Meet Cynthia Arscott
Creator of Goldminds — a mindfulness & sleep app for kids!
Hey, it’s Alex!
This week, we’re featuring Cynthia Arscott — creator of Goldminds — a mindfulness & sleep app for kids.
In just a few weeks since launching the app, they’ve hit over 11k downloads and have more than 3000 paying subscribers, but of course, it wasn’t a straight line to get there!
Cynthia’s story is packed with valuable lessons, including:
Leveraging an existing community for customer acquisition
Listening closely to your target audience to guide product-market fit
Pivoting consistently to find a version that works
Honestly it’s one of my favorite interviews to date — check it out below!
Goldminds Quick Stats:
💰 Capital Invested: $100k
👥 Current Paid User Count: 3,000+
📲 App Downloads: 11,000+
🚀 Launched: September 10th, 2024
Why did you start Goldminds?
Goldminds is a mindfulness app for kids that helps them learn different mindfulness skills through stories.
I myself am a meditation and mindfulness teacher, and I got started back when I was working in tech.
I was at Uber Eats in partnerships, and while I was working there, I experienced a lot of anxiety myself.
When I was trying to get to the bottom of where it was coming from and how I could solve it, I came across meditation and mindfulness, and it had a really big impact on me.
I was able to control my mind and see past my anxiety.
I was a very anxious kid. I went through different challenging situations with friends — I guess you could call it bullying in some capacity…
Those things really got to me when I was younger, but it wasn’t until I started practicing mindfulness, I realized that I could’ve really used those mindfulness tools back when I was a kid.
So I decided to get certified to teach meditation and mindfulness.
How you started…
Originally, I was very naive.
I thought I could launch programs in person in schools to teach mindfulness to kids. I have a really good friend who does karate programs in schools, and she helped me get it into a school to test it out.
So, one day on my lunch break at Uber, I drove to this school, and taught this group of, like, seven year olds mindfulness for 30 minutes, and it went really well.
I think I did four of those in total.
They went great, but it was right before the winter break. Around that time, I decided to leave my job at Uber to work somewhere remote, because I wanted to start to build up this business, but needed an income while I did it.
So I joined this other software company that was totally 100% remote.
I worked there for a couple months and kept trying to build the classes business on the side, but then all school programs shut down during COVID, and I didn't really have an opportunity to even explore that option much further.
Like a lot of people at the time, I went with the trend of introducing virtual classes. I’d hold them every Monday evening after work, then as the classes got more and more popular during the pandemic, we filled out Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays.
At that point, I thought I had made it — but actually wasn’t even close.
It was really labor intensive and wasn't scalable at all.
And what followed was two or three years of utter confusion on what my actual offering was.
I knew what I wanted to teach kids, but the channel was still very blurry.
I did a bit of virtual, I did a bit of in person when that came back, and that was the mix until the pandemic was over.
Then I was pregnant with my son, and a software company came to me and said, hey, we can make a white labeled app for you for pretty cheap, like $300 a month. Do you want to try it?
I knew I wouldn’t be able to do all of the classes with a newborn, so I agreed.
So I recorded about a hundred of these kids' meditations and stories I was doing in schools, and that became the very first version of the app.
Finding product market fit…
For a long time, I tried to keep the classes going while working on the digital product, because I didn't know which one was going to take off.
I was trying to go where the money was, but I still hadn't figured that out yet.
I ended up keeping some school programs, but because I couldn't teach them myself, hired teachers to teach them for me.
And to test out the app, and see if it was actually worthwhile, I gave it out for free to 300 families in these schools. The offer was basically, hey, as a part of this school program that the school has paid for, you get this free app for three months.
The feedback I got was incredible…
People would come to me and say, “This app is putting my kid to sleep in five minutes. Our bedtime routine is easier. This is now a staple. Can you add more of these stories?”
After that I knew there was something there — but it wasn’t what I originally planned…
Instead of mindfulness, it was sleep.
And I was a new parent, so I was just discovering that as parents, all we care about is sleep getting our kids to sleep.
So really, our product changed in that moment from being a mindfulness tool to a sleep tool, which is what made parents more interested in it.
Then, last summer, I was one of the winners of the Visa ‘She's Next’ Grant.
I went to this big event, got to meet a lot of different founders and had a chance to explain my business — how I was doing the school programs — and it's an app for kids.
But the way I was explaining it, nobody knew what I was talking about at first.
Then, everyone was slowly like, oh, like headspace for kids?
That phrasing shifted my whole perspective. I knew that was the direction I needed to head in.
So I phased out school programs, which was a direct cut to revenue and maybe kept one or two schools here and there to help keep the lights on.
From there, I started looking for a CTO.
I went on Y combinator, put up a profile, and decided I was going to build an app to host these stories that were putting kids to sleep. And shockingly, I found the best CTO ever.
I interviewed maybe three or four people and I found him — we started working together instantly.
