Featured Case Study

Featured Case Study — MindGlow Campus Sprint 2026

Team Mindgrowth: turning situational stress into an acquisition map

Placement: 1st — MindGlow Campus Sprint 2026
Team: Qiann Fung, Christy Wong, Abbie Wong, Genie Woo, Hayley
Client: TranceLab Limited — MindGlow AI
Sprint window: 23 Jul – 14 Aug 2026

The brief

Four weeks, no paid ad spend, one hypnosis-based wellness app, and a student market that installs mental-health apps and abandons them in a fortnight. Teams competed on tracked signups, creative quality, strategy clarity, and organic reach. Mindgrowth won by refusing to treat "stressed students" as a single audience.

The insight

Most wellness apps ship a static library and expect users to go searching when they're already overwhelmed — a fundamental mismatch with Gen Z attention spans and the need for instant relief. Mindgrowth's thesis was that stress is situational, not general, and that acquisition should target the specific moment of stress rather than the abstract idea of anxiety.

The strategy

They mapped MindGlow's three product modes to three distinct acquisition moments:

Student Focus mode — targeting DSE and university students hitting exam anxiety and fragmented concentration during long revision blocks.
Travel Calm mode — targeting business travellers and long-haul passengers facing pre-flight panic and in-flight sleep disruption.
Bedtime Calm-Down mode — targeting anyone whose body won't switch off at night.

Each mode got its own channel, its own creative register, and its own conversion path. That's the part that separated this deck from the field: it wasn't one campaign wearing three hats.

The creative

Organic Instagram Reels carried the top of funnel, built around demonstrating rather than describing what a hypnosis app actually does. Two formats did the heavy lifting:

"30-second nervous system reset" — slow calming gradients with a voiceover cueing viewers to drop their shoulders, unclench their jaw, and breathe, delivering the product's value on-feed before anyone downloads anything.
"Before vs. after" split screen — stressed-at-a-desk against relaxed-with-headphones, captioned around the feeling of having fifty mental tabs open.

Both bypass onboarding friction entirely. The viewer experiences the product inside the ad. Smart.

The standout: UNLOAD & RESET

The team's most ambitious concept was a two-week airport activation in the post-security international departure hall, built around semi-private pods offering 15-minute AI relaxation sessions. The four-stage flow ran from ambassador invitation, through a tablet check-in capturing stress level, flight duration and sleep difficulty, into the guided pod session with noise-cancelling headphones and controlled ambient lighting, and closed with a personalised downloadable audio plus a 7-day premium trial.

The strategic reasoning was sharp: departure halls concentrate people with extended dead time, anticipated physical stillness, and unusually high openness to comfort tools. It converts a captive audience at the exact moment the product solves their problem.

Partnership and feedback layers

Mindgrowth proposed routing through existing wellness infrastructure rather than building trust from zero — online consultation platforms and school counselling networks including JC LevelMind wellness hubs and student wellness clubs. For creator partnerships they identified yoga and lifestyle KOLs as the highest-trust route to a wellness-primed audience.

Their measurement plan closed the loop: Instagram story polls, Q&A stickers and comment sentiment for awareness signal, plus three-question QR surveys after school seminars with referral-code conversion tracking.

Retention thinking

The detail that impressed the panel most wasn't an acquisition tactic at all. Mindgrowth proposed a standing focus group of 10–15 highly engaged student participants recruited from school talks, giving structured monthly feedback on beta features in exchange for lifetime premium access. It's a low-cost mechanism that solves post-download drop-off and keeps the product aligned with a fast-moving demographic. That's product strategy, not marketing.

Results

Tracked signups: 18
Tracked clicks: 32

Why they won

They treated MindGlow as a portfolio of situational products rather than one app with a feature list, and every channel choice traced back to a named user in a named moment. The airport concept and the retention focus group both went beyond the brief — neither was required to win a marketing sprint, and both would survive contact with a real budget.

Campaign delivered under MindGlow Campus Sprint 2026, a co-hosted organic growth competition run by TranceLab Limited. Creative used with participant consent.