Seeking inspiration from Mark Twain’s quote that says, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover,” Founder & CEO of Simple Habit, Yunha Kim shares a similar philosophy towards life and work.
Yunha’s entrepreneurial journey began with her first startup venture Locket, an app maker for smartphone lock screens. However, working long hours along with elevated stress levels and anxiety completely wore her down. In order to relax, rejuvenate and get re-inspired, Yunha found Meditation and encountered its innumerable benefits. Soon, she was able to focus better at work, sleep better at night, and began rejoicing life and her relationships.
Yunha started using smartphone based meditation apps to de-stress and unwind, but got fed up and disinterested. Sharing her anguish of finding the right app for mindfulness, Yunha says, “I got pretty tired of hearing the same voice over and over again. It got me thinking that I don’t go to a new app to listen to each of my favorite artists, and artists like Justin Bieber don’t create an entire app to share their music. Instead, platforms like Spotify make it possible for musicians to access a bunch of listeners and vice versa.” On these grounds, she started talking to several meditation teachers and the platform onto which they share their content. Based on her discussion and observations, she identified the void that was existing in this space. Armored with a tech background and clear vision, Yunha set out to create the Spotify for meditation with a focus on 5-minute meditation exercises that people can use for any situation or mood. Today, Simple Habit’s vision has evolved since its inception in 2016 to become bigger and better app in terms of offerings and results.
Even though Yunha had previous experience of leading her startup company, developing Simple Habit was not an easy task. According to Yunha, the biggest challenge faced by her was not saying yes to everything. As much as she wanted to explore every opportunity that came her way for the sake of growth and expansion, Yunha and her team chose to first stay focused on building the best possible product.
Simple Habit: A Standout, Well-Being App For Meditation
Simple Habit is a 5-minute meditation app for employed and engrossed people, offering 1,000+ guided meditations by world-class experts. The bite-size meditations come for a variety of situations and moods, including before sleep, getting over an ex, commuting, and more. The leading well-being app has variety of skilled teachers as well as meditations, allowing users to create a more customized, on-the-go meditation experience. In all, Simple Habit’s mission is to empower humans to stress less, achieve more and live better.
The meditation app is backed by Y Combinator, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), prominent CEOs in Silicon Valley along with students and professionals. Speaking in terms of offerings, Simple Habit provides goal-focused meditations which are categorized by objectives such as, ‘Balance your Lifestyle’, ‘Boost Your Health’ and ‘Improve Focus at Work’. With thousand of users and paid subscribers, Simple Habit has garnered quite a fan base. It is has also won various awards, out of which, it has recently been named as the ‘Standout Well-Being App’ by Google Play for the year 2018.
Standing Out from the Rest
Simple Habit stands out from the other competitive meditation apps in the following ways.
- Simple Habit offers a multiple teacher platform instead of just one, thereby bringing top meditation and mindfulness instructors from all over the world on a single platform.
- The well-being app provides a 5 minute meditation specifically designed for busy people.
- Instead of basic and routine meditation exercises, Simple Habit is designed for a variety of specific situations and moods so that users can find meditations for any situations and moods such as before public speaking, before an important meeting, or before going to bed. Where other apps just speak about the type of meditation (i.e. Body Scan, Breath-Based), Simple Habit takes a step further to help its users to see when, how and where meditation fits into their busy, everyday lives.
Creating a Harmony Between Personal and Professional Life
The Founder & CEO of Simple Habit feels that self-care is extremely important. Working round a clock with inevitable stress, Yunha takes a small break from each day to step away, breathe and reset her mind. However, she inculcated the habit of meditation after experiencing a complete burnout while working on her first startup venture. Today, as the boss, leader and team member of Simple Habit, Yunha meditates every day, enabling her to stay more alert, focused and equipped to handle the hundreds of unforeseen things that can happen in a startup.
Effortlessly Handling the Gender Prejudice
Considering every coin has two sides, Yunha too believes that there are advantages as well as disadvantages of being a female entrepreneur. Besides being called emotional, soft and feminine, women have to deal with unwanted advances from the male colleagues. On the other hand, female colleagues offer help in terms of investments and support and are more compatible at work.
