Insight Timer CEO Christopher Plowman on Teacher Earnings & How the Platform is Changing

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I sit down with Insight Timer CEO Christopher Plowman to discuss the platform’s evolution, the shifting landscape for teacher earnings, and what’s next for Insigth Timer meditation teachers and coaches. He shares why certain changes were made, how Insight Timer is balancing sustainability with teacher support, and what strategies can help teachers thrive in this new model.

We also explore the platform’s growth strategy, the role of engagement metrics, and upcoming opportunities for teachers—including new monetization options. I ask some of your burning questions on direct to teacher subscirptions, Insigth Timer Lives, and retreat updates. Whether you're already teaching on Insight Timer or considering it, this conversation offers insight into how the platform is evolving and what it takes to succeed on the app now. 

Takeaways: 

• Inside look at the Life of the CEO of the world's biggest meditation app

• How the platform is evolving and what content performs best now.

• What teachers need to do differently to succeed in this new landscape.

• The biggest misconceptions about teacher earnings on Insight Timer.

• What’s coming next for Insight Timer and new opportunities for growth.

GIFT FOR YOU

If you’re a meditation teacher or coach who wants to create unique meditations people listen to over and over again, enroll in my free course Meditation Script Mastery

Music Credit: Nova by River Roots - https://www.youtube.com/riverroots

Podcast Transcript

Lou: Hello there, dear listeners of the Art and Business of Meditation podcast. I am literally expanding out of my body. Excited to chat with our guest today. There's a little bit of nerves there, but I'm also just really excited to connect with Christopher Plowman, who I must say this podcast would not exist if it wasn't for, for a company that Christopher Plowman bought 10 years ago. He is the CEO of Insight Timer, a platform that has allowed me to share my art of meditation and reach so many people around the world. And now he is here on the podcast to speak about Insight Timer, but also I hope to speak a little bit about Christopher and his day to day and his life. So Christopher, welcome to the show.

Christopher: Thanks Lee. That was a lovely introduction. I didn't know that. Nice to be here.

Lou: Yeah. So I'd be curious. There was so many places that we could start and I'm just curious, as someone, as a teacher of Insight Timer and as someone on the periphery and in conversations with sometimes Luke or Maddie, what is the day in the life of Christopher Plowman? And that might range like, you know, depending on the week and what fires you're. You're putting out. But what's it like to be the senior CEO of a large tech company or of Insight Timer? Like do you wake up at 4am and do four hours of insight Timer meditations and then, you know, have an eight hour workday? Do you, you know what, what is it? Can you, can you bring us back into what that's like on a day to day? Maybe you can use this week if, if that's helpful.

Christopher: Yeah, I can try that. First of all, I heard a great quote the other day. I'll see if I can find it for your audience from a guy called Chateaubriand, a French guy who talks about the fact that true happiness is when your work and your non work life is integrated. I don't really consider myself as having a job. As you were talking about what's my workday like? I was thinking about. Well, it primarily involves me dropping my daughter at school. That's my primary focus during my days to make sure she gets to and from school and that I'm present for her and present for my son and my partner. That was the first thought that jumped into my head. I consider running Insight Timer just the biggest joy. And I knew you were going to ask this question because you forewarned me, but I didn't think about it too much other than to conclude that working on Insight Time is just a very creative kind of outlet. There's tons of problems that we have to solve every day. And I love solving hard problems. It's something that I enjoy. Some people like exercise, some people like painting, some people like teaching. And for me, I like to look at a very complex problem and see if we can solve it. Building a company like Insight Timer, building a tech company that does about $25 million 20,000 a year without any advertising and with teachers, a very complex organism. So the second thing that comes to mind is that I have a team of people, my exec team, that I just wouldn't insult. Time wouldn't exist without them. And often it's me. It's not often because I don't speak on podcasts often, but I'm kind of. If Insight Timer has a face, it's me. But there are 10 other people that work with me on a daily basis and that build Insight Timer. Insight Timer wouldn't exist without them.

Christopher: And it's just a great joy. And the. The counter side to that is complex problems and communities bring with them lots of pressure and stress that I don't enjoy at all. I don't like having to make decisions about the longevity of our platform and the negative consequences that might have on a group of teachers and their reaction to that. I find that very stressful. And I don't like that side of my job. It comes with the territory, and I'm not complaining about it. But I often feel very pressured, sometimes anxious about the responsibility that comes with building a company like Insight Timer because it is a very important piece of infrastructure. It provides millions of people with free mental health tools around the world. It's also a business. It provides income to thousands of teachers. I have investors who expect returns on their money, you know, $50 million 80 or whatnot. We have people that work at Insight Timer. So there's lots of responsibility that comes with it. And that part I wish I didn't have to. I wish I could have all the fun and none of the responsibility.

Christopher: So to get functional with your question, I usually wake up at about 5 o'clock, have a coffee, jump straight on the dashboards. My kids wake up at about 7. I take my daughter to school at 8, and then I work intermediately throughout the day. I always try and get to the beach at least once if I can. And I don't work late in the evening. I used to do that, but I can't do it anymore. So I typically switch off at around 6pm, have dinner with the family, and then often crash on the Couch, mundane, but it's just something that I love. I'm addicted to it in every sense of the word. I just. I consider myself the luckiest man on the planet because I wake up every single day and I know some people kind of say that as a throwaway line. I truly do think I'm the luckiest person on the planet. I haven't necessarily. I don't have financial success, I don't have wealth and these. I mean, I'm comfortable, but I haven't kind of sold my company. But I have my family, I have my health, I have my creativity and my company. And I have Bondi beach and good coffee. And that's it. That's what I want. I'm a happy 50 year old.

Lou: That's beautiful if you can get outside during the day. Sometimes I feel like even as a meditation teacher and creator and coach, I spend way too much time just on a computer. So to know that the CEO of Insight Timer is also getting to the beach during his days, most days, it's inspiring for me to slow down as I think I need that lesson often.

Christopher: Well, I tell all my team I spend time on their diaries too. I look at their calendars and I say, there is no exercise time in your diary today. There's no, like, I actually, I hope to see at least two hours, whether it's in buckets or in the morning or in the afternoon. If my team have kids, I expect them to have time to pick them up from school. Like these things. To me, I always say to my team, your family is far more important than your work. And I think when there's that relief or that release and they know that, then actually what happens is they love their work so much more because they don't. There's no conflict between their family life and their work life. You need people to be stable at home in order to be, you know, creative at work.

Lou: Yeah. I think in what you're sharing, like there was a, a question for you around this. Clearly there's an integrity, there's a genuineness. And I think any company reflects its leader, reflects its CEO, reflects its founder. And I think what you built within saitimer, the generosity model of it, how much you've given to teachers throughout the years. And clearly in just even this conversation with you, this, this generous spirit of leading, you know, by example or putting your family first, as far as creating like a culture at Inside Timer, which I know less about, but I can, I know a lot about the culture of the Insight Timer platform and the Teachers and the community. And how many people have, you know, truly, truly have blessed their lives in some, both teachers and users, and have allowed so many beautiful things to come. And I think it, it comes from that generous spirit that Insight Timer was born out of. And I'm. I was curious, like, did that, did you always have, like, was that something that was from your parents that you, you took on or is like, you know, how did that, that come about?

Christopher: No. And I. No, it's. It's not the case at all. I think it's.

