TLDR: WATCH THE VIDEO (click above)
How do you get your calm back after a July 4th week of fireworks and family? You could start to meditate – using an app like Calm. But once you signed up, would you be motivated to meditate every day, for 20+ minutes, to get all the benefits?
Calm has a solution for that: upgrade to paid! Today I go through the things that Calm does nicely in its sign-up flow to motivate you to meditate – and the things it could improve (remember, I used to be a Headspace girl).
3 things you’ll learn from watching this:
What should come before Calm's pricing page that would get me to pay
The missing element of Calm's behavior change model
Why meditation is potentially harder than climate change
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👂 Transcript:
Okay. So I may not stay calm during this.
During this, we will go through the things that Calm does very nicely to motivate you to meditate and the things that it definitely could improve.
We will sign up for “Premium” together, and I will end with why meditation is potentially harder than climate change.
So here we go. I'm just going to click on... Oh, I have a paywall. We'll just go to something else. Oh, no, a paywall again.
So you really cannot use Calm unless you pay. And I actually like this.
This is counterintuitive because sometimes you want to give people a taste of your app so that they understand it and then they will more likely pay.
And in this case... Look, meditation just isn't that fun, especially if you've never done it before.
You sit down for 20 minutes, you try to clear your mind and you fail because (and you're not supposed to say you failed) but you fail because you're not used to having a clear mind, and maybe you get a little antsy, maybe you get a little bored.
And so the first session is likely to be your worst session, so why would they give you the taste of it in hopes that it will motivate you to continue?
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So, and also, you know, in general, meditation actually only works or has proven to work, so, if you look at all the RCTs, there's lots of meta-analyses out there. All of them are testing if you're doing it for like over eight weeks. So the minimum study I could find was eight weeks and that's about two and a half hours a week. So this is a lot of meditating if you want the actual results that are kind of shown in the literature, if you do less than that, it may feel good, it may feel nice, but there really aren't any studies to suggest that you're going to get all of those benefits.
And so Calm has to figure out how to motivate you to stay engaged and stay involved, and they're basically taking a model of like, “Look, let's just ask you to pay.”
I like it. One time I ran an event where I had people pay to come and I'd only ask them to swipe their credit card. I actually charged it like $0.02 or something. The idea was not that they would pay, but the idea was they would then stop and think and say, “Do you really want to come to this event?”
Because there's so many flakes out there if it's just for free. I wanted to commit people and it turns out I had high event attendance and this is kind of what ten day meditation retreats are also doing.
You're getting people to really think about it and invest and say, "This is the type of person I want to be." I want to be that person who talks about how they meditate all the time. So if we look at this, you know, these are kind of a classic payment page. They're defaulting me to the yearly. They're showing me how much I have off. It's most popular, very nice, you know, very nice design.
In general, not sure what people expect. $15 a month is actually quite a bit. You could say it's much less than a gym membership.
It's the cheapest health care medication you'll ever get. And yet it is quite a lot. And so I think this page could hold people up. So the thing that I would want Calm to do before this page is actually not convince me about meditation by showing me all of the potential ways I could meditate. And by the way, this is very nice. LeBron James, great. Like showing me celebs. Interesting. But like, this is just getting me to try to think I want to meditate by showing me the meditation. I want you to tell me why my life will be changed. How much of a better person I'll be.
Like, you know, the best thing that motivates me to think that I want to meditate is that friend that has said, and you all have those friends, “This has changed my life. I'm such a better person. You can't even imagine.” Imagine if they just had like 15 of these videos with people just saying, “This is it. You got to do it. Oh my gosh, I didn't believe it and now I believe it.” And so there's really an opportunity here to increase my motivation at the point of the payment wall. We all know the highest drop off is your payment page, and so you've got to increase my motivation high enough to get over that blocker.
And I don't think this is doing a great job. And so really what you're getting is people who already know that they want Calm to break through.
Okay, that said, we're going to do it. And I'm just going to do the monthly. Maybe I don't have confidence in myself or my meditation ability. I do have confidence that after this I'll put a reminder on my calendar to see that one cancel. I was a Headspace girl. Okay, so here we go. Purchase. All set.
We're about to do it. Oh, my gosh. What's going to happen? I bought Calm Premium. I'm now going to be a better person.
It's happening so soon. Okay, great. So they basically did something which is very nice. I clicked on something, I paid, and now I'm back on the page. We see so many times, there is the level of like, you're just paying for something then are dropped into the wild to have to navigate back to what you actually wanted.
So here it is. “Emergency Calm, a meditation to provide immediate relief when overwhelmed or stressed. 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes.” So, a few things here. They now just got me to pay, I'm now going to be a better person, and I have a decision about what to do in this moment. So the question is, am I going to meditate today? Is this what they want me to do?
Of course this is what they want me to do, but they also want me to meditate tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that. And so here we go. I'm going to start to meditate. “Never show again,” what a funny welcome.
Okay, so now we're going to be calm together. Just kidding. We're going to pause this. So in general, you know, his is the start of my journey. This is not a one and done relationship. If I'm going to get the benefits of meditation, I need to be consistent. I need to be doing it. I need to hold time in my day. And now I'm just going to start. So it feels a little bit like we're rushing into it.
I would like more of an intro at some level, so we're going to go back here and everything is going to be front and center.
