🎮 TGOG LVL 2: Learning how to learn, big MindGarden updates & pivoting my time.
Making some big changes in how I invest my time/energy portfolio. As a result I spent some time learning how to sharpen my axe before running off to cut down some trees.
Welcome to issue #3 of the Great Online Game where I’m documenting building my mental health startup while sharing how I’m leveling up as a first-time founder and all the insights I come across.
First things first, two weeks ago we launched the biggest update in MindGarden history. We made a huge pivot from solely being a meditation app to being a lot more mental health-focused.
Ever since the launch of our beta back in October we have completed dozens of customer interviews and hundreds of hours of careful data analysis. We have reached the conclusion that asking users to do a 5-minute meditation is too big of an ask especially since our target audience is Gen Z. As a result we have decided to focus more heavily on features such as mood tracking, journaling, and visual breath work.
We hypothesize by committing to smaller easier habits, users will gain confidence and momentum to do 5–10 minute meditations
You can see the full list of changes here.
Right now my biggest question is whether or not to lock more features and push MindGarden pro onto more users. It’s the balance of revenue and user growth. Duolingo didn’t make a single penny for the first 5 years of its existence and simply operated off of investor capital.
If you were to just think about this logically, this would lead to more users completing onboarding, and higher word-of-mouth growth (It’s also important to note Duolingo hadn’t spent a single dollar on advertising). On the other end of the spectrum are companies that grow way too fast without a proper business model (premature scaling) and end up burning up in flames.
Our mission is to make mindfulness as common as brushing your teeth. It’s a super ambitious goal and one that probably won’t work with a slow and steady bootstrapped positive cash-flow machine.
Finding this balance of growing while ensuring a road to profitability is the current game I’m playing. That being said at the core of all of this is creating the best meditation / mental health in the world.
🧑🏫 Learning How to Learn
‘We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.’ — Archilochus
As a 23-year-old with almost no industry experience, I deal with a lot of imposter syndrome. No matter how good I want MindGarden to be, it will only be as great as my skillset as a coder, designer, behavioral scientist, and gamification expert.
My inspiration is to create a product that makes someone surprised at their own level of discipline because the system is just that good. So after a lot of thought and reflection, I have decided to pause my foray into content creation on Tik Tok, Instagram, and Youtube. In exchange for this time, I am planning to go all in on behavioral science, gamification, and product design. I plan to start with behavioral science (here is my self-made roadmap)
A roadmap is one thing, but ensuring that I’m using the most effective techniques and methods to optimize my learning is something I have also invested time into learning:
I plan on using the Feynman technique as much as possible and teaching what I’m learning through Twitter threads and blog posts.
Transfer learning is crucial to ensure I’m not wasting time learning concepts that I’ll never actually use during product development.
Augmenting my long-term memory + mastering fundamentals, using spaced repetition.
Two amazing resources on why I’m doing this:
👁 The Why
Most product features developed these days are based on qualitative surveys done with users. I realized with most B2B apps, this works as your solving a real pain point. Meditation on the other hand is more of a vitamin. Similar to exercise most people do not carve out the time unless it becomes a dire problem (panic attacks, health problems). Both are essential to prevent problems mentally and physically in the future. Everyone pictures their ideal selves doing both these tasks on a daily basis but due to bad life design, these plans always seem to get swept under the rug.
There is a very strong disconnect between what people say they want versus what they actually do. My goal with this self-created behavioral science degree is to understand human behavior at such a fundamental level that I’m able to create systems that have no choice but to be used on a daily basis. My job is to cross-pollinate this knowledge with product design, gamification, and code to make something that is 10x better than the competition.
Most startup founders have some sort of unfair advantage, whether it be coding since they were five years old, their ivy league network, etc. Day by day I’m honing my ability to build and analyze a product through half a dozen different lenses and most importantly be able to quantify why certain decisions are better than others. Every day is a combination of acquiring new knowledge and then applying it. Building MindGarden is my ultimate playground, and if the product and I are getting better on a daily basis it is only a matter of time before the app becomes a household name.
💰 Could I be investing my time differently?
This is a question I constantly ask myself. In truth, I could be spending a lot more time trying to raise funding and with that money build a team of designers, behavioral scientists, and engineers.
The problem with this: if we can’t find product market fit by the time I raise my subsequent round the company will die. I will have to let these employees go and be s tuck with the exact same skillset and knowledge that I had started with.
Time, just like money, when invested correctly produces compounding returns. I believe the skills I listed above when improved on a daily basis over the course of a couple of years can become superpowers.