How social proof worked on me

A 3 year journey to download a breathing app

I downloaded a new app, Open, the other day. It guides you in breathing exercises, to relax or focus or get energized. I saw this tweet and it was a compelling enough endorsement that I signed up for a free trial and have done a couple of sessions using it.

It is very rare for me to download a new app and actually be excited about it these days; mostly I download a new app when I’m forced to by a ticket company or an airline. And I often hear about how consumer apps have become very difficult to scale because people have become so resistant to try new apps. So, I wanted to reflect on the factors that caused me to give it a shot.

As I thought about it, I was struck by how far back the chain of factors went and how important word-of-mouth was in each step.

First, I was primed to have some affinity for breathwork because I read the book Breath in 2021. It’s one of those fun nonfiction books that makes you believe that its subject is The Answer to Everything while you are reading it. And looking back, it was a similar social endorsement that led me to read it!

So, through organic social influence / word of mouth, I read a book about the power of breathing in 2021. That’s a good foundation.

I had also experimented with different meditation apps throughout the years but had never paid for one. Then, in early 2022, my friend Nira recommended the Waking Up app. She said it had been more effective for her than Calm because it explained the philosophy behind the meditation practices in more depth. I did a free trial of Waking Up and really enjoyed it and ended up getting a yearly subscription for ~$120, which I still use regularly. That made me comfortable with the idea of paying a non-trivial amount of money for a wellness app.

This leads us to May of 2024. At this point I am some guy who’s read a book about breathing, pays for a meditation app, and has proven that he takes advice from people on twitter. The perfect storm! I saw Brooke’s ringing endorsement for Open and I was officially an Acquired Customer.

If you wanted to draw a little causal diagram of it, which I do, it might look like this:

There are several interesting things about my path to downloading Open:

• The events I could directly link to my trial went back 3 years. I made the decision to download the app in an instant, but my actual “path to purchase” was much longer. Brooke’s tweet was the most recent and most important factor but I don’t think I would have signed up for a free trial if the other 2 parts of this path had not occurred.

• If you worked for Open and were trying to attribute my trial to something, it would obviously be Brooke’s tweet (and maybe you’d offer her a sponsorship deal). But you would miss the two latent factors (reading Breath and paying for Waking Up). And those may be useful to know about too! I imagine other Breath readers or Waking Up subscribers would be interested in Open, but these would be impossible to attribute my trial to if you were looking at product data or asking people where they heard about the app.

• The recommendations each had specific information that led me to follow them:

  • Patrick said he would change his behavior based on Breath, which I found compelling. It’s rare that a book changes my behavior.

  • My friend Nira told me Waking Up was more effective because it explained the philosophy in more depth; she did not just say that it was better.

  • Brooke’s tweets cites the lengths she’s gone to attend Open’s classes and says they’re in a league of their own on research and insight behind breathwork. These pieces of information made me stop and pay attention.

• Both tweets had images, which they didn’t need to have, but which probably caught my attention and gave me a richer sense of what they were talking about.

• I had existing relationships (one-way, in the case of the tweets) with each of the people, and over time they’d developed trust with me. This is the whole premise of influencer marketing, although to my knowledge none of these endorsements were paid.

  • I had listened to Patrick’s excellent investing podcast for a long time and trusted his taste. Importantly, trust is transferable from a specific category; I started following Patrick because he is a great finance interviewer but now am willing to take his advice on a wellness book.

  • I was friends with Nira and thought her experience with meditation would be similar to mine. I especially hope this one was not a paid endorsement.

  • I’ve followed Brooke for a while and seen her post lots of stuff about wellness, so I trust her experience in this area. And I can’t remember seeing a post of hers as emphatic as this one.

So, to sum up: the reasons people try stuff are complex! Attribution is never as simple as last-touch attribution; that is a useful simplification of the path to purchase.

If you can find the factors that influence people to try your thing, and they are big enough that they matter and you’re able to target people with that factor, that is valuable.

Social proof and trust are hugely important for decisions like this. And trust that someone establishes in one domain can be leveraged in other domains — you don’t need to be a wellness influencer to sell wellness products.

Finally, to the extent to which social proof from me matters at all, I am really enjoying this app! The onboarding experience is unique and fun, the design is fitness chic, and the breathing exercises have an immediate payoff — you feel better right after you do them, whereas with meditation the benefits tend to take longer to feel.

Plus, they have a social component, and I have 0 friends:

Check it out if you’re interested and get at me at josephhovde1 and you can, uh, see when I breathe! The only compensation I’ll get is the satisfaction of knowing I helped influence your user journey.