🧠How improving mental health made them $3.2M

They used music, meditation, and mindfulness to build a $3 million business.

"It's the prime time to do everything you can, eventually find what you love doing, and who you like doing it with."

- Travis Chen: Age 24, Co-founder of “Sound Mind”

The Sound Mind app is a relatively new business that is already destroying the game and disrupting the music therapy space. Here are some of their accomplishments:

Now the amount of money they were able to raise is amazing on its own.

But I think the most impressive thing about Sound Mind is the impact that they are having!

There is a serious mental health crisis that is going on today, especially for Gen Z.

But what exactly caused Travis and Brian to go toe to toe with one of the most overlooked problems in today’s society?

1. The cycle of pain that leads to change.

Just like traffic on US-1, one of the hardest things for people to do is open up.

Especially Gen Z, because a lot of times we were never taught how to open up correctly.

Whenever we do talk about our mental health issues, it gets thrown back in our faces and not taken seriously.

So what do we do instead?

We cope with it.

Now people cope in many different ways.

Some of us ignore it, some of us get angry, and some of us use humor to get through the day.

The issue is that these things don’t get to the root of the problem.

And after their own fair share of trauma, Travis and Brian knew there needed to be a change.

Travis went through his own mental health struggles late in high school, and he found that the best way for him to cope was to use meditation.

He was using famous apps like The Mindfulness app, Headspace, and Calm. If you want to try them yourself, click here.

So Travis was doing fine mentally until something terrible happened.

He was reading the New York Times and realized that one of his best friends had taken his own life.

Travis was quoted saying:

This planted the seed for Travis to build something that could really help our generation take mental health more seriously.

Brian’s story is very similar because he saw the same problem and wanted to do something about it.

When he was just 17, Brian enlisted in the Army.

Now I know that the media makes the Army look like a badass, Mission Impossible movie.

But the reality is that so many soldiers go through pain that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

Brian saw the effects of PTSD on his fellow soldiers, and he even saw that one of his friends COMPLETELY lost his memory due to trauma.

So Brian decided to start doing research on how the brain handles PTSD and other traumatic events.

And through his research, he noticed that there was one thing that affected the human brain the most.

And that was sound, specifically music therapy.

A lot of people don’t realize this, but the type of music you listen to becomes the way you think.

That’s why if you listen to music that has negative lyrics or a dark undertone, you start to feel more sad and irritated.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love me some Lil Baby and Future.

But if you listen to negativity all day, you will slowly start to think negatively.

And the same goes for positive music as well.

Since Brian and Travis both had knowledge and experience on how music affects the brain, when they met and talked about business, it was a match made in heaven.

They both founded Sound Mind and moved to California to begin growing their business.

The three keys to Sound Mind being successful were:

1. Brian and Travis built a business that could solve their own problems first.

2. The market for their business is extremely large and almost never-ending.

3. They didn’t do it for the money, they built this business to truly help people and make an impact.

2. Don’t get Shiny Object Syndrome, I beg you.

So Brian and Travis came together and became a dynamic duo.

They came together like peanut butter and jelly.

Like Batman and Robin.

Like LeBron and Kyrie.

…before Kyrie became a flat earther.

And they had one mission that was very simple.

They wanted to help students improve their mental health.

So they added some amazing features to the Sound Mind app, like:

1. They created an algorithm that would tailor the audio frequency to the specific user. They treated it like Tinder, so you can swipe left or right on a different sound you want to hear.

2. They would learn your meditation habits and schedule guided meditations for students to go through.

3. The app also allows teachers to check in on student’s mental health status at any time.

Brian and Travis understood that their target audience was on the younger side, so they added features that they would like.

A lot of people would say that a big thing causing depression in our generation is our constant use of phones and social media.

But let’s be real guys.

This social media sh!t isn’t going away anytime soon.

So Travis and Brian realized that instead of seeing it as a negative, we can use it to help people grow mentally.

Travis Chen was quoted saying:

Now all of these features and genius ideas come from understanding their customer.

Since they understood their customer and had a very focused goal, they were able to escape the problem that plagues 99% of businesses today.

And I like to call that problem “Shiny Object Syndrome”.

Basically, this means not focusing on one thing at a time.

This is a problem in our entire society because everyone is looking for a new shiny thing to distract them from what they should be doing.

This is a problem that will keep you broke and stop your business from growing forever.

You need to have a crystal-clear ideal customer, and you should focus on the one thing that will help them.

And that’s exactly what Sound Mind did.

Instead of trying to help everyone on the earth with their mental health, they started only with students in their school.

Because they knew exactly what to do to help them.

And they knew exactly where to find them, which made marketing their product a cakewalk.

They started to speak with the Dean of their school and were allowed to market their product on campus.

Then, they started doing deals with high schools in other cities and slowly went across the nation.

To further market their product, they partnered with the company TruConnect to deliver free tablets to lower-income communities to make sure they have access to the Sound Mind app.

Once they conquered high schools and colleges, they started speaking with CEOs of large companies to help their workers improve their mental health.

And that is when the real bread came in.

3. The most simple way to get more successful.

I spoke about the importance of knowing your ideal customer so you can help them in the best way possible.

But you must make sure that you choose the right customer in the first place.

What is the right customer?

It’s very simple.

The right customer is someone who has a lot of money to spend.

And when I say a lot, I mean

Brian and Travis knew this, so they began to expand their business into a new market.

They spoke with CEOs and CFOs of large corporations, and they noticed a huge trend.

None of them had any idea how their company was doing mentally.

These CEOs had a ton of financial data on their business, but they had no idea what their workers were feeling throughout the day.

On the surface, this may not seem like a huge deal, especially if the business is still making money.

However, Travis and Brian realized that unaddressed mental illness can contribute to a 35% loss in productivity in the job market as a whole.

That is literally over $200 billion lost!

And when a rich CEO sees how much money they are losing per year, they’ll do anything they can to stop it.

Unless you’re Jordan Belfort.

This shift that Brian and Travis plan to do is genius.

They are switching from a “B2C” business to a “B2B” business.

B2C stands for business to consumer.

That means that you sell your product directly to your consumer.

Think of businesses like restaurants, clothing stores, or car dealerships.

That can make you a lot of money, but a much better business model is a “B2B” business.

B2B stands for business to business.

This means that you sell a product to another business.

Think of businesses like Microsoft, they sell their software services to other businesses.

Three reasons to start a B2B business are:

1. Businesses usually have more money to spend, which means you can make more money.

2. Businesses are easier to sell to because they understand that you have to spend money to make money.

3. There is usually less competition when trying to sell to a business.

Brian and Travis can see the benefit of this shift, and plan to make these changes early next year!

🎮You just leveled up your mindset today!

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- Zach