Okay, so I did 5 minutes of meditation. I'm back. I'm a better person, but found that at the very end
they do something nice. Maybe this should be front and center versus “Share.”
I like that have “Share for free.” The counterfactuals, everything like that is like, “Oh, would you charge me for that?” and ask me for the reminder. So that's very nice. So basically this is implementation intentions. If you're going to start a new habit, you have to have intention before starting it.
This is part of kind of why habits are so hard is once you have it, you don't need intent, you don't need to think. But before you have it, you actually need to think, you need intention. And so that means planning and planning it into your day. I'll click “Morning.” Great. We're going to say “The most popular time for meditation.” Nice anchoring. We’ll say “Set reminder.” Wonderful.
So the other thing that they could do, and this is what Duolingo does, is basically take a cue from my current behavior.
It's like, look, if you're coming in at 4 p.m. on a Thursday, maybe you want to meditate 4 p.m. on a Thursday. And so Duolingo really takes a cue from that behavior. And what they've said is they've tested other times, but the time that is best to send you a reminder is the time that you actually naturally use the app. So they're taking a cue from your first use and then sending you a ping to come back to Duolingo again at that same time, which is very clever, right? It's basically saying like, we're going to try to fit your life and you've given us this massive cue already that this is how we fit into your life.
Okay. So now I'm back on the homepage. Calm has a really hard job. It has to motivate me to meditate most days for the rest of my life if I'm going to get some of the benefits and continued benefits. Very difficult.
And so what I wish the Calm would do is swing that motivational bat a little bit harder. It feels like what they're doing is assuming that this amount of choice that they have in the app, which is quite a bit, will motivate me and compel me to keep coming back. And as behavioral scientists, we question that. Normally what happens is you have a lot of choice and that does motivate people to be interested. If you just look at the YouTube homepage, there's lots of choice. If you look at after YouTube, they give you multiple videos, and yet the likelihood of choosing something after getting a lot of choice is lower than when you have less choice, typically for these studies. And so what that means is that you like the choice, but it's not converting because you're just spending too much time making the decision. You can imagine saying, “Well, I...” “I don't know which one to choose.” And then when you choose something, you're still thinking, “Did I choose the right one?”
I'm most nervous about this because it's eating into people's meditation time. If you only have a limited number of minutes set aside to meditate, we've just taken five of them to pick. Now, I'm much more of a satisficer than an optimizer, so I feel worse for you optimizers out there trying to have to make this decision. If you, pro tip, if you google Sheena Iyengar’s TED Talk, at the very end of it, she has a pretty sad and powerful story about some of the backfire effects of giving people choice. So they could decrease my choice here, but they can also swing that motivational bat harder in other ways.
So am I really going to meditate for the rest of my life? Probably not. But maybe, maybe I could do it consistently for five days. So we know from the goal literature that giving people achievable goals, having them feel progress towards those goals, feeling like the end is in mind, maybe even having a reward at the end of those goals gets people to complete more. And so imagine a world where you just had, look for the next five days, you're going to meditate at 8 a.m. This feels much more achievable than changing my full identity to be somebody who meditates.
And if I'm going to meditate like this, you can imagine it could also be cool if I do it with other people. So Peloton has this feature called “Here Now.” And what they've said is when they introduced this, it really gives people a feeling that you're not doing this by yourself.
And so you can imagine when you enter Calm, potentially you're starting with a cohort. Everybody else is going to meditate at 8 a.m. for five days straight, and you give each other high fives through the way. Instead of it being just you. No one knew that I open this app except for you guys. No one knew in my family or my friends that I'm going to start to become somebody who meditates. And so really sharing it with other people is going to help externalize this goal and potentially help people complete even more.
And so meditation is difficult, and that is one of the reasons why it's potentially more difficult than climate change is because there's very little feedback loop. So if I'm going to do something like meditate for 10 minutes, I don't really feel it. Like, I may feel a little bit better, but the reality is it's going to take a long time. Same with climate change.
If you're going to make one action today, the whole world is going to just going to have to wait, right? You don't see that immediate feedback loop. Behavior change is much easier when it's more like a light bulb or a light switch where you turn it on and you see the light go on and all of a sudden things get lighter. You did that and you know how to do it again. And so with meditation, that type of feedback loop and with climate change just doesn't exist.
Not only that, both of these things are just far in the future. So We'll open it up again. Wonderful. Both these things are far in the future, right? It's abstract, the benefits, it's not as concrete. Like, I'm not immediately getting money in my pocket. I'm not immediately eating some piece of cake.
The benefits of meditation are difficult. Some days I may feel really good, Some days I may feel terrible. On average, I may feel better, but hard to really understand that.
And really same thing with climate change that the benefits to climate change may be abstract or farther away from you than closer to you.
And so that's why it's as hard as climate change. The reason why it could actually be harder than climate change is because as an individual, I could make a one-time action with climate change.
This is something like "I'm going to buy LEDs and replace all my light bulbs" or "I'm going to get a heat pump" and I've only taken an action one time. High motivation, but has some lasting effect. With meditation, not really. There's not really one, maybe, except for a 10-day meditation decision that I could do, instead I have to do something every day for a long time. And so this in general is one of the challenges in behavior change and why meditation may be harder than climate change and why it's hard for me to be Calm.
Questions about your product? Email kristen@irrationallabs.com.
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