How MindBodyGreen blew up last year after years of steady work - Technical.ly (2024)

Last year, MindBodyGreen hit the exponential growth curve of the long tail.

Founded in an apartment in Dumbo five years ago, the lifestyle and wellness blog was seeing about 2million monthly unique visitors when 2013 began. By the end of the year, itwasup to 15million.

The site also went from a staff of six in early 2013 to 20now. About a third ofMindBodyGreen’sstaff is devoted to editorial work.Earlier this year the company raised nearly $2 million in funding.

Here are some example posts to give you a senseof what we’re talking about:

• A 23 year-old Brooklyn woman writes about living trash free for two years.
• How to make the vegan “crack sauce” used in Calexico taco spots around New York, including Brooklyn Bridge Park.
• Life lessons from 40-year-oldJason Wachob, the site’s CEO and cofounder.

We spoke toWachobabout why he thinks the site has taken off recently, and how he and his teammake the whole business work.

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The 6-foot-7 Wachob was a varsity basketball player at Columbia University, but ended his career in need of back surgery. Rather than go that route, he managed to cure his problem with yoga.

After experiencing that, he teamed up with some other likeminded people to begin advancing the message of wellness as an all-around approach to health.

“We wanted to create a platform where we didn’tjust preach to the choir, but we built a bigger church,” Wachob said. He described thesite’sgrowth as primarily organic, overwhelmingly via social, especially Facebook.

MindBodyGreen has not invested in a marketing campaign to drive visits, Wachob said; he believes the company has tapped into a larger undercurrent of thinking about fitness and health. “I used to see health as a more external thing,” he told us. “It was all weight loss and vanity.” MindBodyGreen, however, is more focused on real nutrition, fitness, strength, balance and well-being, he said.

Much of the writing on MindBodyGreen comes from contributors worldwide. The sitehas2,500 contributors. Contributors are not compensated.

Of itseditorial content, it’s about 80percent community and 20percentstaff, Wachob estimated.However, it all gets edited and posts get rejected from the site, in order to maintain quality.

Like most content businesses today (ours included), MindBodyGreen’s revenue model is not strictly from monetizing the editorial side. There aretwo additional revenue streams the site isnowbuilding up.

• One is online video education. Users can pay for access to thirteen courses hosted on the site now. Wachob said that number will double in 2015.
• There’salso an annual event, Revitalize, which isalso broadcast free via Livestream.

Behind the scenes, MindBodyGreen has been using its own content management system since the early days. Wachob says they probably didn’t really need it then;now, though, he says he’s glad they have it. It gives themflexibility to layer newer features, like the video courses, onto existing content, which, he said, has made the whole package work better for them.