Christopher: I just don't want to bestow on myself kind of some sort of, you know, lots of CEOs do. I think you need to look at the shareholders of our business first and foremost, if you think about generosity. I started Insight Time. We bought Insight Time, my brother Nico and I, because we thought there was an opportunity to help meditation teachers make money. My brother is a meditation teacher. And we are driven by the conscious benefits that can be derived from that, but also by the commercial benefits. It's kind of at the very core of the complexity of our company, which is how do you create a successful commercial capitalist enterprise and maintain values? Most companies fail. Look at what happens to Facebook and Tesla and whatever, but look at what happens to the owners of these companies. They're just, at some point, their values go walk about. There's just no other way of saying it. I often wonder, if Insight Time becomes very successful, what will I be like? I do. I question a lot. I say, what will I be like? If I'm some successful rich tech person, will I succumb to the evils that people succumb to? But just as I have my team, I have a series of people that I report to as well. I have a series of shareholders, Beau, Gretel, Charlie, Anthony and Zach. And I don't think I know a group, a more kind of kind and supportive group of people, as I do for my investors. And I'm sure that through them we've been able to build and maintain this kind of generosity model, indeed, because they have been generous with their time and their money and their support of me. And so that flows through, I hope, to the platform. And yes, perhaps I'm a conduit for it, because I need to take their money and their time and their interest and convert that into what you see, which is the app and the team and those sorts of things. But it would be wrong to say that I'm special or overly generous. I'm not. I'm just a person that wanted to Build a company and, you know, and, and. And someone that does think that what we have built is important. I do, I do rally against what's going on in the world. And I. It does make me terrified. And I do want insight time to be successful, not just for commercial reasons, but I think the conscious model, the generosity model, was very harmonious as well. It seemed to work. The universe supported us every year. When we first started, we'd have like a million people, more than we had the year before. And we didn't advertise. And I'm like, where the hell are these people coming from? Right? What? You know, we're not advertising. Calm was spending $100 million a year, as was Headspace, on advertising, and we weren't. And of course, they got bigger earlier because they were advertising, but we didn't advertise and we still got pretty big. And now I think we actually have more people on our app every day than they do. I think we've actually finally surpassed them in terms of active user numbers. I don't know that's technically correct, but I think that's correct. So the generosity model was supported by the universe, and so it wasn't an easy model to hold to because things take a lot longer, but we were supported anyway. I think that's my answer.

Lou: I think that's it. I love the humility in it, but you could have, right? Okay. We tried this 50% to teachers model. Have been like a year in and realizing, okay, you're still not making money or Inside Timer is still not profitable and we need to shift things, you know, earlier. We need to, you know, do what other companies might have done and just, let's pay just per play. Let's not really get 50%. We won't really tell them much how much we're making as far as the percentage. So there was, you know, I mean, when Inside Timer started actually paying out teachers, like, you know, just even to do that 50% model was like super generous. And to hold that over the years, um, which I will say I listened to you. I was listening to some other podcasts. You did one you did in 2022 on, I think it was like an entrepreneur podcast, like success habits or something around with like, success in the name. And what struck me was you were mentioning, you mentioned this kind of offhanded that, like, you don't even consider Insight Timer to be successful. And I know what you meant by that because it was just more on the financial front. Well, when I heard that, it struck me because I'm like, wow, I have had so many conversations with people on this podcast and you mentioned the universe supporting Insight Timer. And it's almost like how much the universe has supported the teachers in when they found Insight Timer, where they were in their life, how they could have went down this path. But because of Insight Timer, they were able to go down this path and how much success that has brought them. And then for me personally, just how much success success. I quit a job 10 years ago and was really flailing for four or five years, and it wasn't until Insight Timer. Well, Insight Timer was almost like my golden thread that kept me through. And then eventually when it became monetized, I was like, it really opened up doors for me. So I experienced so much success. I know so many people that have experienced so much success. So when I heard you say, like, Insight Timer is not successful, there was like a. I get what he's saying, but it was strange to hear. So I'd be curious, has that changed? I know since some changes recently or. How do you define. Is success purely financial in your viewpoint?

Christopher: Well, I'm going to answer that from the perspective of me as a CEO and then me as an individual. I hoped I would be much more financially successful than I am today. At 50, however, I consider myself to be much more successful than I thought I would be. I think I've detached my measurement system from money. I know now that the things that make me truly happy is time on the beach, time with my kids, time with my girlfriend. Time. Time is what matters to me. I'm 50 now, you know, I don't know how many, many more years I've got left. Hopefully it's 30 or 40. There's that great calendar, I don't know if you've seen it, the Memento Mori calendar, which says, remember you're going to die. And you map out your entire life in weeks in little squares on a. On a calendar. And there's only 4,000 weeks. If you live to your 80, you've got 4,000 weeks. That's it. And if you go and put that on a wall and you cross out the weeks that you've lived, if you're my age, you're more than halfway. You don't have that many weeks left. And so as I get older, don't get me wrong, by the way, I'm not saying money's not important, and I don't, you know, I would like to be financially successful and I can afford things and I get paid a great salary and blah, blah, blah, Blah. I'm not saying that I'm poor for any stretch, but I'm not a classic successful tech entrepreneur that sold his company for 20, 50, $100 million. Right. I live on my salary and I'm happy with that. I'm actually happy. And I never thought as a 40 year old that I would say that. I always thought that unless I sold Insight Timer and put lots of money in the bank that I wouldn't consider myself successful. I look at myself compared with lots of my friends now, many who have a lot more money than me, but they're going into work, they're working at banks, they hate their day jobs, their lawyers and all these sorts of things and they don't enjoy the time and they don't see their kids and those sorts of things as much as I do. And I would rather my life where I'm in charge of my life and my time than another life perhaps where I was working for someone else and I had more money. So I consider myself successful now, but not for financial reasons, but for other reasons. Insight Timer, I guess you could now argue, is successful in that it no longer loses money, so it's sustainable. We made changes in, in June, July, because we were not going to make it. We were going to run out of money, we were declining and, and the company was going to go broke. It wasn't going to be here early next year based on where we were at. We made a number of changes to the platform and now I'm actually very happy and very surprised to say that the company has turned around entirely. We're now very, very established, we make a small amount of profit, we grow again. An Insight Timer is going to be here for the next 10 years and that's very exciting for me. If you're an investor in Insight Timer, you haven't got your money back yet though. So if you take an investment perspective on this, they typically like to get 10 times their money back. We've raised, I think, roughly $40 million. Insight Timer is not worth $400 million. Right. So depends who you ask. I think my investors are very excited about Insight Timer because it is a profitable, growing platform in the mental health space and we are making teachers real money, way more than most other platforms and they see lots of potential for us to grow that income for teachers over the next few years. And we're doing lots of other exciting things now in retreats and we've got projects in the works for other things for teachers that are coming soon. So

Christopher: I guess it depends who you.

Lou: Are whose viewpoint it is. So in the last 10 years, in this journey, as you look back, do you wish you had made this move sooner to what happened in June, or just as a whole, is there anything that you would do differently? And I know we have to learn the mistakes, and it's all probably perfect, but you were to wave a magic wand, I'd be curious, like, what in the last 10 years would you do differently if you could?

Christopher: So I knew you're going to ask that question, and I've been trying to think. I spent a lot of time actually thinking about that particular question. Just my own personal curiosity. Not even for your podcast. The answer I got to. I'm not sure it's going to be very interesting for your listeners is, I mean, there are things that. That

Christopher: I wish I'd known back then that I didn't know at the time. I'm not saying I'm not sure you could say would have I done things differently? Because at the time, every time I make a decision, I make it in the best interest of the company with whatever information I have available to me. And then as you learn from those mistakes, you know, you end up in hindsight knowing that some of your decisions were the wrong decisions. I'm very happy where we've ended up at the moment. I'm not happy with the fact that some teachers are upset because they're getting paid less income. It's a function of our growing pains and a whole bunch of other things which I'm sure we'll talk about. And I don't like the pressure that brings on me personally, but

Christopher: I couldn't really identify specific decisions that we got seriously wrong. We got hundreds, thousands of decisions wrong. I mean, literally hundreds, hundreds of them. Perhaps in hindsight, because we're going through a. A period of time now with a small group of teachers where there is some. Some teachers are upset with me, and I empathize with them. I understand why, perhaps I might have, had I known earlier on, been more clear about the fact that we're going to have to make changes as the company grows and we don't know what those changes are. And we'll do them with integrity, and we'll do them to ensure that the platform continues to grow. Perhaps I should have been more clear about that, that our business model was subject to change. Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting in a plane driving, you know, flying through some storm, and there's a few passengers kind of throwing things at me, and I'm like, guys, we're all in the plane together.

