Most days, life can be more than hectic. Family life plus work life plus random things in between equals busy. Busy means there’s less time for us to worry about taking care of ourselves.
Enter Simple Habit. Simple Habit is a new app dedicated to helping its users live healthier, more mindful lifestyles while still staying on-the-go.
Founder Yunha Kim got the idea for Simple Habit after witnessing how stressful startups can be. She spend the next 6 months trying to get through the anxiety and stress of life with reducing techniques she tried on herself. She soon found out that mediation seemed to be the most effective. Kim then set her mind to building a service that could be available to anyone who needed a few minutes a day to themselves.
Simple Habit offers more than 1,000 guided meditation sessions, over two years of content, to its users. Which doesn’t include the new sessions added each week. The app focuses on things like “why” and “when” the user is needing those extra minutes to relax. Simple Habit offers a wide variety of meditation sessions, from trying to sleep to getting through the work day, to help reduce the pressures of every day life.
Though stress reduction is the ultimate goal of Simple Habit, meditation has been proven to train the brain to be better at performing more than one activity at once. Meditation helps improve memory, creativity, focus, and sleep patterns.
Each session has a teacher that guides Simple Habit’s users through audio meditation sessions. Sessions can be as short as 5 minutes but 10 and 20 minute options are also available. The topics are divided into different categories, with stress being the main but also including kindness, relationships, work, and personal growth. Each session can also be filtered by a specific teacher if you find a certain voice you’d like to stick with.
Simple Habit was created with improving the self as a whole in mind. The app offers a wide variety of teachers with the idea of not letting the content on the app become too boring. The user if able to mix and match different meditation sessions with different teachers to keep you coming back.
With mindfulness and healthy living always on the rise, it was easy for Kim to get her foot in the door. Interest in the app took off so quickly that Kim had to take a break from school studies to focus on the app that was meant to be a side project. Yunha Kim has raised $2.5 million from investors for Simple Habit. These include Foundation Capital, Fabrice Grinda’s FJ Labs, and New Enterprise Associates, as well as the CEOs from Gusto and Dropbox. Revenues are split between Simple Habit teachers based on the popularity of their sessions.
With the funding, Kim was able to make Simple Habit go from iOS exclusive to Android and web app accessible. More content like podcasts and monthly challenges have also been added. There’s also a feature that sends you notifications to remind you when it is time to meditate. A calendar function also allows you to track your day to day progress. Kim hopes to soon be able to download sessions so that users can meditate without having to be online.
Simple Habit’s subscription options run from $11.99 a month or $99 for the year. There is also a $300 option that gives the user unlimited lifetime access to sessions. And like most subscription based apps, there is a one week free trail available to make sure Simple H is right for you.
The app’s simplicity in helping its users find what they need has also been a huge help in making Simple Habit so popular. Instead of opening up the app to words like “chakras” or complicated yoga poses, there is a section of categories based on what you might be feeling. This helps make the app more user friendly and understandable.
Kim bases the app’s approach on goals and things people want to improve about themselves. The short sessions and free trial allow users to get a feel for meditation. It’s designed for the busy person who doesn’t have time in their day to stop but needs to chill out too.
The guided meditation helps users learn different kinds of skills that can be used without the app. This gives users many techniques to use when come across a stressful situation or feel unhappy. The intention is to build a habit that users can use to improve their moods and overall outlook on life around them.
