Creating an empire around journaling and gratitude with Amir Atighehchi, Co-founder of Habit Nest
I had the pleasure of interviewing Amir Atighehchi, Mikey Ahdoot, and Ari Banayan — co-founders of Habit Nest — a leading creator of action-oriented journals to help individuals develop habits to transform their lives. Thank you so much for doing this with us!
Can you tell us a story about what events have drawn you to this specific career path?
Amir Atighehchi: I’ve been best friends with Ari since Freshman year of High School and Mikey and I have been family friends forever. As my friends intertwined and when I really started becoming interested in personal development (post-college), the idea of creating an app that helped hardwire habits surfaced in many conversations….especially when we started noticing the effect Mikey’s whiteboard was having on him. We gave it a shot by trying to launch with an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and for us, that was taking what we wanted in the app and pouring it into a journal. We found so much success in this industry, we’ve expanded our line but we plan on breaking into the digital world this year!
Mikey Ahdoot: A few weeks after graduating from USC, I met with my other best friend (hi Alex!) as we were both depressed and pretty damn pissed off at how our lives were going.
We spent that entire day doing something that to this day has changed my life (and in a lot of ways, set up the entire foundation for Habit Nest).
We wrote out:
1. If we were living an absolutely incredible life that was PERFECT, what would it look like? What would every element of it look like?
2. What could we do on a daily basis to make every one of these happen?
Afterward, we made a pact to stick to this every single day and hold each other accountable. I painted all my walls with whiteboard paint and made a giant habit tracker. I spent years forcing myself to improve my daily habits and by the end, realized if I had the knowledge then that I have now, it would have taken me months to get to my end goal. This pissed me off and I had a burning passion to build a better way for others to build better habits more effectively.
I got so lucky having amazing cofounders like Amir and Ari to jumpstart this whole process and here we are today!
Ari Banayan: I was in my second year of law school at USC and I had pretty rock-solid habits that I’d formed like waking up at 5, exercising, eating healthy, reading regularly. I’d formed serious discipline when it came to personal growth. One day I was at the gym with Mikey & Amir and we started talking about an idea for an app that would help people build healthy habits. Mikey had the initial idea I was very much interested in habit-building and living an overall structured lifestyle. The conversations turned into meetings, which turned into our first product, and we haven’t looked back since. I graduated from law school and took the bar while we started Habit Nest, and once we started selling actual products I jumped in 100% and never looked back.
Can you share your story of Grit and Success? First, can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?
MA: To be honest, I don’t struggle at all working on this company. I spent so much time envisioning worst-case scenarios — I’ve pictured myself going homeless 10+ times, losing everything, and this company failing. I know exactly what I would do if any of those were to happen, which they are VERY far off from happening, thankfully.
This gave me the perspective to give my all to the business with no fear or hesitations about what could happen. Plus, this is my life’s calling so getting to work on it every day — even the hard days — is a genuine passion and love for me.
AA: We had an idea to launch a product called “The Greatest Gift”, which was basically a gratitude journal you write for someone else, and at the end of the 30-days of gratitude journaling you gift it to the person you wrote it for. In theory, it was a great idea and we launched on Indiegogo around Thanksgiving. We focused so much on trying to promote this by getting the friends and families of public figures to write/gift this to them. Our list included people from Ellen Degeneres, Sherly Sandberg, Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins, to even DJ Khaled (he’s huge on gratitude). We reached out to every writer under the sun from large to small publications, but it gained zero interest. This is just a piece of it…we tried starting conversations with anyone who tweeted the word gratitude on twitter.
The bottom line — it barely hit the goal on Indiegogo. We didn’t really lose money, but we poured so much time into the pre-promotion, we lost a lot of time to build other parts of our business. We learned a huge lesson from that, we learned how important speed was to growth, especially, when engaging in something that really requires a nice stroke of luck. Secondly, we didn’t get the right feedback on the product. We learned over time that it was just too much work for someone to want to commit (people barely like writing someone a birthday card!)
