YC Applications
Her YC application pitched Spotify for meditation. The company she kept is a sleep clinic.
In 2016 Yunha Kim applied to YC with a 5-minute meditation app and a pitch: Spotify for meditation. Sleep was the third use she listed. Sleep later drove 70% of engagement, so she built a sleep program, sold the app, and named the company after the program. The form is below.
In autumn 2016, Yunha Kim applied to Y Combinator from Stanford's business school. Her app was Simple Habit: 5-minute guided meditations for busy people. Her one-line pitch was "Spotify for meditation."
It was her second company. After Duke and a stint in investment banking, she had built Locket and sold it to Wish. She raised "$3m+" for it, she wrote, "and I became more stressed than ever." Meditation was the thing that worked.
The progress section is four months of numbers. The iOS app launched in June 2016. It had 85,000 sign-ups and was "close to 100K downloads," with 5% of sign-ups paying about $12 a month. User growth was 95% the month before. Apple had featured the app five times. The revenue lines are redacted.
The bet was variety. Headspace and Calm, she wrote, had each launched "a single 'channel.'" Simple Habit would be a marketplace: over 100 teachers, each paid a share of subscription revenue by how often people played their sessions. Her reason: users get "meditation fatigue from listening to the same voice/personality over and over again."
Her product answer, the second on the form, lists three uses: calm before a meeting, focus at work, and "sleep better." Sleep came third.
YC took Simple Habit into Winter 2017. Kim dropped out of Stanford that year; the form had said she'd "happily consider dropping out for YC." Simple Habit was on the Shark Tank season premiere in 2017. Kim left without a deal. In November 2018 it closed a $10 million Series A led by Foundation Capital. It had raised $12.8 million in total, Business Insider reported when it printed this application in 2019, with the numbers redacted.
Then the data turned. TechCrunch reported that only 10% of the app's content was about sleep, but sleep brought in 70% of engagement. She wrote that sleep was "the #1 problem that our users suffered from." Her own sleep had got worse in the pandemic, and a top sleep clinic gave her a six-month waitlist.
On 14 June 2022 she launched Sleep Reset. It was not another library of recordings. It was a 12-week program based on CBT-I, a talk-therapy method for insomnia, and what TechCrunch called a "no-pill approach." Each member got a personal sleep coach. The price was $75 a month, about six times the form's $12. By March 2023, Kim told TechCrunch, more than 8,000 people had paid for it, and it had made $155,000 the month before.
On 29 March 2023 Kim sold the meditation app. The buyer was Ingenio, a company TechCrunch says began as Keen.com, a site for psychic readings. Ingenio said the app had been downloaded over 7.3 million times and had 4,200 audio sessions. Neither side gave a price. Bryan Leppi, Ingenio's chief corporate development officer, told TechCrunch the app had more than 90,000 active users. He also said its content "may be added to apps like Keen." The company Kim kept was renamed Sleep Reset, Inc.
The app is still live. The App Store lists Ingenio as the developer and "Simple Habit Sleep, Meditation" as the name; sleep is now in the title. Its latest version, 6.1.1, is dated 16 December 2024 and lists only bug fixes.
Sleep Reset kept expanding. On 22 April 2026 it bought Chorus Sleep, another YC-backed sleep startup, including its AI coach, Luna. That press release names Shimin Ooi as Sleep Reset's CEO. It calls the company a "virtual sleep clinic" for insomnia and sleep apnea, covered by major insurance plans in more than 20 states. YC lists it as active, in batch W17, with a team of eight.
The menu has changed too. The pricing page lists CBT-I coaching at $297 per four weeks after a trial. It also lists a $189 home sleep apnea test, and $149 clinician visits that insurance can cover. One option is "Sleep Medicine": prescription sleep drugs "when clinically appropriate." The 2022 launch had been pitched as no pills. The CBT-I track is still sold as drug-free.
The form bet against the single voice. The product she kept launched with one personal coach per member for twelve weeks. The line that paid off was the one she put third.
The application below is exactly what she filed. Read it knowing how it ends.
Simple Habit: Y Combinator, Winter 2017 · Accepted Reproduced verbatim from the founder's application (some figures redacted at the founder's request). Source: getintoyc.com
Company
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
5-minute meditation app. Spotify for meditation.
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
We built an iOS app that offers 5-minute meditations for life situations throughout the day. For example, meditations to reduce anxiety before a meeting, improve focus at work, and sleep better.
Meditations are recorded by top meditation teachers from all over the world — we currently have over 100 teachers on our platform and are listened to by [redacted].
