How Calm Added 1.2M Subscribers with Creative Marketing Tactics

Nov 13, 2025

Nick Candler, the former Director of Growth Marketing at Calm, talks about his exciting journey from derivatives trading to leading a marketing team that added 1.2 million subscribers. He highlights how Calm leveraged social listening to create viral ads, particularly using catchy trends for their Sleep Stories, which addressed insomnia. Candler discusses the importance of creative iterations and data analysis in crafting effective campaigns. Now the founder of 10 Scale, he emphasizes the role of AI in shaping the future of performance marketing.

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ANECDOTE

Joining Calm At A Tipping Point

Nick joined Calm in 2019 when the company was ~50 people and UA was an underexploited channel.
He joined a small performance team (about three) with strong company growth DNA and monetization focus.

INSIGHT

Sleep Was A Painkiller, Not A Vitamin

Calm's pivot into sleep addressed an acute pain point and unlocked huge TAM expansion.
Sleep marketing matched insomnia activation moments like doomscrolling at 2 AM for perfect ad timing.

ADVICE

Prioritize Paid Social But Test Broadly

Test every channel but prioritize Meta/Instagram for scale in consumer subscription UA.
Keep experimenting with remnant TV and niche channels for time-specific buys like 2 AM slots.

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After starting his career in derivatives trading, Nick Candler pivoted into user acquisition before joining Calm to serve as Director of Growth Marketing during their hypergrowth period from 2019 - 2022. After leaving Calm, Nick started his own performance marketing agency called 10 Scale, and is now a consultant, coach, and advisor supporting products that make a positive social impact. Nick has supported hundreds of millions of dollars in media spend on tech products and political campaigns.

Key Takeaways:

Nick joined Calm in 2019 at an exciting time when the company was on the cutting edge of optimizing both how to monetize a digital product through subscriptions and how to distribute it through performance marketing channels.
The launch of Sleep Stories was a critical inflection point for Calm, both because sleep proved to be a more acute pain point vs. meditation and because paid social channels like Instagram proved to be perfect for acquiring users who were up late at night doomscrolling because they were struggling with insomnia.
Calm was one of the first companies to get sophisticated about using “social listening” techniques to incorporate trending memes from social media into their ad creatives to improve the performance of paid user acquisition campaigns.
Not only was Nick’s performance marketing team at Calm extremely creative, but they also took a highly iterative and analytical approach to optimizing campaigns while using metrics like LTV/CAC and payback period to measure performance.
Ultimately, Nick’s team ran 5,500 ads while he was at Calm that converted an incremental 1.2 million subscribers. Calm’s paid user acquisition efforts were also complemented by Calm’s organic growth engine, which fueled additional and highly cost-efficient user acquisition and subscriber conversion.

Nick Candler:

Calm Website: https://www.calm.com/
10 Scale Website: https://10scale.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolascandler/

Phil Carter:

Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/