AB: When we started Habit Nest, we had absolutely nothing. No money, nothing to sell. It was just an app idea. To raise money, we created a simple journal product to help people wake up earlier and start the day with a morning routine — The Morning Sidekick Journal — and did a Kickstarter for it. The success of that campaign really opened our eyes to the fact that we’d found something, and we completely pivoted from building an app to creating more journals for different habits. We worked really hard to get a lot of organic traffic to our website through mediums like blogging, writing articles for other websites, trying to get shout outs. Really scrappy sort of stuff. All of the nitty-gritty ways we tried to attract traffic to our products and website really helped us build a foundation for what we found in digital advertising. The moment we found success spending a lot of money on social media ads it was like we had built an enormous new pillar for the business. As we continue it seems like we just keep building pillars to further strengthen this little house of habits that we’re building.
We’ve been fortunate in having pretty consistent success, but we had one major bump in the road with a product we built called ‘The Greatest Gift.’ It was a gratitude journal that you’d make to give to another person you were grateful for. We were all completely gung-ho on how successful it would be — there wasn’t a doubt in our minds that it was going to be a game-changing product. We had a rock-solid marketing strategy, what we thought was an awesome product, and we now had an existing company with some money and man-power to get the job done.
From the moment we released the product, it flopped big. We spent like 6 months completely focused on this project, had tens of thousands of people saying how excited they were about it before we released it, and then we had to struggle immensely to hit our crowdfunding campaign goal for the product.
It took a few months for us to look each other in the eyes and say, “it’s time to let this go…”
How were you able to build trust and confidence in order to pursue your ambitious goals with people?
MA: We have so much confidence around our products because we live and breathe the messages inside of them every single day. We know how effective they are as they are based on principles we live our lives from or from principles that experts, researchers, and other authors have.
We also write them with a ton of empathy for whatever someone going through this process may be facing. We know our delivery method (mix of content and accountability) is novel and extremely effective. When you build something with so much passion to be the best in the world, you have so much confidence in your product, even when launching.
That has only compounded over time from the tens of thousands of thank you emails we have gotten from extremely happy customers.
AA: It comes from having the utmost respect for each other. We know each other’s work ethic, and we each have a thirst for knowledge. You have to know and trust that your partners are hungry to learn more and dive deeper into new spaces like marketing, production, branding, logistics, etc. The other super important factor is empathy and listening without judging. We have many instances in which we each carry a different view, but we listen with the least amount of bias. No single co-founder’s opinion weighs more than anyone else’s.
AB: It seemed to come pretty naturally. Amir and I had been best friends since High School, and I could see from the beginning that Mikey was smart and driven. As we started working together it became apparent that our missions aligned, that we could all talk to each other openly without any reservations about personal feelings being hurt, and that we were all willing to work really, really hard.
I think open communication, great responsiveness to new ideas, and not taking anything related to business personally have been our secret sauce when it comes to the relationship. Of course, producing quality work output is important too. We each see the end product of what we do individually, and ultimately we see how it all comes together.
We see the value in each of us in terms of the business and over time that naturally leads to trust and confidence in each other.
Based on your experience, can you share 5 pieces of advice about how you innovated with creativity and discipline?
MA: 1. Build your own life habits up so you are at your happiest, most confident, energetic source every day. This breeds creativity.
2. Start a habit of brainstorming 10 habits a day to improve the world. This is what I did for 2+ months which led me to the idea of starting Habit Nest — the first idea I could NOT stop thinking about. Magical moment :) see this video for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA0BH43HEwI
3. Empathy empathy empathy with the customer, every step of the way. User experience is EVERYTHING as people are becoming incredibly picky and having more and more needs met from products every day. You have to make things SO smooth with your product. Do this by poking as many holes in it as possible and shooting it down from every angle until you have something ironclad.
4. Hire a team to get rid of as many things that you don’t love doing off your plate so that you can stay in a place of constantly thinking of how to innovate your big-picture vision and improving your products
5. Test like crazy, but do it in ways that minimize your investment of time and money. If you have an idea for something, run a Facebook ad to a purchase page of it for $10 a day for a week instead of spending $5,000 in coding and manufacturing then figuring out how it flops. Put your employees in a place to do this too and to do it ruthlessly. If the investment odds are low and the payoff odds are high, this should be done as much as possible.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
MA: Our products themselves help people grow into the best versions of themselves which is the first real place to make an impact. You can make a lot more positive impact on the planet if you are a confident, happy human being with self-respect.
