Over the last few months, my friend Kirill and I have been working on a passion project, a new kind of meditation app!
Leveraging the power of AI, Medito is the meditation coach that evolves with you, reflecting your emotional state and intentions to create, in real-time, an exceptionally personal mindfulness experience.
Medito is the mindfulness app I wish I had when guiding friends and LinkedIn employees through their meditation journey. The most common pattern I saw was people aspiring to create a meditation practice but failing for the following reasons:
Thinking “Meditation doesn’t work for me”
Endlessly scrolling through hundreds of pre-recorded meditations to find the one that “resonates with my situation right now”
Finding it hard to track progress and receive help, feedback, and guidance.
With Medito, we try to help overcome these obstacles by starting with one simple idea:
Mindfulness practice is personal and a such should be and feel personalized to one’s unique situation and emotional needs.
For this reason, in Medito you won’t find any pre-recorded practices. Every meditation is generated on the fly, in real-time, for you based on what you share about yourself in each session and throughout your journey with the app.
Use Cases
The easiest way to describe the possibilities unlocked by Medito’s approach to meditation is to illustrate a few compelling and practical use cases we’ve identified and experienced so far ourselves and with the help of our early adopters.
Priming before an event or challenge: building a meditation habit is hard. What if, though, you could stack this habit onto another activity that happens in your day, for example, an upcoming challenging conversation at work or a public speech? Since Medito speaks directly to the specific situation at hand, we are finding it particularly effective when used to address these very pragmatic challenges throughout the day, whether at work or in life.
Processing an event or situation: similarly, we've been finding it very helpful to stack Medito as a practice after a situation - whether positive or negative - has occurred. For example, I recently lost something very important to me. I described in detail what happened to Medito and it generated a powerful practice that not only helped calm me but also reminded me of the basic principles of building resilience. It coached me on the importance of reframing, responding versus reacting and being a player rather than a victim, which are easy to lose track of when something challenging happens to us.
Group meditations: last month, I spent a weekend with my wife at a friend’s place up in the mountains of Tahoe. In the evening, we asked Medito to create a group meditation for the four of us. Medito gave us a prompt to discuss together: it asked us to describe a time when we felt connected in silence. We went around the room, each sharing quite vulnerable personal stories. We closed our eyes. The app generated, on the fly, a beautiful practice that included visualizations of the scenarios we each described, and then it put them all together by calling out common traits between the different stories and ways for us to appreciate and enjoy being part of each other's journey.
As an early beta, the results are quite remarkable and promising.
Sleep stories: not a surprise here. It's widely known that Calm owes much of its success to sleep stories narrated by celebrities. Medito can generate personalized sleep stories based on the user's unique prompt and situation. Try to describe a setting (e.g. your neighborhood), a theme (e.g. Christmas), and a style (e.g. fantasy elements). I challenge you to get to the end of the practice without falling asleep - I don't typically make it!
Words of affirmation: the Medito audio player now incorporates a live transcript of the practice. A cool use case we’ve found is to have the app generate affirmations for a specific situation or challenge and practice them by either reading along or just listening. These can be designed to address a specific concern or completely left for Medito to suggest based on its prior knowledge and understanding of the user’s unique circumstances.
Sharing and gifting: on Thanksgiving day last month, I created a meditation practice for my wife by telling Medito a few sentences about the most meaningful accomplishments and challenges for us as a couple this year. The app created a beautiful visualization practice that incorporated many elements from my description. I then created a shareable link in Medito, included a personalized title and note, and shared a link via text for her to try. We see early signs of this being a powerful new type of “gifting primitive”.
As we roll Medito out further, I’m excited to see what additional use cases you all come up with!
A Draft Manifesto
With this context, I will now attempt to formulate a very early draft of how I think about the paradigm we’re introducing with Medito and how it fits into today’s ecosystem of health and wellness technologies, with a focus on mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
The last decade of health and wellness tech has seen the rise of the first generation of “mindfulness tech”:
Meditation apps with static libraries of content and limited personalization via mood check-ins and simple search engines (Headspace, Calm, Insight Timer, Waking Up, Healthy Minds)
Wearables tech and apps (sleep, heart rate and HRV, GCM, with EEG and lactate monitoring the newer kids on the block) that led to a fragmented ecosystem of devices and companies focused on specialized biometrics (Apple Watch, Oura, Levels, Whoop)
Journaling and emotional awareness apps (Day One, and more recently Apple Journal)
Online meditation classes, live and recorded (Apple Fitness, Open, Insight Timer)
Our vision is for Medito to play a role in a new generation of wellness and mindfulness tech, one characterized by:
True personalization at the individual level enabled by AI.
This will deliver 24/7 support closer to the relationship one could have with a personal teacher as compared to one-size-fits-all generic libraries of content.Smart integration of wearable tech to tighten the habit loop.
This data can help create awareness (e.g. making it visible when one's stress levels are high) and close the feedback loop (e.g. showing trends and how metrics are affected by consistently implementing positive habits).Privacy-first via data encryption and on-device processing of data.
Software and human coaching to drive accountability and outcomes.
The gold standard I would point to here is Duolingo, even though porting some of its gamified mechanisms to health and wellness will require thoughtful design, which I believe no one has effectively succeeded at yet.
If you made it to this point, I would love to get your feedback on the app and these ideas! You can sign up for Medito right now and completely free at medito.ai
👉 We are looking for early adopters eager to help us improve, as well as professionals in the therapy and coaching world, to partner with us. I would love to hear from you.
Be well and be kind,
Matteo