Our goal is to build the world's leading platform for mindfulness and meditation content. We want to help millions of people learn to live more mindfully and be more resilient.
Progress
How far along are you?
I started the company in Feb 2016 and launched the iOS app in June 2016. In just 3 months, we are reaching close to 100K downloads on our iPhone app. 5% of sign-ups end up paying for a subscription that costs about $12 a month. [Redacted.] Our week-over-week growth rate is [redacted]. We are currently developing Android — expected release date for November.
Simple Habit has already been featured by Apple 5 times and written about by media extensively.
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
We've been working on the company for 8 months (since February 2016). We have ~40k lines of code for all our platforms combined.
How many active users or customers do you have? If you have some particularly valuable customers, who are they? If you're building hardware, how many units have you shipped?
Since our launch in June 2016, we've had 85k sign ups. Our weekly [redacted].
What is your monthly growth rate?
User growth rate was 95% last month ([redacted] MRR growth rate was [redacted]).
We're interested in your revenue over the last several months. (Not cumulative and not GMV).
We made [redacted] last month in September. We make [redacted] as of today, so we're expecting to make [redacted] in October.
Idea
Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
After graduating from Duke in 2011, I worked in investment banking and later founded my first startup, Locket (eventually I sold Locket to Wish). I raised $3m+ for the company and I became more stressed than ever. I tried lots of stress-relief products at the time: massages, lavender pillows, silent retreats and other meditation apps. Meditation worked best for me, and while I liked the meditation apps currently on the market, I didn't like how most apps were one teacher/personality based. I wanted to be able to browse through different types of teachers and teachings and make meditations bite-sized so busy professionals could use it. I built Simple Habit to really serve my needs.
Since launch, we had thousands of users who suffer from stress, anxiety, depression tell us how our app has changed their lives. Check out our app store to see their raving reviews! itunes.apple.com/us/app/simple-habit-mindfulness- meditations/id1093360165
What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
In contract to Headspace and Calm who have launched a single 'channel,' we're launching a marketplace — a platform for mindfulness, offering a continuously updated stream of meditation content from a variety of teachers.
We're the first to create a meditation platform that curates content from hundreds of high-quality mindfulness professionals and charge subscriptions for access.
We're also the first to introduce a Spotify-like business model to the meditation space. Mindfulness teachers are paid a portion of our subscription revenue commensurate to the number of times their content is listened to. Users get access to meditation content that is diverse in personality and topics.
Silent retreats and in-person meditation studios are other alternatives, but they aren't accessible to all busy working professionals financially or temporally.
What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
There are two things that companies in our space don't get:
- Our competitors don't get that users experience meditation fatigue from listening to the same voice/personality over and over again. In other words, they start to tune out. Imagine if Spotify or iTunes only carried one band. One's enjoyment of music would diminish over time. Similarly, the effectiveness of meditation on a listener diminishes over time as they get accustomed to the techniques and personality of the same meditation teacher.
- Our competitors also don't understand that teachers can be a powerful channel for user acquisition. The key to developing this channel is to focus on creating a great experience for meditation teachers. This includes setting up the right financial incentive structure for teachers and building them tools that enable and encourage them to be an evangelist of Simple Habit.
How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
In the US alone, 18M people are meditating (reported by Forbes), and this number keeps increasing every year. Capturing [redacted] of these users is a [redacted] business at our current subscription pricing. However, we consider this just the start of what we can do.
According to research by IBISWorld, the meditation and mindfulness industry ranked in nearly $1 billion in 2015. The space is growing very rapidly. More than 22% of employers currently offer mindfulness training for their workforce. However, meditation and mindfulness is just the tip of an iceberg. We believe there are a LOT of ways to monetize a large audience of people who trust our company to guide their activities around their health. We'd like to take on larger market of mental health, stress relief and health & wellness which is a trillion dollar industry.
Equity
List any investments your company has received. Include the name of the investor, the amount invested, the premoney valuation / valuation cap, and the type of security sold (convertible notes, safes or stock).
After launch, I've taken on [redacted] additional investments into the company as a convertible note at a [redacted].
Curious
What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator? Did someone encourage you to apply?
Y Combinator has an incredible network of entrepreneurs and mentors — many of whom have used Simple Habit and directly fall into our target audience. Being part of YC would be an impetus of growth in terms of learning from the community and attracting the best talent. I'm at Stanford GSB right now and I'd happily consider dropping out for YC.
How did you hear about Y Combinator?
So many of my friends have gone through Y Combinator and they rave about it. Founders of Gusto, Flexport, Weave, Muse, Experiment, Tenjin, Innerspace, ProductHunt, Memebox.
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