Christopher: And. And we are. If this plane crashes, like, I'm. I'm going with it. Every single thing I own. Like, I. The only thing I own in terms of assets is my equity in this company. I don't own a house. And I've said this before on podcasts, every single thing I own is, is equity in Insight Timer. I own 19% of the company. The rest is owned by shareholders and what have you. And if Insight Timer doesn't make it, I'm 50. I'm not. It's not going to be easy for me to get another salary somewhere else, you know, and I won't have any assets to retire on.

Christopher: The. The thing about. Well, the thing about a plane is you've got a couple of components. If I just use this analogy quickly, you've got a couple of components of plane that are essential, right? You've got a guidance system, petrol engines in the wings. Let's just say, I don't know, I'm picking those things. And if one of those things goes, your plane's not great. About a year ago, the entire industry changed and said, there's only one thing that matters in your plane anymore. If you're a startup, it's profitability. If you are not profitable, your company is basically not going to make it. And I had to make decisions to keep our company in the air, and I had to get us to profitability. And that meant I had to reduce the money that we pay teachers from 50% to 40%. We're now gradually getting back to the original payment, but in hindsight, perhaps we could have communicated that better. And I was, I was, I was told at the time that we weren't transparent about it. I couldn't have been more transparent if I tried. I wrote an article, I. I went on podcasts. I did everything I possibly could to explain that the consequence of not doing this was that in a year's time, there would be no Insight Timer. So maybe I could have learned how to do that better in hindsight. But apart from that, I think that Insight Timer is a great accomplishment and does provide enormous value to millions of people and will one day, when we finally kind of have reached our flow state, make tens of thousands of dollars per month for all of our teachers, but It'll take another 10 years.

Lou: I don't understand when people say that you're weren't transparent or weren't genuinely super generous. Like, to give the fund for three months was amazing and to, like, know that that was coming. I remember Reading that email, it was a week before I was about to go dark because I was getting married and it was like a whole week that I was kind of going into this initiatory process. So I remember I'm like literally going to go off email or phone for a week and a half that morning. Let me just check my email one more time. Is like June 26th and like email from inside Timer and just like, oh my gosh, this is going to change a lot. I had to kind of like, kind of felt like, okay, all right, we have to, you know, we have to roll with it. But I kind of had to like compartmentalize that and go, you know, do my thing. So I didn't come out of that until like three weeks later trying to process what does this actually mean? How does this look? I want to get into what's unfolded since that time. But. But I am curious of. I'm always this challenging thing and I know you've spoken so much before and it's in like Insight Timer's guidelines. I understand it where you know, if you want to supporting teachers and if Insight Timer isn't paying them, let's say a teacher needs $60,000 a year or you know, to make a living or whatnot. And if they're not making that and you know, we've talked about why you don't give out your email list to teachers and all that. And I totally understand like that aspect. But you know how and you're doing it with retreats. I know I'm kind of answering this question, but like the. How do you think of the balance between people Like I'm on this podcast, right? This is not through Insight Time, although I might publish it on Insight Timer. But how do you think of the balance with sharing and teaching on Insight Timer versus having things off of Insight Timer and like how they can they support each other if that's the way the teacher is supposed to make. Do you get what I'm. Do you get what I'm saying?

Christopher: I know, I know I do. It's my biggest nightmare. Let's get right. So consider for a second because I think sometimes, as I would if I was a teacher, I consider it from a teacher's perspective. But just consider it for a second. From our perspective, we've built this platform. We've invested we $40 million into its construction. We haven't yet got to a point where we're making teachers enough money, but we spend every single day trying to trying to make as much money for our teachers as possible. If we were to open up our platform and allow teachers to off ramp, which is essentially mean, to farm our database, to take all of the users off our platform and go and sell directly, we would have no platform left. It would be as simple as that. And all of the people that come to Insight Timer to engage with many teachers and to not be spammed by emails and notifications, all that sort of stuff would start suddenly being contacted by hundreds of teachers and we would have no platform left. And it's not that we don't want teachers to make as much money as possible, but if we start sending off all of our community off into individual disparate databases, our platform dies. It's just as simple as that. Airbnb does the same thing. Airbnb encourages you to book on platform. They don't like you to go off platform because the platform disintegrates. Now they've got very clever tools to encourage you to stay on platform. You get free insurance if you book for them. If the house falls through, you can get another house. You've got a whole host of tools that make it, that make it in your interests, whether you're a renter or a homeowner, to conduct your business on the platform. People still don't, of course. They send their email or their phone number and go off platform. We just can't afford to have people on our platform or teachers on our platform farming people off our platform and monetizing them on their own. It's not to say that you can't do that, Lou. And lots of our teachers kind of, they get very clever about it and you know, they, they, they do it to a certain extent, as is always the case, a minority group of teachers ruin it for everyone else because they get really sophisticated in how they try and do this. And they don't just stop there. We had one teacher that many teachers that create fake accounts and increase their play rates and we track them down with IP addresses and all this sort of stuff. Some teachers that you know, by the way, like they're, I don't mean you personally, but reasonably well known teachers that do things that are not, that are not okay. And so what we need to do is we need to do a much better job to help teachers to make money on the platform. And it is something that's an agreement. We have that agreement with teachers when they sign up to our platform, which is, listen, you can use our platform for free. You can access millions of users, you can upload guided meditation, upload courses. But the one thing that we ask if you would like to use our platform is that you don't off ramp and everyone agrees that they won't do it. And, and that's one of the conditions of using Insight Time. Now there are other platforms where they don't require you to do that and you can go use those platforms too. They don't have the community and the, and the reach that we have. But it's a, it's an agreement that we have without, that we, that we have without teachers. And I understand the frustration, I do. But it's one of those things that until we found better ways for teachers to monetize on our platform, if we break that rule, our company disappears within six months.

Lou: I hear you. I try to hone that in. I just was curious if. Because Insight Timer is not fully supportive, I guess I can't trust that you're going to figure out a way to make a living as a teacher outside of it too, whether it's through your workshops, whether it's through retreats, which we'll talk about in a second of how retreats are going with, with Insight Timer. But yeah, it just was. And I know that's a constant battle for. I've heard you talk about this before of that challenge and I totally agree with you. Before when I used to, I mean, I used to just have an email list and I would just send people like, hey, I do a new meditation on Insight Timer. And I would send people back to Insight Timer and it was this kind of like this, this, this circular thing. Now I also have things that I'm doing off of Insight Timer. But I could see how that would have gotten over just, just overloaded with teachers spamming a lot of people and a lot of emails and so that specific thing I totally understand. But yeah, I just didn't know if you're with Insight Timer, with teachers maybe making some a little bit less, some a little bit more right now too of how, how to support them outside of it. And it might not just, that might not be your job. Right. It's actually probably not your job to support them outside of it, but to just create as good of a company as you can for them to flourish inside of it in the rules that you set for it in the way that it's actually going to allow everyone on the app to flourish.

Christopher: Yeah, look, I think you're right. I mean the amount of problems we have inside our platform, I can't, I don't have the time where 80 people to start looking at how we can help teachers off the platform.

Christopher: But I do think that it. I talk to my team about rights and responsibilities, and there is a. It's our rights to determine the rules of our platform. And it's up to the teachers who use our platforms, their responsibility to respect those rules. That's just the way. That's how society operates. And if teachers don't want to operate under that set of guidelines, that's totally fine. They don't have to use our platform. I genuinely mean that. I hope they stay on our platform. But this is one of the things that we've determined is important for our safety, for our longevity, for our sustainability. I can't tell you how much I loathe, Lou when one of our employees has to email a teacher and say, hey, listen, you're using the live platform to promote all of this stuff off platform. Could you please not do that? Because we look miserly and mean and nasty. We do, but we're not doing it to be mean and miserly. We're doing it because if everyone does it, we go broke.

Lou: So let's go back to when we met last, which was you had a call for teachers in October, and I left that call feeling super excited and inspired and really good about where Inside Timer was going, even though personally, my revenue was down 30%. Uh, personally, and I know this is just my own. My own revenue. I can only know mine, and I have a. Some sense of some other people that I know. But, you know, my revenue has continued to go a little bit down since that time period, probably to like 30 to 35 to 50% as of January's pay. I'm just curious how you're. You're feeling since that October call and anything that might be helpful to update. And Inside Timer just sent a great email yesterday with some of that update too. So that kind of spoke to that. To Luke's email. But yeah, anything that would be helpful, anything that you can speak from that call. I know, I know some of it was private and, you know, not being able to share. So I don't know if there's anything else that you could speak.

