon as you have it, and if people need to do anything (like export data, etc) to avoid disruption, make that crystal clear and send reminders to be as helpful as possible.

• Providing a substitute

  • This might be another feature you have (i.e. you can now do X over here), or perhaps even pointing someone to a competitor or another tool that fills that gap. Odd, I know. But the ultimate sign of caring about users’ needs is still providing a first-class experience, even if that means the customer goes elsewhere.

Once more, to drive home the importance of taking features away on long-term growth, here’s what the VP of Product at Mixpanel shared about the impact unshipping has had:

The decisions to sunset parts of the product have made a huge difference across the board. Most notably, our NPS tripled in the last 18 months due to the focus on feature quality over quantity. We also got a nice retention boost and have increased win rates against competitors to a really strong place. Not to mention, there’s also been a decrease in support tickets and support costs. It’s great to see this type of validation.

Content marketing and SEO as a growth engine

While Headspace is a meditation app, they’re really a media company in the business of educating people why, and how, to use meditation to navigate life’s challenges and improve health and happiness.

Similarly to Netflix, their entire business model revolves around the content they produce—both the core meditation sessions, as well as the editorial content surrounding it. So, it should come as no surprise that content-led growth is a core part of their growth model.

Content-led growth, in short, is when stuff like blog posts, podcasts, and really any consumable media is key to driving leads to the product, creating brand awareness around the problem, and allowing sustainable business growth.

Note, while it’s sustainable because the efforts of content are often long-lasting, like SEO, focusing on content as a growth engine is a long game. It takes time to see results.

Luckily, Headspace has been doing it since 2010.

Simply, like lots of things with Headspace, they produce content that their audience finds valuable, like self-care ideas, getting caught in the self-improvement trap, using phones before bed, etc. Within their content, the call to action is always clear; always the same: Download the App. Start Your Free Trial.

To go a bit deeper on their content-driven growth, we’ll look at:

• Using content to break into new serviceable market segments

• Embracing multiple content platforms

• Leveraging partnerships to meet customers where they are

• The value of video

Using content to break into new serviceable market segments

Content is really Headspace’s growth and acquisition strategy. We’ve talked about how they’ve continuously rolled out new Packs that target different types of problems/areas of stress.

It’s not hard to see how each new one they release unlocks a group of people who might have had no interest in meditation, and thus Headspace, before.

For example, I couldn’t care for a series geared around how meditation can help athletes. But when they rolled that out in partnership with Nike and the Olympics, you can imagine how a ton of people suddenly become aware.

And as the planet literally suffers every day—with missing pieces of ice the size of Greenland, melting cars in Arizona, and the ocean off the coast of Miami being recorded as hot as a hot tub—likely a lot more people are experiencing climate anxiety.

Luckily, Headspace is on it. 🌎

This content (written, animated videos, and audio) is then pushed across their platforms to drive awareness and get people into their funnel.

Embracing multiple content platforms

To reach as big an audience as possible, Headspace delivers their content through a multi-platform approach. You can find Headspace content on their website, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, in search engine advertising, social ads, radio, their own Podcast shows, their blog, and on TV.

This all helps them reach a ton of people, and the message is always the same: Making Meditation Simple.

However, as a note to operators, Headspace definitely did not start with a multi-platform approach. They evolved that way over time as their team grew to support it, slowly investing in new channels as they mastered existing ones.

If you don’t have a content strategy yet, your content GTM should be to decide on the media channel that best maps to your audience and then work on your new, better, or different content focus. Start with one channel, learn the ins and outs of success on that platform, and then operationalize a content plan for it where everything you publish is great. In the world of AI, people don’t have time for good.

Also, for each channel, be very intentional about the goals you want your media efforts to serve. Usually, it’s to drive demand, but it’s an important exercise for the whole team to know how you want to quantify the impact of a podcast, vs a TikTok or Tweet.

As a one-line takeaway: Invest in being great at one thing, mastering it, being new, better, or different, and then continuing to build upon that success with new channels.

But, as John Collins from Intercom reminds us, don’t rush to conclusions and write off a channel if you’re not yet seeing results:

Content marketing initiatives don’t generate returns as quickly as other forms of marketing, so be sure to hold your nerve. But once you start to see an audience engage with a particular format or channel, double down on it quickly. And don’t be afraid to focus on that particular medium rather than trying to do everything at once i.e. if you’ve started to have some success with a podcast don’t suddenly start to try spinning up a YouTube channel.. As I like to say content is a super-tanker not a speedboat.

Speaking of multiple platforms, let’s talk about how they’ve grown through multiple partnerships.

Leveraging partnerships to meet customers where they are

In addition to creating effective content that people find valuable, Headspace has been extremely successful in expanding their content’s reach and user base by partnering with some of the world’s top brands to emphasize the vital role of sleep, meditation, mindfulness, and self-care through brand vehicles across industries and domains.

This started back in 2011 when they teamed up with Virgin Atlantic to create an in-flight Headspace channel to help passengers learn about meditation, relax, and get some sleep. Since then, Headspace has collaborated with 12 different airlines, reaching an audience of over 800M passengers each year.

Talk about a solid channel partnership.

And on your next trip, your flight might not be the only place where you find their content. Headspace has also partnered with hotels around the world, including Hyatt Hotels and Casper’s The Dreamery luxury napping hotel (for $25 a nap) in the heart of New York City.

Outside of the travel world where people are generally more stressed and prone to try a new solution, they’ve partnered with numerous companies to create unique curated content for their employees, products, and target audiences, including Amazon, Google, the NBA, Nike, Pinterest, Snapchat, SXSW, and even Hinge for a series of pre-date meditations to beat dating nerves 👏

Also, aware that people often think that relaxing through a Netflix binge is mindfulness (but, end up walking away after a binge often anxious and restless), they teamed up with Netflix and Vox to produce three shows to catch people when they just might need it.

