If you have scattered thoughts in your mind, then your energy is scattered as well. You will find it hard to concentrate on a single task. And productivity will take a plunge from there. If this sounds familiar or relatable to you, then congratulations; you’re not alone.
Countless people from around the globe of all ages suffer from poor mental health. The modern solution to anxiety, overwhelming conditions, and panic is associated with our thoughts.
If we can regulate our thoughts, then, theoretically, we can regulate our response to the outcomes around us.
And what can help us regulate our minds?
You have guessed it right: meditation. From billionaires to middle school students, everyone is talking about meditation these days.
Meditation has become a go-to solution for people and their chaotic minds. The modern world is filled with distractions and information.
Sometimes it can become a little overwhelming for us to keep up with everything that is happening in the world. But if you try to cut yourself off from the world, the FOMO will slowly creep inside. And yes, the solution is meditation.
But do you even know how to meditate?
If you are thinking that you could sit comfortably with your eyes closed and call it meditation, then you need to learn a good deal about it. An app called Headspace is helping people like you and me, the meditation noobs, with meditation.
It is a simple and peaceful meditation app that teaches people guided meditation. It teaches the right technique to do meditation and improve our lifestyle. And just like that, it has registered more than 40 million downloads on the Play Store and App Store combined.
The market size of meditation apps is bigger than you think. And while the world is going nuts over meditation apps, it is absolutely the right time to develop a meditation mobile app like Headspace that teaches people guided meditation.
If you’re interested, then read along; we will talk about meditation app business models, revenue models, features, and the cost of development. Sit tight; this is going to be a long ride. Breathe in and breathe out.
In simple words, meditation is a practice that helps you achieve mental peace and higher consciousness. This practice involves regulating our mind by focusing it on any particular object, thought, or activity and keeping it from drifting away into the rabbit hole of random thoughts.
Mindfulness is one of the styles of meditation that is quite popular in the world right now. Mindfulness means being present in the moment. This practice helps people to live in the moment and make the most of every second of their lives.
But let’s just say you don’t understand anything about meditation. It is a practice that, if you follow the following instructions, you will feel at peace in the end.
And peace is a sign that your mind is composed and regulated. Such a mind is essential for creative tasks and is mood-uplifting.
It’s bigger than you think. Headspace alone has more than 40 million downloads on the app stores worldwide. This should tell you about the demand for meditation apps like Headspace.
If you are still not convinced, then brace yourself; you are going to see some absurd figures from the market.
If you didn’t expect these numbers, then we don’t blame you. All you need to do is sit comfortably with closed eyes and breathe in and out.
Let’s go back in time a little bit. Headspace was incorporated in May 2010 in London, England, by its two co-founders, Andy Puddicombe and Richard Pierson. The first version of the Headspace mobile app was launched in 2012.
Headspace is a mindfulness-guided meditation mobile app that helps its users relax. With mindfulness meditation, Headspace helps practitioners cultivate healthy and life-changing habits to support their mental health. It helps people lead a happier and healthier life.
In addition, it is proven that Headspace can help you reduce your stress by 14% in just 10 days of practice. Within minutes, it can help you relax and get better deep sleep. It can also help you increase your focus and productivity.
The motto of Headspace is: “Democratizing Mental Health Care Around the World.”
Headspace is a simple mindfulness-practicing mobile app. If you want to develop a mindfulness meditation app just like Headspace, then you must do exactly what they are doing with their app, i.e., keep it simple and easy to use for every user of every age group.
The essence of Headspace services is calm and serenity. The same thing is reflected in the Headspace mobile app user experience as well. Basically, with the mindfulness technique, Headspace offers some key services to help its users. These are:
Now let’s understand the functionalities of the Headspace app.
If you too are planning to develop a mindfulness meditation app like Headspace, then you need to take cues from Headspace and implement the best ones in your mobile app.
The numbers from the market statistics have shown that people are eager to pay for their mental healthcare mobile apps. It is the positive impact of such mobile apps that encourages users to pay for the premium services provided by mindfulness apps like Headspace.
Headspace is basically free to use for any user. However, there are some services that require you to buy a paid subscription to get access.
You can also get a free trial of these services for 14 days. If you like the services, then you can buy their paid subscription with annual or monthly billing options.
Headspace is utilizing a subscription revenue model as its main source of income. Headspace knows how to get its users to pay for their premium services.
To encourage users to pay for their subscriptions, Headspace offers free services and a free trial of their premium services.
This way, users get to experience their paid services. Chances are, they are going to like those services. Thus, the probability of users buying subscriptions increases by a huge margin.
If you are looking forward to your mindfulness meditation mobile app development, then you must take the subscription revenue model into serious consideration. Not just Headspace, but the world’s top mobile applications are using the same revenue model as their main source of income.