Christopher: That's all I can. I appreciate you respecting the confidentiality of that call, Lou, and for your listeners. Just so you know, I shared some sensitive financial information during that call. I can share some of that information now. It's always difficult when I talk about this particular topic because at a macro level, I'm very excited about Insight Timer and our growth and our revenue and the health of our platform. And yet Even so, there is a small group of teachers who've seen their income reduce significantly, up to, in some cases, 50%. And I wish that wasn't the case. I know why it's the case. And so what happens is sometimes the narrative, which is a select group of teachers are getting paid less, gets unfortunately, either intentionally or unintentionally misconstrued as there's a problem with our platform. I'm not suggesting you doing that, Lou, but there are some teachers that are quite publicly kind of being upset, and I understand why they're upset. I'd probably be upset, too. But it doesn't mean that we didn't make the right call at the time. And with 2020 hindsight, I would go back and I would make the same decision. It was the right decision for all of our teachers, even though some of them continue to see a decline in their revenue. So what I'd like to do is just quickly talk about Luke's email yesterday, I think that he sent out to teachers, and then talk about the fact that some teachers, such as yourself, are seeing a decline in revenue. We made two decisions back in July. You will recall this, but just for your audience. The first one was we made a decision that we had to become profitable, because if we weren't going to become profitable, we weren't going to be around in a year. And so we changed the commission structure for teachers from 50% to 40%, and that contributed about another $150,000 into our bottom line, which meant we became profitable. This was an essential decision because it suddenly meant that we weren't declining it, that we weren't going to go broke and run out of money. The second thing we did, so that decision was made to ensure that we were profitable and growing, which meant that we could raise funding and our teachers, our investors would be enthusiastic and so on. So that was that decision. The thing is, we made another decision at the same time for a very different reason. And that was not only did we have to become profitable, but we had to start growing again. And in order to start growing again, we realized that our current algorithms weren't the right ones. We needed people to come back to our platform more frequently. And so we introduced return rates. Now, probably in the history of PR and marketing, we'll get zero points for the way we've communicated this, because it's caused a lot of confusion, a lot of displeasure amongst some of our teachers. But it too was a very good decision. Because what we've seen now, as you will have seen from the email that you got yesterday from Luke is all of our metrics are now continuing to grow again. Insight Timer is a growing platform again. And in fact, in January of this year, last month we had the highest number of play counts that we've ever had. We had the highest number of daily active users that we've ever had, and we had the highest number of subscribers that we've ever had. We hit the hat trick, all three. Tick, tick, tick. Now this means that as that revenue from January and February continues, because we pay out, if someone subscribes to Insight Timer today, we pay out 1/12 of that money every month for 12 months to teachers. That's the way it has to be from accounting perspective. So what teachers are going to start to see is that as our revenue continues to grow, the revenue pool will continue to grow. Now, we haven't got back yet to the pre July decision. We're not at June numbers yet, but we're close. We've got about four or five months to go and we'll be back at the original levels in terms of, in terms of total subscription payouts. And I'm pleased with that. If you actually add the new revenue that we've created, which is retreats, we're paying out more than we were paying out in January last year, 8% more. So I'm happy about that too. From a macro point of view, the problem that a small group of teachers has is that if you take these two events and you add a third event, which is the fact that we've got so many play counts, some teachers have been caught up in a perfect storm. So not only are they subject to the fact that we are now paying slightly less revenue out to teachers, but there's a group of teachers that have been with us for quite some time who were receiving what I would say now in hindsight is probably more income than they should have been receiving because they were getting paid based on popularity and not based on meritocracy, which is they're bringing people back to the platform. That's the second thing. And the third thing is our platform is growing. And what happens when our platform grows is there are more people on the platform, they're listening to more content, there are more play counts. And so as play counts go up, if the revenue doesn't increase at the same time, the rate per play goes down. So I had an email from a teacher the other day who said, I started out with a 25% reduction, I'm now at 50%. And I looked at this teacher's account. First of all, this teacher also hasn't uploaded any content in the last six months. And we know that if you don't engage with our audience anymore on any social network, if you stop engaging with your audience, you can forget it. You're not like the days of Insight Timer or the teacher could upload some content contents in, in January and then in two years time they're still learning. Those days are over. Right? We're not going to build a successful platform if people think they can just sit back and upload some content and passively earn income. Because we have lots of amazing teachers right now who really engage frequently. And the more content you upload, the more money you earn. But a smaller group of teachers, and when I say small, it might be two or 300 teachers because we have 20,000 teachers. But a smaller group of teachers are receiving less. Like everyone else, their return rates are not as good compared to their peers as their popularity rates were. So they've been reducing even further. And not only that, but the pay per play rate has reduced because there are more content being played. And if you're a teacher that falls into those three buckets and you're not engaging with your audience, your income is going to drop. Now I hope, I was gonna say I hope that's clear. It's probably as clear as mud. But these are the three things that mean some teachers income is dropping. I didn't know that yours had dropped, Lou, that far. I'm referring to another teacher in terms of that example. But we have other teachers too. You'll notice in the email one of our teachers has been for eight years, is now earning a lot more than they were earning in June. And in fact that particular teacher, I won't say his name on your bio. He was our highest earning teacher for the month of January. He toppled the greats because he has content that has a brilliant, brilliant return rates. He engages frequently. It's a beautiful course. I don't know if you know the course I'm talking about. Yes, and, and he, Charles, Charles is his name and his course is fantastic. He earned more in January than any other teacher. And that was not the case at all pre decision. So there are examples of teachers that are earning more. The truth is, Lou, I don't know what to do about that group of teachers that have fallen between all three cracks because it must seem like a, you know, it must, it, it must seem terrible. But it's a function of our platform growing and of us building a meritocracy within Our platform and it's a function of some teachers catching the return rate kind of juice earlier. They understand it. We don't know what the return rate juice is. I don't know why his course outperforms all the others. I don't. I love the course and I think it's probably because he, when, when he leaves the course at the end of the day, he talks about the course tomorrow. They're short audio files, about six or eight minutes each. When you get to the next day, he refers to the previous day. It's an 83 day course. Right. It has a five. Technically, it has a 4.97 star rating from 15,000 students. It's just a beautiful bit of content. So you don't hear from the teachers that are earning more. You only hear from the teachers that are earning less. That's the human spirit. I understand it. I'm confident that by August the majority of our teachers will be earning more than they were earning in June.

Lou: I have to take my humility pill because I'm probably in those three buckets that I'm like, okay, maybe I'm falling back. My popularity fallen back, which I'm okay with. And I'm uploading content. I used to be more consistent, but I don't have. I trust it, I trust my path and I will. An Insight Timer is always going to be there. But I'm smiling because on the other part of that is I know Charles is a friend and I'm in a small Insight Timer kind of group and I see Charles every week and I've seen his journey with this course. He's been a couple of time on the podcast. We talked a little bit about it a couple of weeks ago. So I'm just so excited to now know that it is the. Because when he tells me his numbers of what he's getting per day, I'm like mind blown of how many plays he's getting per day. It's like absolutely blowing my mind. And so we've been celebrating the heck out of him. So to know that he beat the greats who I can, I can imagine who that is in this month is just celebrating you, Charles. I know he'll be listening to this podcast and he has another 111 day course coming out soon on Zen Stories. So we'll see if he can hit the magic twice. But just to speak on that for people and I know if you've listened to some of my content, you probably have heard me talk about Charles and this course because it is a great Example of Charles made that course and he didn't even care if Insight Timer was going to accept it. I remember him going through that and saying, you know what? They've, they've denied a course from before. He's like, I don't even care. Like this was coming from such a pure place of creativity. And he, he says, like the dao supports it, right? The.

Christopher: His day three. This is day three of his of the course, which says, just detach like we did. Will it, won't, don't, don't force it.

Lou: Exactly. So he's, he lived it for that. And it's. And it's like, wow, look what happens. And you know.