He built the entire app and that was how I transitioned it into a product.
Staying the course…
The entire process from those virtual programs until launching the app three weeks ago — that timeframe was about three years.
Not to use it as an excuse, but the Pandemic was a very confusing time to be a business owner.
There was a lot of back and forth. Some days I’d be like, What the hell am I doing? And then other days, I know exactly what I'm doing. This is it.
For some reason —and I, to this day, don't really know why — I just knew this was such a good idea that I was never going to quit. I would always pivot and iterate because I knew there was a way to get these tools to kids. I just wasn't 100% sure what the channel was going to be.
I didn't necessarily want to be an app.
Having worked at Uber, I wasn't expecting myself to go be the CEO of a tech company, but also, I think Cynthia from three years ago couldn't have handled what Cynthia now can handle.
It was a long and difficult process, but I needed that time to develop confidence and be so damn sure of myself that nobody could tell me what I was doing was stupid.
Setting the pricing model…
I funded everything through the revenue we made from classes and through grants.
I won probably three or four grants, so that was the reason why this product was able to come to life in terms of financing the upfront costs.
And in terms of deciding on a pricing model — I just did a lot of competitor research.
I saw what other people were charging in the space and I decided in order to be a subscription that people don't cancel, it couldn’t cost more than a cup of coffee.
People can rationalize a cup of coffee, but once you get past $8, $9, $10, people start to drop off.
So, that's exactly what we ended up launching with — it's $4.99 USD per month and then $35.99 per year.
Brand positioning & acquiring customers…
One thing I've realized over the past couple of years is that nobody really wants to follow a brand — they want to follow a person. So, what I wanted our brand to look and feel like was just a bunch of parents that were building this app and doing it in service for kids and other parents.
I wanted it to be really personal.
I didn't want it to be like other apps, because if you go and look at other app pages, they're very boring — not to be mean, but they are.
Their content is very educational, and I didn't really want to be an educational space for parents — I just wanted it to be really easy to use, and give it more of a community feel.
I knew I had the product down, I knew I had the right team, but what I really needed was a community to actually launch this product toward.
That was when I decided to bring somebody onto my team, but I was trying to figure out who it was.
Was it going to be a sleep expert?
A psychologist?
A child therapist?
Over time I realized I should bring the person on the team who's had the most impact on me as a mom and somebody whose community that I'm a part of — that I believe in.
That person is Rachel from Hey Sleepy Baby.
She has the most engaged mom community I've ever seen and been a part of, so I knew I needed her to teach us her magic and to help us do the same thing for our brand, because our audience is largely the same — it’s a bunch of parents and caregivers who are looking for sleep support and want their kids to fall asleep.
So originally the conversations were about whether it could be a partnership, and as time went on, I was like — no, I want you to be a founding member of this team.
So that's what we did!
And our marketing/launch strategy was really built around that announcement.
We launched our waitlist a week before we launched the app. So it was a very short timeframe, but we got about 4000 people within a week. And then we launched to that audience a week later.
Ever since, our strategy has just been the two of us sharing how the app is working and to heavily monitor our DM's.
After all, that's where your community is, right?
For the last three weeks, I've pretty much spent all my days in my DMs, collecting reviews and feedback and feature requests. And that just fueled what we shared.
Now we only share things on our feed that are either customer reviews, questions that we're answering for our audience, or features we are adding to the app because our audience wants them.
Goal setting…
Well, we launched to a waitlist of 4000, which blew my mind.
We're now just over a month post-launch, and we have 11,000 people who have downloaded it, so we surpassed any initial goal by a lot!
I think I'm a little shell shocked if I'm being honest.
At this point, it's just growing and being able to maintain the amount of users we have, so we're just going to keep setting paid user goals.
By the end of this year, I'd love to get to between 5000 and 7000 paid users.
That would be my next goal.
Creating the content and experimenting with AI…
Everything on the app is written by me, but I collect feedback from our audience, and ask them what stories they want their kids to listen to.
I’m constantly asking customers questions:
What does your kid like?
Do they love dinosaurs?
Unicorns?
What kind of themes do you want the story to be about?
Do you want it to be about gratitude?
Transitioning back to school?
Falling asleep?
I get all of my ideas from our users, and I always have.
I've just always asked Instagram, what do you want to see?
And then I just write the stories based on that.
I record it all in a studio my friends have down the street from me.
I'm still trying to find a way to scale that, because it takes up a lot of time, but for now, the content plan is two things:
One, have a monthly challenge. Every single month, we're going to have new content hosted by an expert to keep things interesting, and keep people engaged.
We're also going to be releasing other content, probably five to ten additional stories every month, inspired by the audience and their requests and their themes.
This month, I have Halloween-themed stories and some other longer ones people have requested.
It’s like 30 minutes straight of me talking, which, as you can imagine, takes a lot of time to produce.
I did it this weekend and I put myself to sleep four times.
