- Richard Pierson and Andy Puddicombe are the founders of Headspace, an app that provides users with guided meditation practices.
- In 2009, Pierson and Puddicombe ran events in London and New York where they would talk about the benefits of meditation and lead group meditation sessions. The paid events were often sold out, which lead them to come up with an app and expand their business.
- The duo shared how they grew to more than 60 million downloads and over 1 million subscribers today.
- The cofounders have partnered with Delta, JetBlue, Nike, and the NBA to promote meditation and their product, and designed printed booklets on meditation and packaged them with one million issues of The Guardian.
- Puddicombe said that what's been instrumental to Headspace's success is the varied skill sets the two cofounders bring to the business. "Rich has that business background, while I bring a creative aspect to Headspace, and we each complement each other," he said.
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In 2009, before the idea to create an app dedicated to providing guided meditation was even a glimmer in their eyes, Richard Pierson and Andy Puddicombe ran events in London and New York where they would talk about the benefits of meditation and lead group meditation sessions. Pierson came to meditation later in his life, while Puddicombe had long enjoyed its benefits.
The paid events were often sold out, convincing the duo that they were on to something big.
"We saw how people got inspired at these shows, and so we sold some meditation content on USB sticks that every participant could take home," Puddicombe recalled, "but we had to create a stronger business model beyond the events."
The globally popular, subscription-based app Headspace now has attracted more than 60 million downloads across 190 countries. Headspace has also widened its reach by partnering with Nike, the NBA, the American Medical Association, and airlines such as Delta, Virgin Atlantic, and JetBlue.
The company also grew rapidly in the past nine years, going from three people working out of a closet — "a literal closet," Puddicombe said — to nearly 250 employees across offices in LA, San Francisco, New York, and London.
How did Puddicombe and Pierson scale Headspace so successfully in a competitive space filled with dozens of meditation apps? They gave Business Insider the inside scoop to teach other entrepreneurs what steps to take to build a far-reaching global company.
Paths to meditation: one corporate, the other Himalayan
You wouldn't recognize Andy Puddicombe 20 years ago. The London resident has been mired in grief to several tragedies that struck his life: A drunk driver ran into a group of his friends, killing two of them, and then a few months later his stepsister died in a cycling accident. Not long after, an ex-girlfriend died during surgery.
Puddicombe, deep in a sports science degree at the time, turned to meditation to help him manage all the pain he was feeling. It was not a new practice; he had long practiced meditation as a youth, but this time was different. He decided he needed a more radical 180-degree turn in his life: He decided to travel to the Himalayas to train as a Buddhist monk.
He spent his 20s at Burmese and Tibetan schools, learning the ins and outs of being a monk. "I saw this enormous need for people who needed to cope with stress and I realized meditation could help them," Puddicombe said in an interview with Business Insider.
After leaving the monastery, he met advertising executive Richard Pierson, who was also going through a quarter-life crisis. He was working in advertising as the head of business development at UK-based Brown Brothers Harriman. "But I was feeling increasingly stressed out and dealing with crippling anxiety," Pierson said in an interview. "I knew I needed to make some major changes in my life." So he left the advertising business to start studying acupuncture, and in the same building Puddicombe also ran meditation clinics.
"We became close friends and decided we wanted to make meditation more accessible to people because we knew that there was something special there that should be shared with the world," Pierson said.
Branching out into the tech space
They designed the app soon after with the last £50,000 they had left after culling funds from friends and family, which evolved from the events company the duo was running, also called Headspace. It was a last-ditch effort borne out of desperation, Puddicombe said.
"We soon realized that we needed to make this practice even more scalable and accessible to people everywhere and anywhere [than just running events]," he explained.
Together, they founded Headspace in 2010, laying the groundwork for one of the world's most popular meditation apps. Guided and non-guided meditations are voiced by Puddicombe, whose soothing voice could have you de-stressed or calmly sleeping within minutes. The 10-minute meditations guide you to slow your breathing and pay attention to relaxing every part of your body, from your toes to the crown of your head. Meditative techniques focused not just on relaxing at home and getting ready to sleep, but also while walking, riding an airplane, stressing out over an emergency, or even eating mindfully.
The first iteration of the Headspace app had to be simple to use and accessible, Pierson recalled.
"Meditation often has a lot of outdated clichés attached to it. So one of the most important things we considered while we were designing the app was that Headspace should feel like it's for everyone, and it should feel mainstream," Pierson said.
What helped make the app attractive were the animations and characters they designed, which Pierson and his team believed would make the app even more approachable.
The benefits of meditation have been chronicled by peer-reviewed studies long before Headspace surged across the world: A 2012 study by the American Heart Association found that meditation helped patients lower their blood pressure, stress, and anger compared with those who attended a health education class. In 2014, Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that mindfulness meditation practice, at a rate of 25 minutes for three consecutive days, alleviates psychological stress.
More recently, a 2019 study published in JMIR Mental Health by researchers Kathleen Marie Walsh, Bechara J Saab, and Norman AS Farb looked at the effects of smartphone-app-guided meditation, and reported that improved mood, lowered stress, and higher attention levels all were found in patients who engaged in meditation-related apps for just 10 minutes a day.
Meditation branched out from an Asian movement favored by New Age fans to a more accepted practice for adults who may have never taken the time to silence their bustling thoughts. A CDC report found that the use of meditation increased more than threefold from 4.1% in 2012 to 14.2% in 2017. Everyone from C-suite execs to teachers to athletes were looking to meditation as a useful method for finding calm amid the always-on digital world bombarding us. This wasn't going to be a momentary blip on the wellness-trends radar.
Making marketing moves
Launching an app is one thing; getting people to download it is another. After the live group meditation sessions, they needed wider exposure beyond those event attendees.
Along came the turning-point idea: collaborating with the UK newspaper The Guardian. Puddicombe and Pierson designed printed booklets on meditation, with details on how to download the app, which were packaged with one million issues of the paper on January 1, 2012, and again in 2013.
"That was huge for us," said Pierson, who now serves as the company's CEO.
Pierson said that another key partnership that helped showcase the app to more people was with an airline. "In our early days, working with Virgin Atlantic was instrumental in validating the content we were producing and distributing. That's also when we saw that there was a large appetite for Headspace content," he said.
Puddicombe added that the Virgin Atlantic partnership "gave us credibility on a mass scale, and in a way gave permission to those customers to find something new."
Collaboration boosted Headspace's visibility
Today, you can fly on a Delta or JetBlue flight and choose one of the many meditations available on the in-flight Headspace app. The airlines partnerships are one of the many deals the Headspace founders struck with well-known brands in order to attract customers who may have never thought about meditating.
Working with NBA players has given Headspace a millennial-focused polish: In the app's category Performance Mindset, NBA players such as Phoenix Suns point guard Ricky Rubio and Los Angeles Lakers power forward Kyle Kuzma share their stories on how meditation played a role in their athletic careers.
This co-branded category is the latest segment of a multi-year NBA-Headspace partnership that first launched in February 2018. Then, Headspace was introduced to the NBA by providing all league and team employees across the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, and NBA 2K League with access to Headspace's app.
Nike was another brand Puddicombe and Pierson sought to attract, due to Nike's reputation as a brand for athletes. "This was an audience that wants to look after the body and mind," Puddicombe said, "and we wanted to be part of that community."
In addition, the founders launched Headspace for Educators, the company's flagship social impact program, which saw them partner with more than 100 K-12 school boards in the US to provide Headspace access to educators at no cost.
Growing pains
The hardest aspect in scaling Headspace has been growing at such a quick rate for consecutive years, Pierson said. "How you maintain the culture that helped you build the company and, at the same time, evolve it based on what the company needs in the future is a delicate process, one we are continually iterating on and improving," he explained.
Before the company raised $75 million in funding, Puddicombe remembered those very lean years when they were just hoping to create enough content for the app. Entrepreneurs benefit from having friends who can volunteer their time and resources, Puddicombe said. "Because we bootstrapped for five years, the first version of Headspace had us recording stuff in a friend's recording studio. These people were eager to be part of the vision we had for Headspace," he said.
Stay calm and carry on competing against rival apps
Puddicombe said that what's been instrumental to Headspace's success is the varied skill sets the two cofounders bring to the business. "Rich has that business background, while I bring a creative aspect to Headspace, and we each complement each other," he said.
He also noted that being friends with his cofounder was also a key factor in how they operated later in the company's timeline. "We go on holiday together, our wives are good friends, and we're both united in our passion for Headspace," he said.
Today, Headspace isn't the only meditation app available. Companies such as Calm, Buddhify, Oak, and Happify Health are also nudging their way into the meditation-wellness space, an industry valued at $130 million. But Puddicombe said Headspace has a key advantage over them all.
"We're backed by scientific studies," he said, noting how Headspace started working with academics on research around meditation "from the very beginning."
"More than 70 clinical trials and 23 peer-reviewed papers demonstrate how Headspace can deliver outcomes related to alleviating stress and promoting mindfulness," he said.
He went on to explain, "Our approach to science has really been to focus on novice meditators, on people who are likely to be Headspace members and to look at the benefits after eight to 12 weeks of practice for anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes a day. This allows us to demystify a practice that can sometimes feel abstract for people who haven't tried it before and to demonstrate tangible health benefits in an accessible way."
For example, a study out of Northeastern University found that three weeks of using Headspace increased feelings of compassion by 23% among the study participants.
Authenticity and credibility go a long way to elevate your company above the competition, Puddicombe said. "People will be wondering if Headspace really works and now we have science offering that reliability to our customers," he added.
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