We have talked enough about Headspace and its business and revenue models. Now let’s head towards the development process of a mindfulness meditation mobile app like Headspace. Here are the steps that you need to follow to ensure the successful development of your ambitious mobile app.
There is no substitute for market research. If you want to develop a successful mindfulness meditation mobile app like Headspace, then you have to test the waters first.
The thorough market research will tell you more about customer demand, market problems, complexities, and market opportunities. These factors will later become the defining factors of your mobile app.
Therefore, make sure you get the help of market experts, research papers, and surveys to get various useful metrics that can help you get a precise understanding of the market.
Meticulous market research will help you to identify:
The best part of market research is that it tells you a lot about your rivals. By studying your rivals and their business strategies, you can create your own unique and efficient business strategies for maximum business growth.
So, before you kick off your meditation mobile app development project, sit back, relax and think about the market and your potential rivals.
One of the biggest tasks of any new business venture is identifying its target audience. If you can successfully identify your target audience, then you can increase the success rate of your business by a huge margin.
According to a study, every year, around US $37 billion is wasted on advertisements that fail to engage the target audience. But you can save your precious time and money by studying your target audience and their demands to offer them remarkable customer service.
Here are the following methods that can help you identify your target audience:
Once you know your target audience, you will be able to successfully create a mediation mobile app like Headspace that is intended to offer services that your customers actually want and need.
There are some things that are not in your hands, and for those, you need to hire an app expert. Mobile app development is one of those things.
For successful and high-quality mindfulness meditation app development, you need a company that can offer you valuable ideas to carry out a successful project. The right company will make a difference between a world-class mobile app and a piece of useless garbage.
So, you need to take some time and search for the best mobile app development company. Or you can ask your friends for some good recommendations. Either way, you should have a few shortlisted companies, and one of them could be the one you are looking for. Once you have this list.
You must prepare some questions for them. These questions are closely related to your project and will help you understand which company to go with.
For your convenience, we have curated some questions for you. You can take help from these questions and create your own as well.
These may look like a lot of questions, but you can never be too careful. Especially when it is about your time, money, and confidential details. Make sure you judge the potential companies carefully and select the one that perfectly fits your requirements.
A mobile app is basically a group of multiple features. It is safe to say that the features of your meditation app are the identity of your app.
Therefore, carefully selected features will take your app’s user experience to a whole new level. Here, we have selected some essential features for the users, admins, and then some advanced features that could help you win the market and customer base.
Let’s begin and see what are these features.
Sign-up and sign-in are the most common and important features of any mobile app. This feature allows new users to register for the app via the signup option.
To sign up, user can enter their personal details. Or they can simply sign up for the app via their Google, Facebook, or Apple accounts. If the user is already signed up then sign-in is only required in the case of app deletion and reinstallation. Else, the user will stay signed in.
Signing up and signing in also helps users to have their own unique identities on the app. This feature also helps them to have dedicated profiles for them as well. For admins, it is a great feature to keep registered and active users on track.
The user profile is a great feature for users. Each user has their own profile. This profile contains their information like name, email ID, phone number, number of sessions taken, progress stats, etc.
Progress stats is a part of the customer profile. This feature provides detailed information about the sessions taken by the user with their progress information.
It also encourages users to achieve more and more success by getting more sessions and never missing out on any sessions.
Thus, such a feature can really help users to keep up with their mental well-being. You should consider such features while developing a mindfulness meditation app like Headspace.
People love their friends and interact with them on social media. Imagine if you could put mental well-being and friends together in one app.
It could help you to increase your mobile app engagement by a significant margin. Social media integration in your meditation app will encourage users to take their sessions on time and share their progress on social media for their friends to see. This is an instant reward system that is fueled by the mental and emotional well-being of users.
People are not familiar with the process of meditation. Many of them are constantly at a tug of war with their random thoughts.
In this case, having guided meditation audio support in the app could help users to learn and practice meditation more easily without getting distracted.
These simple and easy-to-stream audio files can be listened to by users at any place. This increases the mobility of the service as well.
If you like the guided meditation audio feature then you are absolutely going to love the guided meditation video feature.
In this feature, instead of an audio file, a guided video file is provided to the users to offer a more human touch to enhance understanding of the instructions with visual representation. This feature takes the meditation experience to a whole new level.
Push notifications are a great addition to your meditation mobile app. With these interactive notifications, you can send alerts of meditation timings, new session updates, stats updates, rewards, and even advertisements to the users.
These push notifications help you to enhance the overall user experience of your users. It never lets users miss out on their meditation practice and keep them in good mental health.
Themes are the modern feature of the app that has quickly become mainstream. This feature is basically a toggle that allows your app users to switch between a light theme and a dark theme.
In the daytime, users prefer to use the light theme for better visibility. But in the nighttime, users like to use dark themes for reduced strain on their eyes. This simple feature is a giant leap in the overall customer experience.
Free trials of premium services and features allow free users to get an experience of premium services. If they like those features and services they can pay for their subscription to keep on using those services.
This feature increases the chances of subscription purchases as well. By offering a sneak peek into the premium features of a mobile app, you can grab the attention and interest of your users. After that, it becomes easy for them to buy your paid services.
Not all data are received by analytics and complex metrics. Some reviews have to come straight from the users so that you can offer them a personalized user experience.
In this case, the user feedback feature comes in handy. It allows users to send complaints and suggestions to the developers or the admins of the app. You can observe this feedback and offer a phenomenal experience to your app users.
Dedicated dashboards are the visual representation of complex app data for admins. These dashboards show all the app analytics in visual form like pie charts, graphs, tables, etc.
These dashboards can show information about any segment of the app like users, finance, marketing, etc. The information that could take a while to read and understand, with dedicated dashboards, this information can be read and understood in just a glance. It is an efficient solution for the users.
Different admin of different department requires their unique information. An admin of the finance department does not need information about marketing.
The role-based dashboards are carefully designed dashboards that help admins of different roles to monitor information pertaining to their roles. Role-based dashboards bring an organized view to the monitoring system of the mobile app and leave little to no chance of error.
A content management system or CMS allows admins to manipulate or customize entire content available on the app platform. This content can be text, graphics, sections, or anything.
This tool offers admins the freedom to customize their app according to their own needs. When you find the right app development company for your mobile app development, make sure you ask them to offer you personalized CMS for your app so that it can fulfill all your business needs effortlessly.
Customer relationship management or CRM is one of the essential tools for the admins that helps them to manage customer experience on the mobile app.
A CRM stores all the necessary customer data, identity information, behavior, app interaction, demands, and much more. With the help of this information, admins can determine user interests and offers them a personalized user experience for seamless app engagement.
Admins of the app are provided the ability to manage their active and registered users via the User Management tool. This tool helps them to keep an eye on the app activities and ensure a smooth operation of the mobile app for an uninterrupted user experience.
Marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business. Therefore, having a dedicated tool for managing the marketing of your business could really streamline the entire marketing process for you.
You can easily create new marketing campaigns, offers, promotions, etc. on the mobile app and monitor their performance. The flexibility and customizability of the system allow admins to channel their marketing strategies in the most precise way to ensure the highest outcome.
Having a broad scale of business requires a powerful and accurate finance management system. This system automates the entire accounting process in order to save a lot of time and promote accuracy.
This system also allows admins to check the real-time finance data of the app and generate reports with just a few clicks. This system can be accessed on any device on the go.
Artificial intelligence is a revolutionary technology of the modern world. Paired with Power BI, it can derive powerful business insights that can help you to form future business strategies for your business.
Harness the power of machine learning and detailed report of the current business performance and projected growth rate and the much more important data that can help your business to achieve exponential growth.
As a mindfulness meditation mobile app owner, you have a responsibility to offer your users personalized services so that they can benefit from your services.
For more personalized services, you need more details from your app users. Therefore, detailed profile creation features could help you to take more essential information from your app users. This information could be:
An introductory free course can help you to give a demo of your services to your app users. This introductory course can set a lasting impression in the hearts of your users. It also builds trust among them.
If you are able to impress them with your services then they are more likely to purchase your subscription for premium services. This way you can lure more users into buying your subscription.
There are some activities like breathing exercises that can be turned into small interactive games that can help users easily understand the concepts and methods of the exercises in an exciting way.
Gamification can be applied to other meditation or stress relief sessions to simplify the process and maximize their impacts.
Activity insights allow users to check their progress in a detailed form. With performance scores, level achieved improvement in mood and mental health, etc.
This insight is crucial for the mental well-being of mobile app users to keep an eye on their progress and observe if they are experiencing real-life benefits or not.
An E-wallet is a phenomenal tool that can help you streamline recurring payments from your app users. If you could have an integrated e-wallet option in your app then your users will use it to quickly make payments for their subscriptions and in-app purchases.
If you’re building a mindfulness meditation app like Headspace then you must-have features like an e-wallet that promotes simplicity and convenience.
If you could provide your paid users to get a weekly or daily special session with a meditation Guru then it would increase the value of your premium subscription.
Users will feel that their money is well invested because they will be getting instructions to form Guru in live sessions. It will also attract free users to get a premium subscription in order to enjoy these personalized live meditation sessions with qualified Gurus.
Relaxing music can help your meditation app users to reduce their stress to a significant level. Having an entire playlist of relaxing music can enhance your app’s user experience.
You can also update your relaxing music playlist so that your users will always have something new to get relaxed. Such music is scientifically proven to reduce stress and promote peaceful thoughts in the listener’s mind.
Just like relaxing music, there is a certain type of music that helps listeners to focus better on their tasks. People use focus music while working and studying and it has shown incredible results in terms of maintaining levels of focus.
People use different platforms to listen to this music and it would be a great option to offer natively this music to give your users an all-inclusive experience.
A moderate physical workout releases endorphins in our brains that make us feel happy and euphoric. These exercises are also good for your brain’s health.
Features like body activity exercises can help your users remind them to get up and do some physical activity in order to keep a healthy level of endorphins in their brains.
Dedicated physical activity sessions allow users to follow the activities easily and feel better automatically.
No one likes a monotonous lifestyle. No one likes doing the same stuff over and over again. The same goes for meditation practices as well. If you keep on asking your users to do the same practices, chances are, they are going to dump the practice in a few days.
To keep the spark alive, you will have to teach them meditation in small steps while gradually increasing the difficulty levels.
This process makes them feel a sense of accomplishment as they progress further in their practice. It is a reward as well. Therefore, makes sure to include such features when you develop your own mindfulness meditation mobile app like Headspace.
So, these are the features, some essential, and some difference-makers that can help your app to stand out from the crowd.
If you are serious about your mindfulness meditation mobile app development like Headspace then you need to figure out what features to keep and what to not.
It completely depends on your target audience and your services. Now, let’s move on to the next step of our mobile app development.
Once you’re done selecting the right mobile app development company. You will have a discussion with the company about the scope of your project.
In that discussion, there will be a part of the tech stack that they are going to use for the development of your meditation mobile app. This tech stack is a group of technologies that are going to be used for the development of your app.
But you will be careful while picking the right technologies because these technologies are going to define the performance, speed, usability testing, responsiveness, security, and scalability of your mobile app. Once built, you cannot easily change the technology of your mobile app.
It can cost you a lot of time and a fortune to do so. If you don’t want to make sure mistakes then make sure you ask a lot of questions to your mobile app developers and tell them about your vision so they can assist you better while choosing the best tech stack that suits your business needs.
It took Headspace 10 years to become the Headspace that it is today. But don’t worry, we are not saying that it will take you 10 years as well. The right mobile app development can help you build a great meditation mobile app that can make your business stand out from the crowd.
But it’s not that easy to determine the app development cost of meditation mobile app development like Headspace. The reason is not just one.
Because there are several factors that affect the cost of development to a significant level. Therefore, there is no straightforward answer to this question without knowing the precise scope of the project.
But what are these factors that vary the cost of app development that much?
Here are the main factors:
Different countries around the globe have different economical conditions. Therefore, their hourly cost of development varies from each other.
Now it depends on you to which country you outsource the project of mindfulness meditation mobile app development like Headspace.
For instance, the hourly development cost in the USA is USD 180 – 200, in the UK it is USD 140 – 170, and in Australia, it is USD 120 – 140. However, in Asian countries like India, the hourly cost of development varies between USD 60 – and 80.
Now the ball is in your court. There is a significant difference between the prices of different countries. Don’t mistake lower prices for lower quality of work.
The quality of work will be the same around the world. It is up to you and where you outsource your project.
Mainly there are two types of mobile app development,
In native mobile app development, the individual app is built for an individual platform like Android and iOS.
Hence, if you want native mindfulness meditation mobile app for Android and iOS then you will have to pay for the development of an app for each platform. This means it will take more time and more money to build native apps. However, these apps are lightning-fast and offer great performance.
On the other hand, cross-platform mobile app development takes less time and effort to build mobile apps for both platforms (Android and iOS). Because in cross-platform app development the base code remains the same for both platforms.
Hence, two apps can be built with the same code. These apps are good if you have an initial low budget. But these are not as powerful as native mobile apps.
Mobile apps are nothing but a group of specially curated features that help you perform a specific task. That means, if you need more features in your mobile app then you will have to spend more money for it. And it will take more time for the development as well.
Thus, these are the main defining factors of the cost of mobile app development. But this doesn’t answer your question, right? Just to offer you a ballpark.
Let’s just assume that you need to develop an app for Android with essential features only, not the advanced one, and you get it developed from India, then it would cost you around USD 70,000 to 90,000 to develop a mindfulness meditation mobile app like Headspace.
However, this may vary depending on your specific needs.
Reports and researches show that almost every other person is suffering from either mental or emotional problems. In such situations, apps like Headspace are helping people to stay positive and cultivate healthy habits for their mental well-being.
But this app alone cannot reach all the people who are in need. Therefore, if you are thinking of building a mindfulness meditation mobile app like Headspace then it is a step in the right direction that possesses the power to change the world. Work thoroughly on your idea and you will find success for sure.
If you have any questions regarding the development of meditation and yoga apps then feel free to contact our experts.