I recorded four times in a row and after the fourth take was like — I'm done for the day.
So that's another thing I have to figure out…
We have experimented with using AI read stories — that could take a lot of pressure off me, and can actually produce custom content based on the user’s profile information, but the flip side is people want a human to speak to them, and obviously I have a much softer, more nurturing voice than AI does.
And the problem with AI is the better the ‘voice’ is, the more it costs.
When we first launched, we had this really good AI voice, but it was really expensive. People were loving this custom stories feature and everyone was just generating stories but we were blowing through our budget like every day.
So we're playing around with that.
But if we can get the voice to be really good, that would save a lot of time because even though I still write the stories, I don't always need to narrate it.
It’s just been a ‘let's try it’ kind of situation.
I had the general idea, my CTO figured it all out from a technical point of view, and it's arguably been our most popular feature. The kids freak out when they hear their names in the story, which is so cool, and they think the story is about them, which is great!
I knew how popular personalized stories were for kids...
My son has a book that was gifted to him — his name is Archer, and it was like, ‘Archer the Panda’, and he loves it, so I wondered how we could implement something similar in our app.
But, yeah, it was just a trial and error situation.
There wasn't a ton of thought or strategy, other than I know this is popular right now, and I think we can find a way to include it into our app.
Balancing parenting with business building…
I have an interesting balance.
I have a two year old son, and he's watched by my mom in the morning, from about 8:30 to 11:30.
During that time, I work like a mad woman doing all kinds of things.
I work well under pressure, so I try to write content only a couple days before I'm recording, because I know I can get myself to focus really well.
The content, overall, takes a lot of time…
I plan to record once per month, so I get everything written and done and I go into the studio once per month.
I'm trying to figure out how that's going to work as we scale because I do think we need more than that, so I'm trying to convince my husband to build me a studio in our house.
But for the most part, I'm working with our team on featured content daily.
I'm the one behind the Instagram Stories. I'm not doing the posts, but I'm doing the actual stories and talking to our audience.
I'm also the support person, answering all of our customer emails.
Once my son wakes up from his nap — he naps from about 12-2 at this point — I'm done working by then.
I'm with him every afternoon and then I start work again when he goes to bed. My husband does his bedtime and then I pick up any extra time on the weekends here and there.
It's only been the last three weeks since things have really picked up, honestly, so I’m sure our routines will change again…
Present challenges…
Before we launched, I would have said cash flow, but since we've launched, I'm feeling very comfortable with that — it’s a huge relief honestly, because I spent years being very concerned about it.
Now, I just think I need to hire someone to be able to do what I can do, either a VA or an assistant or something like that…
I haven't figured out exactly what that looks like, but I hold too many tasks, and I really need to get better at delegating and outsourcing.
But here’s the thing:
people tell you that you need to spend money to make money, but unfortunately when you’re starting out, there’s a ton of trial and error as to what you're spending your money on and what the ROI is going to be.
I spent so much money outsourcing things, thinking that it was going to help me grow, and it didn't.
That really just made me not want to outsource, because I didn't have the cash flow to experiment. So I just felt like I had to learn everything myself and do everything myself.
I think I'm finally at a point where I can legitimately outsource things, because we’re subscription based and the cash flow is relatively consistent, I can see exactly what our monthly recurring revenue is going to be, which really helps.
Financing the app…
There's a couple ways to look at it.
In terms of what I have spent on it over the last couple of years, probably $100,000 between grant money, my own savings, and reinvested revenue, but there's also the opportunity cost of not having a salary.
So when you look at that factor in that I haven't paid myself, even until today, it’s like three years of no salary — it was a huge risk.
But to be honest with you, I'm of the mentality that high risk equals high reward.
I'm confident, even just within three weeks of our launch, I'll be okay and we'll continue to grow because the numbers right now show us that our conversion rate from free to paid users is really high.
Future plans…
To be honest, I battle with wanting it to be a big company, but also wanting it to stay small.
I don’t mean small in revenue, rather “small” as in a small business.
I do not want to be somebody who works 9-5, Monday to Friday — I’m planning on having more kids, and I want to be afforded as much as I need to spend with them.
I would love for this business to continue to grow, but I don't want pressure to do one thing or another from investors. I've bootstrapped it this far, and I don't feel like I need outside investment because we don't have a huge customer acquisition cost.
Usually, it's expensive to acquire customers, but I knew I could do this organically as a starting point and then introduce ads later. So, to be fully transparent, I would like to keep this as a big small business, where, ideally, I have five employees, and we'd run it the same way and just keep going.
I don't have big plans to be, like, the next Uber or anything like that, but if somebody wants to come around and turn us into that, then we’ll see. laughs
That’s it for issue this issue!
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If you, or someone you know would like to be featured, or just want to connect, feel free to message me on LinkedIn, or, if you’re building a business of your own and need some support, we should chat!
Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry