The Calm Story: Building the World’s First $1B Mental Health Unicorn

Michael Acton Smith gave attendees at Hustle Con an in-depth look into how he built a unicorn on the back of the mindfulness trend.
The Calm Story: Building the World’s First $1B Mental Health Unicorn

Sam: So this next speaker is a good friend of mine. We actually covered him in Trends and I was floored by his story. His name is Michael Acton Smith and he’s the co-CEO of Calm. I’m a big user of Calm, so I love them for that reason. But I also really like this company because it’s one of the most efficient businesses I’ve ever really read about. Calm has 80 employees and they do about $2 million in revenue per employee. They’ve only been around for seven or eight years and they built a wonderful company that has a product that’s used by over 60 million people. And so Michael’s going to tell us their origin story and how they made it all happen. So let’s give it up for Michael Acton Smith.

M. Acton Smith: Thank you, Sam. Hey everybody. I’m Michael and I just love this space. Such a beautiful theater. Actually last time I was here I was sitting in the audience and I just moved to California and I came to Hustle Con. This is several years ago and I sat and I was so inspired by everything I heard. I was scribbling notes frantically throughout the day and the Headspace founders were up on stage and I was gritting my teeth, gnashing away saying, “One day I want to get up on that stage and tell the Calm story.” So pretty cool to be here and I think that’s part of the magic of this Hustle community. One year you’re in the audience, the next year you’re up on stage. So I’m telling the story. So without further ado, I’d love to share with you the Calm journey. It’s been a pretty extraordinary ride and I want to share a couple of lessons that we’ve learned along the way.

So Calm is simple. Our mission is pretty simple. We want to make the world happier and healthier and we’re based here in San Francisco. This is our team earlier this year and a extraordinary team of 10 X as Sam mentioned, very nimble, very efficient given the kind of scale of business we’ve grown to. And we were founded back in 2012 in London, in Soho on a sofa. And this is my co founder Alex Tew. And we used to spend hours every evening we shared a house playing video games. And while we were playing video games, particularly FIFA on the Xbox, that was our favorite, we would just talk about business and ideas. We so kind of love business and entrepreneurship and taking the crazy ideas bubbling around our head and putting them out there in the world. And we were both unemployable, so we kind of had to do this.

Available exclusively to Trends subscribers

Understand upcoming market trends, receive our premium weekly report, access our database of research, and network with the smartest people we know

7 Day Trial

Join Trends now for $1!

Hear from our members:

Gagan Biyani

Co-Founder / Udemy

Few places bring together so many engaged hustlers around new ideas, changes in the markets and product/services recommendations.

Adrian Salamunovic

Founder / Author of "Free PR"

The network is amazing. Where else do you see founders of 9 figure companies helping founders who are just getting started?

Jack Smith

Co-Founder / Vungle

The community is very collaborative and people in there have offered introductions for me, not wanting anything in return.

What do you get with Trends:

Private Community

The most powerful business peer group

Connect with thousands of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, executives and insiders. Collectively, Trends members have companies with tens of billions in revenue.

They say you’re the average of the 5 people you spend most of your time with. Are you surrounding yourself with the right people? You are now.

Weekly Case Studies

Curated stories from the business world

Dive into the success stories of companies around the world and discover how they achieved.

How One Company Created a Niche Market for Young People Who Want Fancy Bibles
How to Capitalize Early on the Fast-Growing Sports Gambling Industry
How Moiz Ali grew Native Deodorant from $0 to $100m acquisition in 2 years
How The Athletic Grew a Niche Audience to ~1m Subscribers in 4 Years

Market Signals

In-depth trends analysis & monitoring

Discover what’s trending before it goes viral

Don’t press snooze on this opportunity: sleep supplements

The signal: As meditation becomes mainstream, people may be surprised to find that searches for sleep apps double their meditation counterpart. As people invest in getting a better night’s rest, there’s opportunity abound, including physical products like weighted blankets or premium PJs, supplements, popular insomnia drugs having their patents expire, companies paying their employees to sleep better, marketing for sleep specialists, or online sleep education (ex: sleep apnea test has 27k searches per month).

The alternative milk market is getting frothy

The signal: As more people wave goodbye to dairy, alternative milk is slowly taking over; it has already cornered 13% of the market. With the exception of soy milk, all of the alt-milks have been on the up, with some of the newer entrants including hemp milk and pea milk. Other alt-products are getting attention, including cashew cheese, with 18100 searches per month.

Capitalizing on the Airpods market, making more money than Shopify

The signal: Since killing the headphone jack, Apple has graced the world with AirPods, which did an estimated 60m units in 2019. That means AirPods alone are bringing in approx ~$10b in revenue, more than Twitter, Shopify, or Spotify, to name a few popular tech giants. Opportunity lies in Apple opening up SiriOS or the wave of iPhone accessories (including cases, cleaning kits, hooks, and keychains) which have shown “hockey stick” growth alongside their hardware predecessor.

Weekly Lectures

Leading experts share their knowledge

Attend exclusive lectures from experts in the industry and stay in the know

Sound good?

Gain full access to Trends for $1! Cancel anytime.

7 Day Trial

Join Trends now for $1!