All of these partnerships extend a bridge for Headspace to tap into other brands’ hard-earned customer base, and also are a stellar example of how they’ve found an integration point with these other products that (1) benefit both brands and (2) meet the consumer when they might need it most.

For example, with the Casper partnership, people taking a nap and trying out a Casper mattress could well have a better nap/experience with Casper when listening to Headspace’s sleep sounds. Both brands and the customer, benefit.

That’s the foundation of a good strategic partnership.

The value of video

From the early days, Headspace made video a core pillar of their content strategy. Why?

When it comes to content marketing, especially for B2C, it’s all about video. Obviously, that’s just one of many types of content that you can create, but it’s something to consider and value heavily if you’re not doing anything there yet.

Just a fun fact, video is the number one channel for content marketing today, surpassing blogs and infographics as the top media used in content marketing. More than 60% of marketers now use video for content marketing, and the majority of them believe that video is their most effective format of content (76%), produces more leads (79%), and directly increases sales (81%).

So, when/if you are developing a content marketing strategy, don’t forget about the importance of video. But, as the founder and CEO of Slidebean says:

Video content is expensive, and a long-term bet! It will take months to create an audience, and that means dozens of videos. If you have to hire someone for the production, it will be an expensive bet and one that few companies will be able to afford. Even if you're doing it internally/yourself, it's going to take away a big chunk of your time. Most startups need customers faster, in a way they can more directly control for scale, and YouTube is not ideal for that.

Of course, video doesn’t always have to be internally produced and high-quality (🫰). UGC is super popular and is actually the basis of Headspace’s TikTok strategy.

From D2C to B2B

To wrap us up today, let’s talk about how Headspace has added a B2B offering next to their consumer product, and what we can learn about a move from consumer to enterprise

Back in 2021, Headspace acquired Ginger, an on-demand mental health company providing around-the-clock access to emotional support via coaching, therapy, and psychiatry. Around the same time, they acquired AI-powered mental health and wellness company Sayana.

This was towards their long-term growth strategy of getting into the corporate healthcare world, where the bucks are plenty. Already ~40% of their revenue comes from Headspace For Work, a corporate health and wellness program that provides a company’s employees with access to the Headspace app, specifically designed workplace programs, coaching, therapy, resources, and much more designed to reduce stress, increase focus, and decrease burnout at work.

Reaching over 4K companies, this move has doubled the number of people engaging with Headspace’s products.

While it doesn’t make sense for a lot of consumer products, adding a B2B model to an existing D2C business can be a great way to diversify revenue and reach more people.

Consumer products have higher churn rates and lower prices, but once you lock in an enterprise, net revenue retention is much higher through the annual contracts they sign. Sounds good, but as you can imagine, it requires careful planning, strategic alignment, and thoughtful execution.

Since I haven’t done this myself, I asked ChatGPT for some advice. Not too shabby: 🤖

1. Assess the Market Opportunity:

   • Research the B2B market in your industry to understand the needs, pain points, and buying behavior of potential business customers.

   • Identify key competitors and analyze how your offerings may stand out.

2. Determine Product Fit:

   • Understand how your current product(s) or service(s) can be adapted or extended to meet the needs of business customers.

   • Consider developing specialized features or bundles specifically for B2B clients.

3. Align Sales and Marketing Efforts:

   • Building a B2B business requires a different sales and marketing approach compared to D2C. You may need to develop a dedicated sales team focused on B2B.

   • Consider leveraging content marketing, industry partnerships, and trade shows to build brand awareness in the B2B space.

4. Adjust Pricing and Packaging:

   • Develop pricing models that align with the expectations and purchasing behavior of business customers, which may include volume discounts, subscription models, or customized packages.

5. Implement Robust Support and Service:

   • B2B customers often require a higher level of service and support, including dedicated account management, personalized onboarding, and priority customer support.

   • Clearly communicate your support policies and ensure your team is prepared to fulfill these commitments.

6. Compliance and Legal Considerations:

   • Understand any legal or compliance requirements specific to selling to businesses in your industry.

   • Consult with legal professionals to ensure contracts, privacy policies, and other legal documents are appropriate for B2B relationships.

7. Collaborate with Existing D2C Operations:

   • Ensure alignment between your D2C and B2B teams to avoid conflicting goals and messaging.

   • Recognize that the needs and expectations of B2B customers may differ significantly from D2C consumers and require distinct strategies.

8. Invest in Technology and Tools:

   • Utilize CRM systems and other tools that allow for efficient management of B2B relationships, tracking, and reporting.

   • Consider investing in analytics to track and understand the performance of your B2B efforts.

9. Start Small and Iterate:

   • Consider piloting your B2B offering with a select group of customers to gather feedback and refine your approach.

   • Continuously monitor performance, seek feedback, and make adjustments as needed.

10. Maintain Focus on Your Core Business:

• Expanding into B2B shouldn't come at the expense of your existing D2C business. Ensure that resources are balanced and that both parts of the business receive the attention they require.

By thoroughly understanding the needs of the B2B market and aligning your offerings, strategies, and operations to meet those needs, you can create a successful B2B business that complements and enhances your existing D2C model.

…pretty solid tips. 👀

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And that, guys, is a wrap on Headspace.

Thanks so much for reading! I really appreciate your time a great deal, and I hope in return you learned something new today.

If you did—and you enjoyed this post— I’d be super grateful if you gave it a like, share, and if this was your first time reading, subscribe for more.

Until next time.
— Jaryd ✌️

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