Your “Jukebox” of Meditations

‣ Company: Unplug Meditation
‣ Founder: Suze Yalof Schwartz
‣ Mission: To offer quick, modern meditation videos for any need
‣ App launched: 2017
‣ Team size: 10
‣ Go-to emoji: ❤️✌️

Before founding Unplug Meditation, Suze Yalof Schwartz was a successful fashion editor in New York and Los Angeles, but stress had been mounting.

“I was thinking all the time about all the things I had to do,” she says. When her mother-in-law took her aside one day and encouraged her to take five deep breaths, Schwartz felt immediate relief. “That’s when I realized I wanted to focus on making people over from the inside rather than the outside.”

Her app, Unplug, offers more than 1,000 meditation videos—all filmed in the company’s flower-adorned Los Angeles studio—to help with a range of real-life ailments, from sleeplessness to anxiety to divorce to difficult conversations with friends or colleagues.

“We became a jukebox for meditations for all of life’s challenges,” says Schwartz. Here’s how.

Your meditation career began with a brick-and-mortar studio. How did you turn it into an app?
I opened our studio on April 15, 2014, because I figured everybody would be stressed about their taxes! We started with meditation, sound healing, breath work, hypnosis, tapping, and crystal healing. One day, one of our regulars who often travels for work said, “I wish you made videos so I could take your teachers with me.” That’s really where the idea came from. We shifted to a physical-digital hybrid.

The app has so many specific meditations. What are your favorites?
I love Heather Hayward’s meditation for when you’re feeling overwhelmed—I go back to it all the time. Tracee Stanley has a great one about setting intentions for an amazing day: You wake up, tap a button, and think about how you want to be instead of all the stuff you need to do.

You attended Apple’s Entrepreneur Camp in 2020. What advice do you have for other developers?
The best thing anyone can do with an app is to simplify it. With every single thing within an app, ask yourself: Is it simple? Does it make people’s lives better? That really helped me edit.

Do you have any advice for people who want to meditate more regularly?
I have a secret sneaky tip: Don’t get out of bed. Don’t have coffee first. The first thing I do when I wake up is pull up a meditation. I lie back down with my eyes closed for 10 minutes. And then I feel positive every morning. By avoiding email and social media when I wake up, I don't allow other people to choose what's going into my brain. I feed myself positive messages instead.

What about the inevitable storm that follows?
Even when you’re being pulled in a million different directions, it’s important to remember that meditating isn’t just for your own health. Secondhand stress is real. You’re either giving it to someone or getting it from someone. It’s actually not selfish to take care of yourself, because the energy you put out impacts everyone around you.

Unplug: Meditation

Meditations For Everything

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Unplug Meditation is a part of the App Store Small Business Program. If you are a developer and would like to learn more about the program, follow the link below.