Christopher: Yeah, but listen to, to the resonance of his voice in that. Like, the whole thing is just really beautifully executed. The audio quality is amazing. The kind of, the cadence, the gentleness, the softness, the authenticity of it. It's just got something really special about it. And it's snackable. You know, it's not, it's not 30 minutes per day. It's a beautiful course. The other thing I would like to say, Lou, for some of the other teachers out there is

Christopher: there is a, another huge benefit for other teachers on the platform. We have a musician, the same musician who was very, very popular in the early days. And as a result of what we've done now with return rates, we have other amazing musicians who create beautiful crystal ball sounds and things like that that are now getting more coverage on the platform and are getting earning income. Right. So it is true that some of the more popular. And this is the same for every platform that was ever built. Right. You get a group of people that were there at the start. It's human nature to have an expectation that things will continue to be as they always were, but we can't continue to be the way we always were. It's like when your child goes from age 5 to age 10, you treat them differently. When you go from age 10 to 20, you treat them differently. And it's not that we're trying to treat our teachers differently, but Insight Timer is growing up and we're trying to build a platform that services millions of teachers and hundreds of millions of users. And that means Insight Timer can't exist. For a small group of teachers who happen to be with us at the start, there's going to have to be some jostling, there's going to have to be some repositioning. And I know there's going to be some teachers who understandably get very upset about that, but I can't take my eye off the prize, which is millions of teachers, hundreds of millions of of students. That's just what we have to do.

Lou: I want to follow, I think what I'm tracking with Charles's example on Made for you algorithm. Because what it seemed like from that email was that because Charles's content, and this is the meta question, is if your content is tracking with a good ror, is the Made for you algorithm trying to pick that up more to then feed to people? Because that's what it seemed like with Charles. It's like it's noticing Charles has great ror and then let's send it to more people and then that's just like a great cycle.

Christopher: Yeah. So the answer to your question is yes. And let me explain to you why I learned something just before, about six months before we introduced the return rates, I learned something which I didn't know before, and we learned it from Duolingo. I learned this concept called cur. I don't even know what that stands for. It's an acronym that means current user retention or return rate retention or something. And I had always, up until I learned this, thought that the only way to grow your platform was to bring new people into the platform. So installs, right. We currently have. We've always had about 10,000 installs. Not always, but it hit about 10,000 a day five years ago, and it's remained static at about 10,000 a day ever since. About 50, 60, 70,000 people join inside Timer every week. And so I've spent a lot of my time, wasted time trying to work out how I can turn 10,000 installs into 20,000 installs. And then this guy at Duolingo discovered something which is that's not the most efficient way to grow a platform. It's an important way to grow our platform. Installs are important, but actually what matters is how many people who are already part of your platform come back each day or each week or each month. And we worked out something quite interesting, which is that we have 10,000 people who arrive at our front door every day for the first time, but we have 50,000 people who come back to our front door every day that haven't been on our app for the last 30 days. It's a much bigger opportunity to grow your platform. And so we were spending all of our time on this 10,000, when actual fact, we suddenly realized that there are 50,000 five times as many people that rock up every day that we can actually engage and encourage and get to grow our daily active user Base and sell subscriptions to. And how do you do that? Well, you find content that brings them back. And so when we discover a core, and when I say we, it's the algorithms, it's the AI, it's a whole bunch of sophisticated stuff that's way more sophisticated than any one individual. Of course we're now looking for content that brings people back more frequently and we will favor that content. And if you have a course like child that brings people back and our platform gets bigger as a result. Because if I come back to the platform three times a week instead of one, right, that means we have three times, it's still me, but in terms of the way we count them, it's more daily active users. And what we know is there's a direct correlation between the frequency that I or you return to the app and your propensity to tell people about our app. Word of mouth referrals go up when you're reactivated. Users start to use the platform more often because they like the platform more and so they start to talk more. And what does this do? It creates more than 10,000 people. That's new. That comes to your door every day. It grows the other metric too. And we also know now, and you've seen these from the stats I shared with you in the meeting, in the email, that when we bring 100 people to our front door, four of them subscribe. 3.6 actually

Christopher: 360 subscribers. And that money goes to teachers. And that's how it works. So yes, we are looking at every single thing we possibly can to find out which content is causing people to come back. And we're going to give that more coverage because that's going to be how we grow the business so we can pay teachers more money.

Lou: Is that a aggregate. Like if it's an 83 day course and like you'll take the. Because maybe one day has a 80% return rate, the other way has a 90 return rate. Like does it. Do you know like the specifics? Is it the first 10 day, you know, if it's a 10 day course, it's like an aggregate thing or like the first couple days or is it hard to.

Christopher: No, I don't. I'm, I'm way out of my depth now. My head of data, however, I'm going to take your punts and he'll tell me later I was wrong. I don't think we look at the individual days. What happens is we look at people that return frequently and then we look at what content they looked at. So it's the other way around. So if I come back often, we'll say, what are they listening to? It doesn't matter if I'm on day six or day nine or day ten. It just knows that the dowing course is something that I was listening to, but it's different if that makes sense. Again, I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but I think that's the case. We look at the content footprint of our high repeat users and we determine what content they're listening to. And that's how we determine if something has a higher repeat rate, a return rate. I can hear the phone ringing already. It's telling me I'm not right.

Lou: Well, I love. It's analogous, I think, to any. Some business advice of like, it's easier to have a sell a product to a former customer than to try to bring on a new customer. It's kind of not exactly what you're saying, but in some sense, some, some essence to like a business philosophy in that.

Christopher: Yes and no. I think if someone's determined that they didn't like the product initially, they might be harder. You know, first impressions count. But the point that I was trying to make is not whether or not it's easier for a resurrected user as opposed to a new install user. There's just lots more of them. So we've got five times as many opportunities every day to reactivate a user and get them to become an engaged user and sell a subscription to them than we do with our installs.

Lou: Got it. So we're rapidly losing time. I don't know how much I want to respect your time. And there's.

Christopher: I've got time if you want to. I've got time. I've got this fly running around my room.

Lou: Yeah, no, I, I, there's, there's just, I know many teachers gonna be like Lou, ask these questions. I know.

Christopher: I've got, I've got another, I've got another. I've got time for you I'm not far away.

Lou: Amazing. Amazing. Okay, so let's go to. I think ROR is making much more sense, I think, than it has ever. And just hearing what's happening with Charles's course and just what you're shar. Let's go to some of the other updates which something else which is challenging for someone, you know, like me who hates logistics and like I have, my wife does retreats and I see the pain of that and I'm like, I don't want to run a retreat and so, you know, to have Insight Timers, start retreats personally, it was like, okay, we'll. We'll see how this goes. But it's not for me to engage with right now. How is, you know, I know David Gandelman shared a little thing and, you know, I know David, and David does. Has been doing retreats for years. And so, you know, I can. And he's a bigger teacher on the app, so I can see him giving a little juice to retreats, doing it on the app. But I'm curious overall, you know, David, I would say, is more of like an og, you know, bigger teacher. Like, what's. What are you noticing with maybe not like a David Gandelman on the app, but other teachers doing retreats. Just, I guess just an update on how retreats are going so far.

Christopher: Look, David did do well with his retreat. He's a. I love David. He's a great guy. He's very professional, runs a quality product. We've had teachers with very few followers that have sold at their retreats too. We've had some teachers that have uploaded a retreat and haven't sold a single retreat. You know, like it's. It's day. It's day one for retreats. Think about what Insight Time was like the day I bought it. And that's kind of where Retreats are at today. Retreats is in its current form, sort of this cobbled together thing that we wanted to get launched as quickly as possible. We're taking the same playbook that we've done hundreds of times before, which is we get something launched, we'll trial it, we'll see what works, and then we'll iterate our way to success. Think about the way Retreats is currently operating on the app, right? There is no browsable directory of retreats on the app. So if you come to the app and you're looking for retreats, you can't find any. The only way you can find a retreat on our app at the moment is if you've got a retreat. Lou and I listen to your guided meditation. I get to the end of the guided meditation, I click through, that's when I'll see your retreat. That's the only way I can see it. The chance of me running into your retreat is tiny. Now, we knew this at the time because we were testing lots of other things. First, we wanted to test how would people interact with that screen. How would they pay for the deposits? How would we take the money? What did our dashboards look like? We had to build a Whole bunch of tech that you don't see in the background to make this operational. What I can tell you is that in about four weeks from now, we are launching a new tab on our app, one of the primary five tabs. We're going to replace the community tab with a new teacher tab, and I'm very excited about it. You might not see when it launches because we'll a b test it. Some people will say it, some people won't. But we're going to really double down now on lots of things for our teachers. And on that particular screen, you will be able to browse retreats. You'll also be able to browse all the live events. You'll see all the current live events that are live. And there's a couple of other exciting things that we're building into that, which I'm always nervous about, talking about things now because when they don't happen on time, I get bashed up. But I'm very excited about some of the other things that we're. That we're looking at for our teachers. I spent all day, every day, Lou, trying to think about ways that I can introduce transactional revenue to teachers. And by that I mean revenue that's not part of the subscription product because that has its limitations. The more people that join, the more. The less income teacher. Like, there's a kind of a fixed amount of income. I want to turn some of our passive teachers into active sellers. And the way we do that is we allow teachers to sell stuff direct, right? It's complicated marketplaces, transactions, Apple fees, quality reviews, returns, you name it. It's a cluster of problems. But in order for us to help teachers make more money on platform, we have to start somewhere, right? And retreats is a huge category for thousands of teachers. Maybe not you and maybe not others. I got an email. I think I said it on Tom's podcast. Last time I got an email from someone saying, why are you doing retreats? No one wants retreats. And I had 3,200 teachers that registered interest in retreats, right? So that person's not interested in them, but other people are. The reason why I picked retreats first, by the way, is because think about how much money we make per subscription, right? So a $60 subscription arrives. Roughly speaking, Apple takes us third. Roughly speaking, teachers take a third. And roughly speaking, we take third. We get about $20 for a subscription, which over the year for that customer is about A$80 a month. It's nothing. It's nothing. That's what we get and all of the hosting and infrastructure that we have to do for one of our subscribers. I think we have about 350,000 subscribers. I'm sure that number's wrong. We get a dollar eighty a month now. Yeah. With retreats. We know from research that typically a retreat organizer will spend anywhere between 30 and 50% of that retreat marketing that event. So we said, well, why don't we allow our teachers to sell their retreats? Or we'll take 10%. Small fraction teacher gets 90%. So they have a cost savings based on how they currently run their advertising and marketing. But if you've got a $2,000 retreat, we make a $200 retreat commission on that 10%. Right. That's 10 subscribers for us that we get for one transaction. And so my investors looked at that and they said, Christopher, this is an interesting potential category of revenue. There could be a couple hundred million dollars in revenue here for teachers and a 10%, maybe $20 million for insight timer and commissionable revenue. This is an important thing. And not only is it an important revenue category, but it's an extension of a lot of meditation teachers, businesses. You're becoming more val to teachers that run retreats. So I can tell you that I think we did a hundred thousand dollars in retreat sales in January. Again, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's tiny. We made 10 grand, right? It's. It's not a lot, but we paid out $90,000 to. To retreat organizers. Right. It's not a lot either. But in 12 months from now, I don't know, will that be a hundred? Will that be a million dollars a month? In retreats, we might make a hundred thousand dollars, but that's another $900,000 in retreat sales that will, that will make for teachers. So I am excited about retreats. I know that a lot of teachers wish we'd done direct to subscription first because that's what they want. But we had to pick something, and so I picked retreats. In hindsight, was it the right decision? Yes, I think it was. I'll tell you why. Because I said in that July article, no one remembers the sentence but go back and read it. I said, listen, direct to teacher subscriptions is really hard. It's going to take a lot of time. We're going to have to think through it. It's risky for our own subscription products. I said it. But I think people just saw direct to teacher subscriptions and then disregarded all the other parts of it because they're excited. And I Understand it. I'm very excited about launching a marketplace on the teacher tab where teachers can sell audiobooks. Tom Evans would love to sell audiobooks. In fact, he sent me a video message last night saying, can I do that? Other teachers want to sell PDFs and instructional booklets. Other teachers want to sell meditation cushions and all this sort of stuff. I would love to set up a marketplace for teachers where they can just list, publish and sell. And we take a, we take a commission. We're very interested in setting up chargeable teacher led challenges. You know, our challenge product. Lots of teachers say, I'd love to run my own challenge. I can get 200 people in. I'll charge 20 bucks. I'll make $4,000 inside time. It takes a cut. I love this idea. Other teachers want us to put a paywall in front of live events so that, you know, I don't know if, you know, Adam wakes, you know, the, the musicians or whoever, they could start charging for, for entry into lives. We've got all of these ideas, but we have a very small amount of resources and we'll get to them all. I'm totally off topic from your retreats question, but I just wanted to.

Lou: It's bringing up, it's bringing up another question that I've never heard you answer. And it feels like just an obvious question. And I'm sure you've explored it, but I'm like, you're reminding me. And I think my subscription, because I pay for Inside Timer Premium, but Ryan's recurring at $20 a year. And so I don't know when I bought it, but it's recurring at 20 bucks a year. You're telling me it's still 60 bucks a year premium. And just I guess the obvious question is why not raise the subscription? You know, if.

Christopher: Well, okay, we run tons of pricing tests and I can tell you that in one country. I probably won't tell you the country because all of those, you know, in one country we dropped the price, another country raised the price. We run pricing tests often. I know that in the UK we dropped our pricing because I think it was £60, which is ridiculous, or it was £40 or whatever. We dropped it down to. I think we dropped the price by 30% and revenue increased by 50%. So we do lots of pricing tests. The problem is pricing is very complex to run tests. Apple doesn't make it very easy. And then you have all of this sort of ugly revenue coming through that's not the right price. And the dashboards go all over the place. So pricing is something that we. We look at a lot. We look at the paywall, right? Most people get a paywall when they first sign up to Insight Timer during the onboarding. Some people don't see a paywall at all. Other people get it when they try and click some content inside the app. We have lots of. I mean, we run hundreds of tests.

Lou: Got it. You're. Got it. Got it. Okay. So it's been navigated.

Christopher: I will tell you another thing, and I probably shouldn't because I probably think we're not going to do it. But we look at lots of other business models. YouTube, for example. YouTube only pays its top 30% of creators, right? I've looked at that. I was like, okay, well, what does that make sense? Because we pay out, I think, about 30% of our income to people that earn $10 or less or whatever the number is, Right. It's a huge overhead for us. Right? Tiny amount of money for a teacher. And I've been thinking, well, if we did what YouTube did and we took that money and said, listen, guys, until you start to earn $10 a month or $100 a month or whatever the number is, we just can't afford to pay you because it's. It's just too hard, right? We have tiny team. If I took that money and threw it up over into the, what I call the middle class of teachers, we would increase our teacher revenue by 30% right now, to all of your listeners, I'm not saying we're going to do that because I'll probably then have 10,000 teachers that were in $10 or less who all get on the Internet and say that I'm a bastard and I, you know, I took the money back. But I just want you to know, Lou, and your listeners to know the ones that get angry at me, that I wake up every single day trying to work out how I can put more money in your bank account, because that will determine the success of Insight Timer and that will determine my personal success. It's all I think about, and there's lots of levers available to us. The problem is when you have a community of 20,000 teachers, every single one of them has an opinion. Some of them are very vocal, and some of them, quite frankly, sometimes can be unkind. It becomes hard to have a debate or a discussion like this, because what happens is you get one or two people in the meeting who kind of usually not because of something we've done, but, you know, the great saying hysterical is historical. Usually it's not about us, but they kind of cloud the discussion and then we can't, we can't get to the. These kinds of constructive discussions. Let me ask you that question, Lou. I'm going to switch. I'm going to take the mic.

Lou: Oh, wow. Okay.

Christopher: There we go. I'm asking. So, Louis, this doesn't work, by the way.

Lou: It looks good for YouTube.

