April 3, 2018

It’s a big day at the Shine office.

Thanks to you, we’re sharing three major milestones that the company has reached today.

●︎ Our members could form a country. The Shine community is now 2 million members strong. Yep, Shine has become the secret weapon for self-care for people like you in over 189 countries around the world.

●︎ We raised a Series A led by Comcast Ventures, with betaworks, Eniac Ventures, Female Founders Fund, Felix Capital, BBG Ventures, and The New York Times. This funding will help us scale the Shine you know and love, and give you more ways to invest in your wellbeing.

●︎ Go shorty, it’s our birthday. Today marks the two-year anniversary of when we took the biggest (and best) leap of our lives—quitting our jobs and launching Shine.

Why this matters:

We’re making wellbeing accessible for all.

You deserve to connect with yourself and others and talk about how you feel—and we don’t believe that experience should be pricey, isolating, or homogeneous.

Together, we’re rebranding what it means to practice self-care and live an elevated life. We’re making a historically top-down industry more representative, more affordable, easier, and more connected than it’s ever been.

We’re proud of what we’ve built in the last two years, and, we promise, this is just the beginning.

A few things we’ve learned in the last two years:

●︎ Ignore the skeptics. When we first launched Shine, we got feedback that “people really just care about their physical health, not their emotional wellbeing.” (lol) But we stayed focused and charged on. Two years later, self-care has never been more topical; and you, our community, made that happen.

●︎ Lead with authenticity: We created Shine in 2016 as two work-friends on a mission to scale the support we gave each other—tired of seeing dated, one-dimensional examples of what it meant to “live your best life.” Back then, most content was (and still is) ad-driven, with major wellness brands leading us all to believe we were just one 30-day retreat or juice cleanse away from happiness. But we knew wellbeing is not one size fits as all. And you proved it.

●︎ Don't waste time. Whether you choose to spend a few minutes reading Shine Texts, listening to tracks in the Shine app or showing us love on the Twitter, we’re reminded every day how precious your time is. You’re busy. You’re focused. And in your limited free-time, you need easy ways to practice self-care. We lead with short, meaningful conversations that help make self-care a daily habit, instead of another burden on your to-dos—and there are more time-conscious products to come.

Thanks for Shining with us, all 2 million of you.

Read next: Self-Care Is Contagious—Cheers to 2 Years of Shine