AA: Being in the wellness space, the products really do the talking for us! We’ve spoken in front of High School Summer classrooms to students who struggled during the school year. We gave them stories about our journey and the importance of habit building at a young age and we donated over 50 journals to that High School.
Most recently, we emailed our list and asked them to fill out a typeform of any first responders they know that work in healthcare and the journal they wanted to surprise them with. We shipped over 200 free journals to these people who are working so insanely hard to keep us safe.
AB: I think our products themselves are the good we’re trying to do, but what’s more is that we do our absolute best to connect with our customers. Through email, groups that we form for accountability, even text message. We let our customers know we’re there for them every step of the way because we want to make sure every single person who buys one of our products actually uses it to improve the quality of their life. In some sense, I think that’s even more important than the products themselves.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
MA: We are thinking of lots of angles to bring our content, platform, and ideologies to a digital format. This will make our products much more accessible to people who don’t usually enjoy journaling.
AA: We’re going to break into our first digital product this year that really emphasizes accountability. It’s too early to discuss but we want to leverage the power of human/social accountability in a way that empowers everyone.
AB: We’re always working on new journals. At this point, we’ve built an array of products related to core habits that most people if not all want to or have tried to build at some point in their lives.
So now as we try to expand the product line, we’re very open to suggestions from our existing customers about the products they want us to make. There are a couple of journals in the works right now. Most exciting is that we’re finally getting around to building an app. And it’s going to be amazing.
What advice would you give to other executives or founders to help their employees to thrive?
MA: Empathize with their needs. Forgive yourself for your management mistakes, but learn and improve. Encourage them to take asymmetric risks and to have freedom when operating by allowing them to chase projects they are incredibly passionate about. Do this by minimizing their time/money risk but allow them to create brand new projects they believe in as doing this at scale will allow you to grow exponentially at low risk.
AB: I don’t know if this applies to everyone, but for us, it’s extremely important to find out what type of work they’re enjoying most in their job, what they’re getting tired of, and what they want to try and grow into being able to do. We give them free rein to honestly tell us what they want to be doing. It really seems to provide them with a sense of ease, helps them understand that we really do want them to enjoy their job, and ultimately when they’re doing the type of work that satisfies them, they do better work.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
MA: Give yourself a 3-day challenge to live as the absolute best version of yourself. You don’t have to do it forever. But map out what behaviors you would need and just for yourself to do it for 3 days. Taste that self-respect that comes after. If you feel motivated, extend that to 3 weeks. Cut the behaviors that aren’t essential and keep going. But keep that starting window SMALL. Remember, you do NOT have to do this forever.
AB: Treat others the way you want to be treated, and never take it personally if you’re not treated how you treat others — now, always, everywhere, and with everyone. If we all did that… the world would be a very different place.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
MA: “It’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view”
I learned that guilting myself and pressure leads to getting nowhere, and I also learned to trust that I will not stop until I get to the ideal life I want. So I remove the pressure off myself mixed with a crazy drive of not stopping until getting to where I want to be in life. This leads to happiness and inner peace every single day.
AA: “You’re the average of the five people spend the most time with,” by Jim Rohn. I can’t think of anything more true. Without even realizing it, the people we spend time with seeps into our own DNA, our habits, our mood, and our happiness. There’s no one I’d rather go to battle with other than my two co-founders and I know how massively critical it is to have great partners in life — it can either break or make you.
AB: I think Amir’s quote would be my favorite ‘life lesson quote’ as well. It’s so clear as you get older and spend large amounts of time with different people that you literally become them, extremely unconsciously. Mannerisms, thinking, habits. They are very strong molded by the people you spend time with, and if you look at any given period of your life, it’s very evident.
Choosing my friends wisely, taking time for myself every single day, limiting time with habitually negative people.. these are things that are absolutely integral to my quality of life.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Instagram: @HabitNest
Twitter: @HabitNest
Facebook: facebook.com/HabitNest
Website: https://habitnest.com
Thank you so much for joining us! This was very inspirational.