Christopher: If you were the Insight Timer CEO, you're conflicted because you're in the small group of teachers that would benefit from this. Would you take all of the income from teachers earning a hundred dollars or less, stop paying that income out to them because it's a huge overhead, 5, 6000 teachers, transaction fees, invoicing, etc. Etc. Etc. And pay that income to the top 30% of your teachers? What would you do? And run. And run the risk of having 8,000 teachers that get on the Internet and call Christopher Plowman? So, and so what would you do?

Lou: If I was Christopher Plowman and having to navigate this, you know, I know teachers and I support teachers that are making probably under 100 bucks. So I want to know that they're probably listening to. And so I want to hold a genuine curiosity of okay for. Is it. I would have a question like, would it incentivize teachers to give more to Insight Timer to reach that mark? So it's almost like, okay, I have a goal. I need to get to where I'm making enough content, making enough energy to have $100 in revenue or a specific follower amount. I know YouTube. It's like you need to have a thousand subscrib. And this watch time, I don't know what the metric would be, but it would be curious of would it. Would it inspire people to get to that marker? Now that's one perspective that I would consider. And then the other perspective is I'm a big believer in if you can make one, you can make a million of like the, the small wins appreciate. And so even honoring people, you know, that are making $10, them appreciating it and growing 10 into 100, 100 into a thousand, and hopefully, you know, on and on and on. So there's two parts here. You know, the selfish part of me would be like, oh yeah, like that would be great. I'm already, you know, past that, you know, past that number. And I'm seeing income come down and I would, you know, that would be a nice boost to know something's coming up. Yeah, I guess it would. I would question that first piece of would it compel because right now I'm actually, you know, with Insight Timer. You know, if I'm being transparent with you, I've been putting some more energy into, like doing, you know, videos on YouTube and trying to create, you know, all the alternate sort, alternate avenues, so to speak. And I'm, you know, I. That that mark of hitting that mark of where I'm going to be monetized is compelling. Like, okay, I'm moving there. It gives me a goal to work towards. So that's. I don't know. That's something I would question. But is it at the foundation of Insight Timer's generosity model? Maybe not. And I, And I'm. And I would lean towards, well, what's the foundation? What got Insight Timer here and not that what got us here is never, always might not get us there. So I'm aware of that aspect. And you've made those changes already, so I'm not answering your question, Christopher, but.

Christopher: Oh, no, I was going to point out that that's the case. You're not. See, this is the problem. I don't have that luxury. Yeah. And you've just raised very, very concisely. Actually, I was being facetious when I said politician. You've raised all of the levers and the pressure points that I have to consider. But at some point, I have to make that decision, and no matter which decision I make is going to upset an alternate group. And I talked to you earlier on. I didn't use the right language, but I kind of explained that there's a part of my job that I don't like, and it's this one. Right. Which is hard decisions have consequences. That kind of. Cause, you know. Well, you understand. So. So I'm actually going to push you one step harder, Lou, if you had to make a call and. Because I'm just going to. I'm going to. This is. This is my life. Right. If you had to make a call, what would you do? Would you do it or wouldn't you?

Lou: Wow. I'm really putting on the spot here.

Christopher: And you can say I don't want to answer the question. And then that will kind of. That would be okay, too. But.

Lou: My intuition is saying, no, I wouldn't do it. I don't know why, but I'm saying I think it's. It's incredibly. I'm just trying to put myself also back to a. I don't. It's that like a hundred dollars is a lot, not a lot and a lot at the same time. But I'm trying To put myself back to me in 2016 and like, just receiving the energy, oh, someone pay me 20 bucks for something like just that is enlivening and motiv. And so I'm trying to put myself what would my 2016 self would have said? And my intuition is going, no, and I'm going to not again again give you the alternate answer too. And there's a part of me that's like, that, that'd be, that'd be interesting. I, I'd be curious. I'd be curious to put this out to people that are actually making that money if they knew that it would. It would exponentially raise if they were to hit this bar. Because that also gives the question of, there's this came up of like, will Insight Timer ever not allow a teacher to be a teacher in some ways? Like, would there ever be any boundaries to signing up to be a teacher?

Christopher: Yeah, I mean, we do you mean, do we throw people off the platform? Is that what you mean?

Lou: No. Like, where maybe you have to have some sort of certification or some training, like, you know what I mean? Like more like schooling around and don't have to go into that. But that often gets a lot of people. Maybe they'll do a couple meditations and they're not there, but they're still making a time. You know, it's fractional, so it might not even be worth exploring. But yeah. Wow. You just putting that pressure on me, Christopher, to me, having to make like a gut decision here is like, wow. I, it's hard, it's hard to, to make. It was really hard to just be in that pressure just to get a little taste of, oh, you have to deal with this all the time and a lot more.

Christopher: I'm sorry, maybe it was a bit unfairly, but I, I, it was an interesting exercise, wasn't it? I was very curious.

Lou: It was a new experience for me. I loved it.

Christopher: I should do this more often. When teachers contact me, I'd say, well, what would you do?

Lou: What would you do? I like it. Director teachers, that was a big theme. You mentioned it. It's something that obviously a lot of people are asking about and I totally get. To me, the answer, if I'm playing Christopher Plowman again to this answer, which the answer to, well, I don't want Insight Timer to lose its membership would in my thoughts, where that is almost like a pretty quill. I'm losing the right word. But that is a necessity. Like, you can't actually pay for director teacher subscriptions unless you have An Insight Timer subscription. Like I would, I would say to cover Insight Timer, you make that like foundational. And then any direct to teacher is an add on. And if they were to try to cancel their, their subscription to Inside Timer and say, hey, I just want to support this teacher, you'd be like, well, we, that's just part of our model is that we have to, you know, we have to have it.

Christopher: So I can hear the teachers now though, right? Can you hear them? So I agree with you.

Lou: It just makes sense. I think it makes sense like, that I would be curious to, like, I don't know why, what their argument would be.

Christopher: It does. Well, let me, I'll play it out because we already talked about it, right? So I'm a subscriber to you and I pay my Insight Time subscription and I come to you and I say, lou, I actually don't want my. And I'm your student, right? And I'm paying you 20 bucks a month. I'm paying inside time of 60. And I come to you, I say, lou, do you know what Christopher Plowman told me? He told me that if I want to keep being your student on Insight Timer and pay you every month, I have to pay. I don't want to pay Inside Timer, I just want to pay you. Do you think that's fair that he's stopping me from being your subscriber?

Lou: I think if I knew that, that the health of Insight Timer was, you know, at the core of this, I would say yes. I think if you're, I would say being clear with teachers signing up for this, that these are the ground rules now. The fear that I would have if I was you is that the person says, well, you know what? Yeah, I do this actually also off of Insight Timer and you could actually subscribe to me. Here's my link to go pay and you subscribe and I'll, and I'll share with you these PDFs that I have on site Timer. That's, that's the fear for sure.

Christopher: But a lot of, a lot of teachers do that already anyway. Not a lot, but some teachers do that and then that's fine. I mean, I have many very, very dedicated teachers on inside time and friends who run businesses off inside time and they have to. That's how they. Sure, that's fine.

Christopher: There are other problems too with a director's description model. Right. First of all, Apple takes 30%. We need a cut, right? So the teacher sits there and think, I'm getting, I'm getting $30 a month, but I'm giving Apple 9 and then insight time is getting whatever 5. You know, it's 14. I'm only getting $16 of the 14. That's not fair, right? Like why am I paying them $16? Right? Because Apple doesn't care about aggregators like us. Apple's an aggregator. So we, you know, I talked about this previously, it's very difficult. And when Apple's taking such a big chunk of money for a marketplace like ours to operate, they are, they, they take too much. We saw this with donations. We saw a huge decrease in donations when Apple started clawing that 30. But we take no money from donations. We don't make a single cent. You can come to Insight Timer, be a teacher, run your lives, take donations and we will not make $0.01 from you. Apple takes 30 and the teachers take 70%. The direct to teacher thing, we spend a lot of time talking about it. I think AI has evolved quite a lot since. Sounds funny to say it, doesn't it? Since July yesterday. And so once this new Teacher tab, assuming it passes the A B test, because we might find that we launch this teacher tab and it performs very poorly, in which case we'll have to try something different. Our tests determine lots of things that appear on the app and don't appear on the app. But assuming that the new Teacher tab is popular with our users and results in more return rates and more people coming back to the platform, then we have started thinking about ways or features that we could introduce that would allow someone like you, for example, to sell something to our audience. When it moves into a recurring subscription, it becomes more complicated. So it may be initially that we're going to do transactional stuff, right? So you might run a 10 day whatever on the app and that might be $50 and Apple will take a third and we might take $5 and you'll take 30. I'm not sure. But we, we are excited about this and I do want our teachers to be, to move from being passive to active. So we're going to have to do this. I just don't, I don't want to tell your, your listeners that I know when and I know how because I made a mistake of kind of putting some rough estimates around that and I shouldn't have done that because. Well, you know why, you've seen the responses. But we're looking at it, we're looking at it and I do think without going into AI too much, because we'll never be a platform that creates fake AI teachers and all that Sort of shit. We can, you know, you can go somewhere else for that. But if we can use AI to help you become Shiva with a thousand arms instead of Lou with two arms, and you can maintain that authentic relationship with more students because AI is running things in the background and preparing you to have those relationships, then I think it does become very interesting. So we're looking at how we can do that. But I just can't say anymore. Not because I'm trying to be avoidant. I just don't know Lou when and how it's going to look.

