How Calm grows

Calm is a sleep app, and the three tactics here are all told secondhand, by guests describing it from outside. They cover a celebrity campaign, onboarding that plays sound before asking anything, and a short-lived paywall change. Two of the three were described as not working.

• Calm partnered with LeBron James; a former employee called it the most expensive and worst-performing campaign, since his fans cared about basketball rather than sleep.Calm
• Calm starts playing rain sounds as soon as the app opens, before any questions, and its commercials were just 15 seconds of rain sounds.Calm
• Calm showed only a yearly plan on its paywall for a while, then brought the monthly plan back two to three weeks later, which the guest read as a sign the test did not work.Calm

Summary written 2026-09-26 from the tactics below. Figures are as founders stated them.