Lou: I think that's a smart thing and I want to encourage people on that question before. If you're listening to this, whether, if you're listening to this on Spotify, you can comment. If you're listening to this on YouTube, you should be able to comment. But I'm curious, what would your answer be to your question before of, of cutting, you know, making the, the YouTube model? I'd love to hear people's thoughts in whatever comment section shows up because that'd be fun to, to hear. Christopher the Live. I got a lot of questions around Live. Obviously people having interest in like the direct, you know, pay for Live and just also the quality of lives. Like there's a lot of questions around just different shifts happening technically, which you might not be as tapped into something you shared in our October call. So if it's confidential, don't share it. But there was something about the actual users of Live that was so mind blowing to me of, oh, there's a much less percentage people using Live than I even imagined. And it made me understand why Live. Maybe it's not a huge focus for you. So if I could, I could edit this section out if, if.

Christopher: I think far away. What was the number? I can't remember. Is it 5,000 people?

Lou: It was something, yes. Something insanely low compared to how many users are on Inside Timer where I was like, whoa, that's so much less people using Live than I even imag. It is a good way to reach new people. But it might seem like if I'm making a brash judgment about it, a lot of people who appreciate just having the free opportunity to be in classes and you know, they'll, they'll show up on like lives all the time to. Because they're have the space in their life. I don't. There's just like a not, you know, there's less donations happening on Live, obviously from when, you know, live started. But yeah, I just think hearing the numbers of how many People are actually doing Lives was shocking to me. And so it might just make sense for people who are wondering why there's not more attention towards Lives.

Christopher: Are you talking about attention from us or attention from the community from you?

Lou: From an inside Timer, yes.

Christopher: I think everyone asks me about every feature, why there's not more attention on those features. Live is a huge expense for us too. A lot of people don't realize, but the streaming cost for us is extensive. When we were looking at saving our company a year ago, we considered turning off Live because of the expense of it. In the end, we decided not to because there's something about our Live platform, even though it's a small percentage of our users that can't quite be described, but there's a spirit or an essence to us and our community that I think sits inside that, that Live bit of infrastructure. I often go to Lives. I like to listen to musicians. I love it. I can't remember what number I said at the time. I can recall, Lou, that I think my CTO Cyrus told me that I got that number wrong. I think that's not people that comment in Lives. It might be that the people who participate in lives is about 10% of our total user base, which is still a reasonable number. It's about 10%.

Lou: Okay, that's more reasonable than, yeah, maybe.

Christopher: Comments, but I'm not sure that I'm, I'm telling you the truth here, in my heart I am. But I'll need to go and clarify that. It's certainly a small percentage of our users and Live's a bit of, a, bit of a potluck on our platform. You can go to some absolutely unbelievable, mind bendingly high quality musical experiences and then you can get some really sort of low, average, low grade stuff. When you asked me the question, would there ever be a time that we would not allow someone to be on Inside Time, I was not thinking, yes, but I was thinking there might be some sections of the app where we would say, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna fence this off and in order to do Lives, you'll need to reach a certain level of quality and a certain studio quality and, and these sorts of things. I, I can't give up on Live for a few reasons. One, because it's. It was so hard to build. Never a good reason to keep something, but that's true. Two is because I think it differentiates us from lots of other platforms out there. It gives a real, an in real life sort of flavor to Insight Timer, but mostly because I'm very excited about Live as a platform for our teachers to start selling courses and retreats and marketplace items. And we are looking at the moment at features that will allow someone who's doing a LIVE to say, I have a course on this. And they will click a button on their desktop. And in the LIVE experience for the listeners and the viewers, a slide up will appear with that course and they'll be able to buy it on the spot. These kinds of little changes because at the moment the text says, go to my profile screen, then scroll 50km and then turn right and go left. And it just doesn't work. And so I'm excited about Lives for that reason. We also know that teachers who are putting on retreats, if they go and promote them in live, they do very well with their retreats. So I think that Live will become a very interesting tool for people to sell courses. And I don't mean to become salesy, but Charles giving a LIVE on his course and then saying, go buy it would be a beautiful experience. Very consistent with what we're all about. So it doesn't have more time put to it, Lou, because we're. We're 80 people and we just ran out of resources. Resemble run out of time.

Lou: Yeah. Christopher, you've been extremely generous with your time. I have one more question, and you're welcome to answer as much as you know, more if there's more to say. But what for teachers listening? What can us teachers do or continue to do to help Insight Timer flourish? Any requests?

Christopher: Look, it's simple. I say this to every single person who says, what can we do? We need Insight Timer to grow because the bigger we become, the more resources we can put onto things. Right. I have a fixed amount of cost every month because it's determined by how many teachers get a fixed amount of pay. We get a fixed amount of pay, too, from teachers, from their subscribers. If we're triple in size, then we have triple the income. Teachers get triple income and we can do triple the things. You know, we're not hoarding our profit. It gets reinvested into more tech and more streaming. It's like we're not paying dividends. It's not like we're all. We're not getting. We get salaries, but we don't, you know, their investors don't get paid out dividends. It all goes back into the business. And I know so many teachers do so much for us already. So, you know, it feels. It's difficult to say, hey, guys, I know we cut your pay and some of you are really struggling at the moment, but can you please help us grow? But that's the answer to your question. That's the authentic, honest answer that the more people that sign up to Insight Timer, the more successful we will become and the more teachers will earn.

Lou: Well, Christopher, as you've mentioned, it seems like the universe has supported it, supported me through it, and I trust that it's going to continue to unfold. And I'm super hopeful and excited about where it's going and just super, super grateful for just the opportunity. Like, truly, this podcast wouldn't exist without it. So much of what I'm able to do now wouldn't exist without Insight Timer in my life. So I have endless gratitude to you, to the platform, and just, yeah, just super happy to have this conversation and get to share, hopefully with teachers. And I'm sure people are going to be angry that I didn't ask their questions or you didn't. You know, there's always going to be that. So, yeah, continue to meditate and work with that in your own self. But, yeah, thanks so much, Christopher. Such a, such a joy.

Christopher: I really enjoyed it, Lou. I should do this more often. And in fact, I am going to do this more often. But thank you for having me. I've, I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed talking.

Lou: Well, you've mentioned that you have now. I saw on the email yesterday the. We can send a video to you to ask a question. That's, that's. Well, you really opened up the doors there.

Christopher: Well, it's just we're trying to find a way where I can speak regularly to our teachers and that they, you know, it's hard because I tried those meetings in October, but you can only get 20 or 30 people in there. They're exhausting. For me, I did five in a row. By the end of the week, I'm dead. And so we do need to do a much better job of communicating the kind of stuff that Luke sent in that email yesterday. We need to do much more of that so that the void, the lack of communication doesn't get filled with people saying things that aren't true. So we're going to do more of that and I'm going to start speaking more. So maybe I'll come on your podcast again in six months time, Lou, and tell you how we've been going.

Lou: We'd love to have you. All right, friends, take care.

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